Political Rants & interesting thought pieces

[Crafty_Dog]

July 23, 2020   View On Website
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    Dignity in Our Time
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman

I went once to the funeral of a friend, a soldier. He had died an ordinary death, a car crash that left his parents in agony. I remember his father standing stock-still with an expressionless face. I thought for a moment that he was indifferent, but upon further consideration I realized he chose to be dignified, and his stolid figure meant that he would not share that moment of agony with the rest of the world. It was his final salute to his son, and the only solace he had the right to call on.

Dignity is not the absence of feeling. It is the presence of feeling so profound that sharing it with the rest of the world would degrade it. It commends a person to privacy, to feel without indulging self-demonstration. It means that the most extreme moments of feeling, particularly of pain, should be experienced in the quiet of your own soul. Self-control is a gift we owe ourselves and a duty we have to each other. You can weep, but your tears are too precious to share.

It strikes me that our time is singularly lacking in dignity. I will not bore you with examples of the lack of dignity in modern politics. From the lowest citizen to the highest official, of all parties and of all ideologies, the desire to be dignified is gone. In America, no feeling is so squalid as to be hidden, no appetite too low not to be shown, and no ambition too embarrassing to reveal. We all have squalid feelings and appetites. Dignity is not an absence of these things; it’s the will to keep them private.
Some simply cannot believe that reasonable people might disagree. Instead, disagreement is the result of the other’s corrupt soul. This is nothing short of a form of rage. Dignified opponents will not reveal their rage, not because they are not angry, or because they like their opponents, but because self-control is something they owe themselves. The most powerful argument against a lout is to listen to their argument then leave, agreeing to disagree. It will usually enrage him. His raging against you, and the fact that he cannot draw you into a reciprocal rage, the fact that you appear untouched by his insults, leaves your opponent in agony. He will keep thinking of what he should have said for a week. Most important, in retaining your dignity, you have shown yourself the pleasure of being strong. Dignity is the highest manifestation of strength.

I think of the dignity of Martin Luther King Jr. who would not defile himself by raging at his enemies. He was able to assert his views and himself without engaging in public rage. What he felt privately, was private. But in public he sought reconciliation with those he opposed, and offered a hand of reconciliation. He wrote the Letter From Birmingham Jail, an act of profound dignity in an unjust world. He understood that how he waged his battle was as important as what the battle was about. He opposed but did not demean opponents. The way in which he carried himself may have hidden rage, but dignity is the art of hiding what should be hidden, and controlling passion. He is remembered not only for his eloquence and courage but also for his presentation of what a public person ought to be, especially when under attack. Dignity allows for dissent and confrontation, while allowing the world to see how such battles ought to be fought.

I remember when I was young that the highest imperative was to be true to yourself. That was interpreted as burdening everyone you met with your beliefs. It was a time when repression was a dirty word and did not apply to regimes. It applied to your feelings. Repressing your feelings would betray your belief and damage your liver. It was a time of what I call pseudo-Freudianism. Freud was believed to regard repressing feelings as self-destructive. He didn’t but that didn't stop some from proclaiming that he did.

When we look at the howls of outrage in the world surrounding us, we see the sense that beliefs should be shouted at the top of your lungs, with your enemies disparaged and crushed if possible. The crisis of dignity today is the abandonment of the idea that there is a time and place for everything, and the refusal to believe that your own beliefs might be wrong. The indignity of self-certainty and celebration has been elevated above the dignity of public modesty and, with it, the profound and unbending love of one’s own belief.

Dignity is a form of art. It is built on deep and complex passions that are controlled in spite of their power, and the will to craft a persona that has a place for passion and a place for courtesy. The ugliness of our time is those who have only passions, to be displayed at any time.

In the end, dignity is always reborn. People who love their own views and passions above all else are weak. Their self-absorption leads them to forget that this is a dangerous world. However much they proclaim it, they don’t really believe it. Their self-righteousness leaves them little room to watch their backs. But dignified life allows you time to observe the world, and strike before you are struck. Yet there’s always is a time and place for everything, even for enemies to share a drink and a moment to reflect. Understand that enemies may need to be destroyed, but not despised, for your own sake.

We have lost our dignity and must regain it. We need a society that regards a lack of dignity as a sign of weakness.   

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQu4ZHXItr0

[DougMacG]

Where is our 'ray of hope' thread?

"HOCKEY: There’s no kneeling in the NHL: No less than 6 teams link arms, stand together during national anthem to show unity."
https://www.theblaze.com/news/theres-no-kneeling-in-the-nhl-no-less-than-4-teams-link-arms-stand-together-during-national-anthem-to-show-unity
Hat tip Glenn Reynolds.

A real sport.

Or this.  The P.A. system fails and an Edmonton arena full of Canadian hockey fans sing the American national anthem, April 2017:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf2jb51HzTs

Real sports fans.

[Crafty_Dog]

The Elites Fiddle While America Burns
The Great 2020 Meltdown has exposed the rottenness of our political and corporate establishments.

By Gerard Baker
Aug. 3, 2020 11:53 am ET


The most intolerable irony of the past few miserable months has been listening to our self-appointed moral leaders lecture us on the nation’s irredeemable sinfulness from the comfort of their own secure, well-upholstered positions, while we endure daily the urban nightmare of a world created by their political allies.

As our cultural, media and corporate chiefs deliver their social and political wisdom from their redoubts in New York’s Hamptons, Palm Beach, Fla., and the greener pastures of the San Francisco Bay Area, America’s cities have been ravaged by successive predations of lockdown, disorder and violence.

Urban living is a fragile trade-off at the best of times between convenience and discomfort, excitement and peril, opportunity and expense. If you take away the convenience, excitement and opportunity, the residue isn’t an appealing one.

For cities like New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle and Portland, Ore., the damage done by this indulgent summer of insanity may never be repaired. For decades these cities have been controlled by monolithic Democratic establishments—though Republican mayors proved they could govern New York. They have milked the more dynamic parts of their populations to feed their own ideological agenda while doing nothing to lift the least advantaged out of misery.

The Great Meltdown of 2020 has exposed how rotten these urban establishments have become.

The lockdown, that soul-crushing exercise in economic suicide, imposed and enforced largely by the people it least affects, has permanently demolished vast elements of the economic base of these cities: businesses that will never return, employees who have moved away or will work from home rather than tolerate the increasingly perilous lottery of commuting and working in a deteriorating urban environment.

Adding to the injury were weeks of unrestrained, anarchic unrest, with whole parts of cities burned and blighted, with the willing connivance, even encouragement, of authority.

Then, as Democratic mayors actively encouraged an all-out assault on city police forces, a terrifying wave of violence and crime swept the cities. In Chicago last month murder rose 139% over a year earlier. New York had more shootings in the first seven months of 2020 than in all of 2019. The victims of these crimes are almost never the vocal elites, safe in their well-protected homes and offices. They are the poorest and least secure of our neighbors.

Meanwhile, political leaders—backed with money and words from their business allies—have responded with an elaborate performative exercise that has nothing to offer the daily reality but is designed to redraw the boundaries of our free thought. So, for example, those of us who stayed in New York this summer weren’t permitted to worship in church, but we were allowed—we were more or less instructed—to worship at the feet of those who preach hatred of the police, racial strife and white self-loathing. Friends weren’t permitted to attend parents’ funerals, but the right people were free to travel across state lines to attend multiple funerals for political and public show.

If you think irony is dead you had only to observe Bill de Blasio, New York’s mayor, posing for pictures as he painted “Black Lives Matter” on America’s most famous shopping street, while a few miles away his city resonated to the sound of gunfire and the anguished cries of families of children murdered in broad daylight.

This is what modern leadership looks like: a morality play that treats us all like recalcitrant children, even as the cities we helped build implode around us.

Whatever the political consequences of this unprecedented summer, there will be hefty costs, and they won’t be borne by those responsible. As cities are further hollowed out by crime and decay, taxes will rise, further stifling investment and growth, further harming the most disadvantaged, and accelerating a vicious circle of decline.

It’s a needless tragedy engineered by ideologues that is sending into sharp reverse the gains made in large American cities in the early years of the 21st century.

Already between 2015 and 2019, migration away from America’ largest cities had accelerated. That was largely an economic phenomenon, as rising taxes and the possibilities of technology drove people away. City leaders are now re-creating the social conditions that ruined these cities in the 1960s and ’70s: violent crime; urban blight, crumbling infrastructure. And they’ve added to that list schools run by unions dedicated to radical ideology and the mob in control of the streets in furtherance of an intolerant political agenda.

Worst of all, now we have a corporate elite, safely sequestered from the consequences of all this ruin, loudly helping it along by signaling their own virtue and denouncing our supposed vice.

[Crafty_Dog]

second

The Pandemic Is a Dress Rehearsal
The world is entering a transformative era. Prepare for more chaos and instability.

By Walter Russell Mead
Aug. 3, 2020 6:52 pm ET

Eight months after the novel coronavirus burst out of Wuhan, China, it has created unprecedented economic and social disruption, with economies cratering across the globe and more destruction to come. Tens of millions have lost their jobs, and millions more have seen their life savings disappear as governments forced restaurants, bars and other small businesses to shut their doors.

Wealthy societies are able, for now, to print and pump money in hope of limiting the social and economic damage, but such measures cannot be extended forever. For the first time since the 1940s, political authorities around the world face a flood of economic and political challenges that could overwhelm the safeguards built into the system.

In poorer countries, the situation is worse. The pandemic rages unchecked through countries like South Africa and Brazil, where low commodity prices, falling remittances and falling demand for industrial products are intersecting with capital flight to create an unprecedented economic shock. Countries like Lebanon and Ethiopia, facing grave crises before the pandemic, struggle to maintain basic order.

Science will, we must hope, come to the rescue with a vaccine or a cure before our resources are exhausted. But as the world wrings its hands and waits for a deus ex machina, we must recognize that the end of the pandemic does not mean a return to the relatively stable world of the post-Cold War era.

Governments and other institutions have always had to deal with difficult challenges that they couldn’t predict. Disease, famine and barbarian invasions fell unexpectedly on societies that often struggled merely to survive. The Industrial Revolution brought new perils like financial panics, the business cycle and social upheavals. Millions left the land and learned to depend on the modern economy for sustenance. Revolutionary political movements that challenged the old order could be as destructive and mysterious as the plagues and famines of earlier times.

After World War II, as the threat of nuclear war glowered in the background, the assumption that humanity could deal with most natural disasters, health problems and the business cycle took hold. It wasn’t utopia, but life seemed more predictable than in the past. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the threat of nuclear war receded into the background and Western self-confidence reached new heights. Over the past 30 years, the world has developed an intricately organized, massively complex, extraordinarily effective and extremely dynamic global civilization.

The pandemic, which is mild as the great plagues of history go, demonstrates that the complexity of this global civilization has become a source of new vulnerabilities. And with the legitimacy of many institutions resting on their ability to solve problems quickly and effectively, Covid-19 challenges political leaders and institutions in ways that they cannot easily manage.

The world needs to get used to that feeling. The pandemic’s legacy will be crisis and chaos—and the trajectory of human civilization has shifted in ways that will test political leaders and economic policy makers more severely than anything since World War II. This is partly because the return of great-power competition introduces new risks and complications into the international system. More fundamentally, it is because the information revolution is beginning to disrupt the world as profoundly and traumatically as the Industrial Revolution disrupted the 19th-century world.

The transformation of the workplace by information technology has been a bright spot in the pandemic, allowing many businesses and important institutions to continue functioning even as key employees stay home. But the same transformation is also driving many of the forces destabilizing society: declines in stable manufacturing jobs, whole regions hollowed out by economic change, the collapse of professional journalism and the rise of social media, the implosion of traditional retail, and looming job threats as self-driving cars and other new technological innovations move into the marketplace.

A host of 21st-century problems threaten to overwhelm the institutions of both national and global governance: the emergence of China as a new kind of economic and geopolitical challenger, the escalating arms races in cyber and biological weapons, the global surge of populism and nationalism, and the growing risks from poorly understood vulnerabilities and relationships in volatile and rapidly changing financial markets. Any one of these could push the world into a cycle of crisis and conflict resembling the first half of the 20th century.

Covid-19 is less a transient, random disturbance after which the world will return to stability than it is a dress rehearsal for challenges to come. History is accelerating, and the leaders, values, institutions and ideas that guide society are going to be tested severely by the struggles ahead.

[Crafty_Dog]

Third: 

https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres-why/

[Crafty_Dog]

From an interaction I had with a German FMA friend on FB:
===================

Much I could say in response to the specifics of your argumentation, yet somehow we are in agreement on your fundamental point that America is very badly divided.

The responsibility for this is not equal in my opinion. Obviously there is a danger of hubris in such a conclusion, but sometimes in Life things are not even.

The Progs et al, in their own words, seek to "fundamentally transform" America.

NO.

The Progs et al abused the power of the intel and national police apparatus in an attempted soft coup of our elected President and punish their political opponents with lawfare that subverts the Rule of Law itself.

NO.

The Progs et al seek to impose a racial caste system, wherein people are not defined by the content of their character but instead by the color of their skin.

NO.

The Progs et al with open borders and amnesty to illegal aliens seek to dilute the American citizenry with voters more to their liking.

NO.

The Progs et al now seek to create electoral chaos with millions of ballots sent out with no signature verification process and no verified chain of custody (a.k.a. ballot harvesting)

I would say "NO", but there is a very real chance they will succeed in this and the lawlessness that they have unleashed on our streets may well turn out to be only the appetizer for a much heavier meal.

The Progs et al promise to come very our guns.

HELL NO!!!

[Crafty_Dog]

https://americanmind.org/essays/revolution-2020/

[Crafty_Dog]

   
    On Presidential Debates
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman

As I write this, my wife is watching the presidential debate in another room. I am sitting alone and sipping a port because I loathe presidential debates. This has nothing to do with the candidates – they are a separate matter. I hate presidential debates because they are designed to bring out the worst in every candidate, making it impossible to determine whether any of them is worthy of the office. Had Thomas Jefferson debated John Adams the way debates have been staged since Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, I would have hated them too.

To understand what I am saying, we need to distinguish between being clever and being smart. There are several differences between the two, but for the current topic, the useful distinction is between thinking fast and thinking deep. Thinking fast allows you to see an opportunity, conjure a sharp statement and focus for an hour. Thinking deep means recognizing that the issues are all complex and therefore being unable to give simplistic responses to questions that are unanswerable in the time allowed. No issue to be faced by a president could responsibly be addressed in an hour. A candidate might have thought deeply on race, but precisely because he had thought deeply he would be aware of the difficulty and danger of trying to express what he has thought in two sentences.

Clever has the power to take your breath away with a witty and apt jab. Smart is boring. The deeper you see, the harder it is to talk about it. A smart person who takes on a clever person in front of an audience with limited time and interest will always lose. The first modern debate was between Kennedy and Nixon. Nixon had far more experience on the issues. Kennedy won the night by claiming that President Dwight Eisenhower had allowed a missile gap to develop. The statement was untrue, and Kennedy knew it was untrue, but it didn’t matter. A clever falsehood can sweep the table in a sentence. The explanation of why the statement is untrue requires a great deal of time.

The smart frequently suffer from the social defect of the inability to be glib. The paradox is that a person appears to be less than bright, when standing next to a truly clever candidate. It is not impossible to be smart and clever. Franklin Roosevelt was brilliant in many ways, but he was also able to say what he was thinking in a way that the audience could understand and be persuaded by. The fireside chats were clever. But FDR did not have to stand next to a simply clever man. He had the freedom that comes from owning the moment and using it to sum up the complexity of your knowledge. FDR had the opportunity to reveal his depth without simultaneously fending off a clever man. He might have won a debate, but showing that you are more clever than the other guy is hardly a qualification for president.

A competent president must think deeply on a dizzying range of issues, yet a president need not be a master improviser.

Rather, a president should have thought deeply about what to do when the moment to act comes. Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson told Kennedy that his first task as president was to go off alone and think about whether he would be prepared to use nuclear weapons and, if so, identify the circumstances under which he would. Acheson told him not to tell anyone what he had decided. A president manages a crisis by going away and thinking about it even before it happens.

The hunger for the clever leads the American people into some absurdities. Eisenhower had been a soldier and was not always clear when speaking. The media therefore raised the question of whether he was suited for the presidency. Here was the supreme commander of Operation Overlord, the first commander of NATO and the man who negotiated an end to the Korean War, being ridiculed at times because of his convoluted public speaking. Some claimed he was senile. He wasn’t, but the media expected the president to be clever, and Eisenhower was deep and complex. He likely defeated Adlai Stevenson only because both were, in their own way, smart. In those days, clever might not have been as honored as it is today. Since the debate became a critical part of a presidential campaign, we have been plagued by clever presidents.

This makes the task of a citizen far more difficult. The citizen must have the discipline not to draw rapid judgments and to listen carefully to what someone wishing to govern has to say. Looking back in history, we see few instances in which elections weren’t raucous occasions. What saved the day was the expectations the public placed on candidates. Candidates were expected to comport themselves appropriately. The public can rant, but smart candidates let others do the ranting for them.

Unfortunately, sometimes debates are the only opportunity for a citizen to judge the candidate. A citizen’s fundamental job is to figure out who is smart and who is merely clever – and, of course, who is neither, which shows rather quickly. This is a tricky business; voters often can’t know whether there is actually a missile gap. When President Harry S. Truman placed a plaque on his desk saying “the buck stops here,” the public had to decide if he was clever or smart or both in publicizing that plaque.

Democracy generally places a premium on the clever because the clever can move the public in a way that the smart usually can’t. The smart will drone on subjects such as health care or nuclear war. The smart know that the subjects are so important that they need to be dealt with soberly, and so complex that they need to be dissected in excruciating detail. There is no need for one liners that dazzle, but an absolute need for sobriety and meticulous thought.

So my bottle of Taylor Fladgate 20 and I are refusing to watch the debate. I brood over what is the fundamental distinction within human reason, of which the presidential debates are merely specimens. Democracy frightened the founders, and the debates remind me, after the third glass, that there has to be a better way. There isn’t unless we demand it, but we love the clever sally and loathe the boring truth.   

[Crafty_Dog]

https://archive.harpers.org/1994/11/pdf/HarpersMagazine-1994-11-0001862.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJXATU3VRJAAA66RA&Expires=1423434213&Signature=8O60NjTWyBb4ji1nsZZPTZM62rk%3D

[Crafty_Dog]

https://quillette.com/2019/10/07/oikophobia-our-western-self-hatred/

[Crafty_Dog]

Entirely too sanguine IMHO, but FWIW here it is:



October 8, 2020   Open as PDF

The Tedium of Passion
By: George Friedman

I normally try to forget the books I write, at least for a while. They can be a trap, enclosing you forever. But I can’t escape the last book I wrote, “The Storm Before the Calm,” about the anger that would encompass American life for at least the first part of this decade. I drew my conclusions from moments like the Great Depression and Andrew Jackson’s assault on the eastern banks. But to a great extent I got my bearings from the 1960s and 1970s for the obvious reason that I lived through them.
It was a time of intense outrage at anyone who disagreed with you, a time of utter certainty of one’s own view. Lyndon Johnson was regarded as a baby killer, and the war in Vietnam as a tool to enrich defense companies. Opponents of the war were viewed by their critics as tools of the communists and haters of America. Entwined in this was a culture war. On one side was what was called the counterculture, which saw America as fundamentally corrupt, combining the dehumanization of the suburbs with insoluble racism. On the other side was what was called middle America, viewing the counterculture as degenerates who were destroying the fabric of America by rejecting everything that was decent and honorable.

I recall members of the American Legion and members of construction unions confronting hordes of anti-war demonstrators dressed bizarrely, I suspect because they wanted to show contempt for the middle class and a sense that they had transcended the World War II veterans into a higher truth. I was young and dressed like a slob, still my preferred sartorial statement, and went into a 7-Eleven in Boone, North Carolina, during a best forgotten road trip. The person behind the counter called me a “hippie degenerate punk” and threatened vague mayhem if I didn’t leave. I was in similar clothing when I denied that the Viet Cong were the heirs of the American Revolution to a young lady I thought I was getting somewhere with. She grew enraged and refused to talk to me when I called them Stalinist thugs, the latter a far greater loss than a storekeeper in Boone.

I found myself in trouble. Socially I belonged to the baby boomers, who, like the millennials today, thought of themselves as having the mission to perfect humanity. But I was born in Hungary and lived with a family that remembered its recent past. For me, the perfection of humanity was not the goal. The goal was avoiding the power of tyranny. I saw tyranny through my parents’ eyes. That era was a moment of great passion, with evil masquerading as the good, and people expressing it by hating anyone who disagreed with them. I love the United States because it was better than where I had come from. It did not demand perfection. To the radicals of the 1960s, America had to be reconstructed through revolution. To middle America, the nation had been penetrated by monsters trying to destroy it.

It all became very personal. Someone who opposed the Vietnam War did not socialize with someone who supported the war. The basic assumption that normally controls the United States – that reasonable people can disagree without loathing each other – was suspended, replaced with a passionate belief that anyone who differed from oneself was deeply flawed and likely despicable. Things changed only after Richard Nixon was driven from office, the anti-war activists started looking for jobs and the pro-war movement realized the war was a waste.

Passion is an overrated virtue because it has no sense of proportion. Passion makes everything look more significant than it is and sees disagreement as sacrilege. Passion makes it seem that this is the worst of times. Because of my parents I knew the tales of European passion, but unlike my parents I wasn’t frightened by it. I was bored by it. The core certainty of each side was not merely that it was right but that the other side was wicked. Passion and self-righteousness blended with a rage at those who disagreed.

The passion of Hitler or Lenin, of course, was not boring. It was evil, but there was never a boring minute around either side. The idea that I have mentioned in the past – that civilization is the ability to believe something, yet be open to the possibility that your belief is in error – is boring. Constantly drawing in your horns when your passions demand that you gore your opponent is tiring, and the inability to hate because your opponent might be right takes a glittering moment and turns it into duller shades. Being moderate is the foundation of civilized life, yet it’s one that always repels those who are certain that they are self-evidently right.

We are of course in a moment where respect for the views of those you disagree with has withered. This happens in America with some regularity. But the time we live in is not as exciting, tense and fraught with danger as the media might suggest. It is simply tedious. As Shakespeare put it, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” As we have seen in the past, the United States is far too robust, and far too resilient, for the passions of the moment to destroy it. If it weren’t, it would have been destroyed long ago. Robert E. Lee couldn’t break the union, and he had a powerful military behind him. Joe McCarthy and the anti-war movement couldn’t do it. The current cast of characters certainly can’t do it. The founders knew that the best solution for political passions is boredom. Eventually the actors take a break, and the audience needs to get home, pay the babysitter and get some sleep.

For those who have never lived through this, they have never seen passion like this. For those who have lived through it before, it’s more of the same.   

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16624/socialist-states-of-america

[ccp]

of course

all the swamp anti Trump Republicans will blame Trump for this

even though it is their inactions that have led to this since Watergate

they think they are immune  because they  are part of  the DC swamp crowd

[Crafty_Dog]

Amen.

[Crafty_Dog]

Another great piece from VDH that nicely summarizes quite a bit-- America hangs in the balance people!!!
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/the-fragments-of-a-civilization/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202020-10-13&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

Government crimes and coverups, a corrupt media, a candidate hiding and lying to the public, and plans to undo the foundations of the republic


Piece by piece, our civilization is beginning to disassemble. And the agents of fragmentation are as obvious as the efforts to conceal them are frantic.

St. Hillary the Colluder

In nonchalant fashion, we learned last week from newly released government documents that Hillary Clinton’s campaign team cooked up the Trump-Russia collusion hoax as a way of diverting attention from her own ongoing embarrassing email scandals.
Clinton, through three firewalls, paid foreign ex-spy Christopher Steele to create a bogus smear-Trump dossier. Steele, who had no data on, or information about any such collusion, apparently drew largely on fabrications dreamed up by a former Russian spy working at the liberal Brookings Institution. The convoluted conspiracy baffled even the sneaky Russians, who were confused when they got wind of it — possibly through the direct participation of one of their own assets.

Did we then spend millions of dollars on Robert Mueller’s nearly two-year investigation, a wild goose chase consuming millions of collective media hours hyping fantasies, and paralyzing an administration for three years — all for Hillary Clinton’s machinations, the apparent true and only Russian colluder?

John Brennan’s CIA intercepted Russian concerns over such a ruse. He even briefed President Obama on the Clinton caper. Yet the U.S. investigatory and judicial branches did not stop Clinton’s efforts to subvert a rival’s campaign. Indeed, many of the highest officials of the Obama administration shortly joined her efforts to seed the fraudulent Steele dossier throughout the Obama government and thus into the media as well — their efforts peaking in timely fashion right before the November 2016 election.

Translate all that, and the evidence grows that Hillary Clinton, in felonious fashion, paid for the Steele dossier to subvert an election and, after the election, to destroy a presidential transition and indeed a presidency itself — government efforts that historians one day will assess as the most intense effort on record to destroy a U.S. president.

These crimes were committed with the apparent cooperation of at least some in the Obama DOJ, FBI, and CIA, along with their epigones who were deeply embedded in the administrative state when Trump won the election. The tactics of such a strategy included altering federal documents, lying to a FISA court, leaking classified information, illegally surveilling American citizens, conspiring to frame top administration officials such as General Michael Flynn, unmasking names in confidential intercepts and leaking them to the media — and lying under oath about the above and more.

Hillary’s efforts constitute the most egregious scandal in American election history. And yet, shameless to the end, she continues to foam about “Trump collusion,” in the manner of a beached whale, gasping for air and twitching about on the sand.

Hackery

In nonchalant fashion, we also just learned that CrowdStrike — a company in which the Pelosis made an initial $1 million investment and that is now run by billionaire Shawn Henry, a former high official of Robert Mueller’s FBI — was given the sole proprietorship of the hacked DNC computers. Has the FBI ever allowed the victims of a felonious federal crime to conduct their own forensic investigations? The FBI outsourced the analysis even though the computer hard drives were the key evidence at the crime scene of a supposed conspiracy, allegedly cooked up by the Russians.

The scandal was not just that the FBI did not object to a private company taking over its own responsibility for the investigation. Worse still, for two years Washington insiders have known that CrowdStrike’s president had testified before Congress that he had no evidence that any Russians had hacked the DNC computers.

His secret testimony — apparently also known to Mueller’s investigators — came at a time when the nation was convulsed by the media-driven Russian hoax, much of the frenzy generated by MSNBC, where Henry himself had been an occasional “security” analyst.

We may never know how, why, or by whom the computers were hacked, only that the DNC and the Clinton campaign most certainly did not want any government agency investigating those mysteries.

If Biden wins in 2021, as surely as the sun rises, all the current investigations into the illegal weaponization of the DOJ, the FBI, and the CIA will abruptly cease within days.

De-debating

In nonchalant fashion, we also belatedly learned that the moderator of the vice-presidential debate, Susan Page, a USA Today Washington News Bureau Chief, is currently writing a biography of arch-Trump antagonist Nancy Pelosi. (Would the Biden campaign have objected if a debate moderator was now writing a likely favorable biography of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell?)

At about the same time, it was belatedly disclosed that the designated moderator of the now cancelled second presidential debate, Steven Scully, once worked as an intern for debate participant Joe Biden. (Would the Biden campaign have objected had the moderator once interned for the Trump organization?)


The Strangest Campaign in History?

Apparently, Scully also had mistakenly sent a message over the public Twitter airways — rather than through intended private direct messaging — seeking the advice of now prominent Trump hater and fired former Trump press secretary Anthony Scaramucci. Scully asked the “Mooch” whether to respond to Trump’s charges that he was biased — though Scaramucci is the most publicly biased of all self-described media experts. (Would the Biden campaign have objected if it learned that the debate moderator had been communicating with Kellyanne Conway for advice on how to reply to criticism from Biden?)
Is America so short of informed beltway creatures that it cannot find, if only for the purpose of appearances, a single moderator who has not either interned for Joe Biden or Donald Trump, or who is not currently writing a bio of a Trump-hating or Biden-hating public figure?


Worse still, Scully deleted his tweet, froze his account from public access, and claimed that his computer was “hacked.” “Hacked” is now the operative defense when caught in embarrassing electronic communications. To avoid responsibility for their own embarrassing actions, Joy Reid, Anderson Cooper, and Anthony Wiener also claimed, probably falsely, that their phone or social-media accounts had been hacked.

Had the debate taken place, one wonders whether Scully, much like Fox’s Chris Wallace and USA Today’s Susan Page, would have zeroed in on Trump, in similar gottcha, moralistic fashion to explain why we should not presume him to be untruthful or racist.

The morning after we saw the recent, live vice-presidential debate carried out successfully with proper social distancing and testing precautions, the Commission on Presidential Debates abruptly insisted that the second presidential debate, to be moderated by Scully, would be virtual for the first time in American history.

The commission — an ostensibly bipartisan group that nonetheless consists exclusively of Democrats and Never Trumpers —  knows that Trump thrives on “reality” television while Biden has crafted a unique campaign based almost entirely on remote communications through Skype and Zoom, often with the assistance of poorly concealed teleprompters and scripted talking points. Moreover, when a candidate leads, as the mainstream polling suggests Biden now does, debates are considered unnecessary hazards, even as underdogs see them as critical chances to reboot campaign momentum.

The commission’s decision came even though the president’s doctors reported that by October 15, Trump would be medically fit to participate and virtually immune for months from reinfection. In addition, as with most asymptomatic and recovered patients with viral antibodies, Trump would be unable to pass on the virus for months, if ever.

In other words, Biden — and anyone else present — would have had far less chance of being infected by Trump in the now cancelled second debate than during the first debate.

Issues Are Bad

In nonchalant fashion, Joe Biden just announced that he will rule neither in nor out the Democratic plan to “pack” the Supreme Court to either 13 or 15 justices, should he win and the Senate flip Democratic.

As Biden put it to his questioner:

I know it’s a great question, and you all, I don’t blame you for asking, but you know the moment I answer that question, that headline in every one of your papers will be about that, other than, other than focusing on what’s happening now.

Biden was only clarifying what he had said earlier in the first debate when he stonewalled with, “Whatever position I take on that, that’ll become the issue.”

That incoherence was a further clarification of an earlier admission that the inquiry was “a legitimate question” but one that Biden was “not going to answer.”

And most recently Biden quadrupled down and insisted that voters do not “deserve” an honest answer on whether their Supreme Court will be packed — as he reverted to his bizarre earlier campaign mode of “lying, dog-faced pony soldier,” “You’re a damn liar, man” and “Look, fat, look. Here’s the deal.”

If we follow all the contorted Biden logic, he seems to now believe that the public has a reasonable interest in what he would do about enlarging the Court to nullify Trump’s conservative picks — but that the public nonetheless doesn’t deserve to know.
And Biden will not meet that “legitimate” but undeserved public interest, because, by answering, his very response would become the “issue.” That is, Biden would take a position on an issue, and therefore either delight or offend many voters. And he must avoid that at all costs.

Biden’s answer may be the most surreal response of any presidential candidate in memory.

But it is emblematic of his entire stealth campaign, in collusion with a cheerleading media — a virtual candidate who has no answers to questions that are now rarely asked.

Any reporter, debate moderator, or journalist who asked a question that Biden could not answer or that would in any way embarrass Biden would now earn lifetime ostracism and career beltway ruin for aiding and abetting the Prince of Darkness and the enemies of progressivism.

The current Democratic Party, hostage to the hard-core Left, has asserted that in victory it may seek to pack the Supreme Court and thereby end a 150-year law governing that nine-member body. It has also said it might end the 170-year-old Senate filibuster, on cue from Barack Obama, who as a senator nonetheless found the filibuster useful when he was in the minority. It claims it might do away with the 233-year-old Electoral College, a foundation of the U.S. Constitution that sought to ensure a republic rather than a democracy ruled by the 51 percent and urban centers.

Biden will no longer repeat his earlier no-fracking pandering, but his party (“I am the Democratic Party right now”) has often said it will end fracking. Fracking, remember, has helped to lower world oil prices, to the detriment of Russia and the Middle East. Fracking has helped to keep American troops out of Middle East interventions (remember the now calcified slogan “no blood for oil”?), aided middle-class commuters, created millions of well-paying jobs, and made electricity cheaper, and the air far cleaner.

On all these questions, Biden will offer no answers to voters who do not “deserve” to know. Yet he could very well seek to change the core rules by which America is governed — as part of a larger project to ensure systemic progressive dominance.
He has no answers because to answer honestly would either reveal himself to be a leftist pawn now and thus an anathema to the suburban swing voter; or, contrarily, he’d be exposed as an oath-breaker in the eyes of the AOC–Bernie Sanders socialist near majority of his own party.

So in Orwellian fashion, “issues” can no longer be issues, even if they could alter the United States in a way not seen since its founding.

Sleepwalking to the Revolution

To paraphrase Sophocles, 2020 saw many strange things and nothing stranger than peak Trump derangement syndrome, COVID-19, a self-induced recession, our first national quarantine, and riots, looting, and arson, all mostly unpunished and uncontrolled, in our major cities.

So we are in revolutionary times, even as we snooze about a recent systematic effort, hidden with great effort by our own government, to destroy a prior presidential campaign and transition, and now a presidency.

We are asked to vote for a candidate who will not reveal his position on any major issue of our age, because he feels to do so would enlighten the undeserving electorate and thereby cost him the election. So we continue to sleepwalk toward a revolution whose architects warped our institutions in 2016–2020, and they now plan to alter many of them beyond recognition in 2021.

Translated, that means that they don’t regret what they did in 2016–2019, only that they belatedly got caught for a brief time.
And so by changing the rules after 2020, they are vowing never ever to get caught again.

[G M]

"Translated, that means that they don’t regret what they did in 2016–2019, only that they belatedly got caught for a brief time.
And so by changing the rules after 2020, they are vowing never ever to get caught again."

That is their plan. They will plunge us into war if they need to.

Another great piece from VDH that nicely summarizes quite a bit-- America hangs in the balance people!!!
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/the-fragments-of-a-civilization/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202020-10-13&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

Government crimes and coverups, a corrupt media, a candidate hiding and lying to the public, and plans to undo the foundations of the republic


Piece by piece, our civilization is beginning to disassemble. And the agents of fragmentation are as obvious as the efforts to conceal them are frantic.

St. Hillary the Colluder

In nonchalant fashion, we learned last week from newly released government documents that Hillary Clinton’s campaign team cooked up the Trump-Russia collusion hoax as a way of diverting attention from her own ongoing embarrassing email scandals.
Clinton, through three firewalls, paid foreign ex-spy Christopher Steele to create a bogus smear-Trump dossier. Steele, who had no data on, or information about any such collusion, apparently drew largely on fabrications dreamed up by a former Russian spy working at the liberal Brookings Institution. The convoluted conspiracy baffled even the sneaky Russians, who were confused when they got wind of it — possibly through the direct participation of one of their own assets.

Did we then spend millions of dollars on Robert Mueller’s nearly two-year investigation, a wild goose chase consuming millions of collective media hours hyping fantasies, and paralyzing an administration for three years — all for Hillary Clinton’s machinations, the apparent true and only Russian colluder?

John Brennan’s CIA intercepted Russian concerns over such a ruse. He even briefed President Obama on the Clinton caper. Yet the U.S. investigatory and judicial branches did not stop Clinton’s efforts to subvert a rival’s campaign. Indeed, many of the highest officials of the Obama administration shortly joined her efforts to seed the fraudulent Steele dossier throughout the Obama government and thus into the media as well — their efforts peaking in timely fashion right before the November 2016 election.

Translate all that, and the evidence grows that Hillary Clinton, in felonious fashion, paid for the Steele dossier to subvert an election and, after the election, to destroy a presidential transition and indeed a presidency itself — government efforts that historians one day will assess as the most intense effort on record to destroy a U.S. president.

These crimes were committed with the apparent cooperation of at least some in the Obama DOJ, FBI, and CIA, along with their epigones who were deeply embedded in the administrative state when Trump won the election. The tactics of such a strategy included altering federal documents, lying to a FISA court, leaking classified information, illegally surveilling American citizens, conspiring to frame top administration officials such as General Michael Flynn, unmasking names in confidential intercepts and leaking them to the media — and lying under oath about the above and more.

Hillary’s efforts constitute the most egregious scandal in American election history. And yet, shameless to the end, she continues to foam about “Trump collusion,” in the manner of a beached whale, gasping for air and twitching about on the sand.

Hackery

In nonchalant fashion, we also just learned that CrowdStrike — a company in which the Pelosis made an initial $1 million investment and that is now run by billionaire Shawn Henry, a former high official of Robert Mueller’s FBI — was given the sole proprietorship of the hacked DNC computers. Has the FBI ever allowed the victims of a felonious federal crime to conduct their own forensic investigations? The FBI outsourced the analysis even though the computer hard drives were the key evidence at the crime scene of a supposed conspiracy, allegedly cooked up by the Russians.

The scandal was not just that the FBI did not object to a private company taking over its own responsibility for the investigation. Worse still, for two years Washington insiders have known that CrowdStrike’s president had testified before Congress that he had no evidence that any Russians had hacked the DNC computers.

His secret testimony — apparently also known to Mueller’s investigators — came at a time when the nation was convulsed by the media-driven Russian hoax, much of the frenzy generated by MSNBC, where Henry himself had been an occasional “security” analyst.

We may never know how, why, or by whom the computers were hacked, only that the DNC and the Clinton campaign most certainly did not want any government agency investigating those mysteries.

If Biden wins in 2021, as surely as the sun rises, all the current investigations into the illegal weaponization of the DOJ, the FBI, and the CIA will abruptly cease within days.

De-debating

In nonchalant fashion, we also belatedly learned that the moderator of the vice-presidential debate, Susan Page, a USA Today Washington News Bureau Chief, is currently writing a biography of arch-Trump antagonist Nancy Pelosi. (Would the Biden campaign have objected if a debate moderator was now writing a likely favorable biography of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell?)

At about the same time, it was belatedly disclosed that the designated moderator of the now cancelled second presidential debate, Steven Scully, once worked as an intern for debate participant Joe Biden. (Would the Biden campaign have objected had the moderator once interned for the Trump organization?)


The Strangest Campaign in History?

Apparently, Scully also had mistakenly sent a message over the public Twitter airways — rather than through intended private direct messaging — seeking the advice of now prominent Trump hater and fired former Trump press secretary Anthony Scaramucci. Scully asked the “Mooch” whether to respond to Trump’s charges that he was biased — though Scaramucci is the most publicly biased of all self-described media experts. (Would the Biden campaign have objected if it learned that the debate moderator had been communicating with Kellyanne Conway for advice on how to reply to criticism from Biden?)
Is America so short of informed beltway creatures that it cannot find, if only for the purpose of appearances, a single moderator who has not either interned for Joe Biden or Donald Trump, or who is not currently writing a bio of a Trump-hating or Biden-hating public figure?


Worse still, Scully deleted his tweet, froze his account from public access, and claimed that his computer was “hacked.” “Hacked” is now the operative defense when caught in embarrassing electronic communications. To avoid responsibility for their own embarrassing actions, Joy Reid, Anderson Cooper, and Anthony Wiener also claimed, probably falsely, that their phone or social-media accounts had been hacked.

Had the debate taken place, one wonders whether Scully, much like Fox’s Chris Wallace and USA Today’s Susan Page, would have zeroed in on Trump, in similar gottcha, moralistic fashion to explain why we should not presume him to be untruthful or racist.

The morning after we saw the recent, live vice-presidential debate carried out successfully with proper social distancing and testing precautions, the Commission on Presidential Debates abruptly insisted that the second presidential debate, to be moderated by Scully, would be virtual for the first time in American history.

The commission — an ostensibly bipartisan group that nonetheless consists exclusively of Democrats and Never Trumpers —  knows that Trump thrives on “reality” television while Biden has crafted a unique campaign based almost entirely on remote communications through Skype and Zoom, often with the assistance of poorly concealed teleprompters and scripted talking points. Moreover, when a candidate leads, as the mainstream polling suggests Biden now does, debates are considered unnecessary hazards, even as underdogs see them as critical chances to reboot campaign momentum.

The commission’s decision came even though the president’s doctors reported that by October 15, Trump would be medically fit to participate and virtually immune for months from reinfection. In addition, as with most asymptomatic and recovered patients with viral antibodies, Trump would be unable to pass on the virus for months, if ever.

In other words, Biden — and anyone else present — would have had far less chance of being infected by Trump in the now cancelled second debate than during the first debate.

Issues Are Bad

In nonchalant fashion, Joe Biden just announced that he will rule neither in nor out the Democratic plan to “pack” the Supreme Court to either 13 or 15 justices, should he win and the Senate flip Democratic.

As Biden put it to his questioner:

I know it’s a great question, and you all, I don’t blame you for asking, but you know the moment I answer that question, that headline in every one of your papers will be about that, other than, other than focusing on what’s happening now.

Biden was only clarifying what he had said earlier in the first debate when he stonewalled with, “Whatever position I take on that, that’ll become the issue.”

That incoherence was a further clarification of an earlier admission that the inquiry was “a legitimate question” but one that Biden was “not going to answer.”

And most recently Biden quadrupled down and insisted that voters do not “deserve” an honest answer on whether their Supreme Court will be packed — as he reverted to his bizarre earlier campaign mode of “lying, dog-faced pony soldier,” “You’re a damn liar, man” and “Look, fat, look. Here’s the deal.”

If we follow all the contorted Biden logic, he seems to now believe that the public has a reasonable interest in what he would do about enlarging the Court to nullify Trump’s conservative picks — but that the public nonetheless doesn’t deserve to know.
And Biden will not meet that “legitimate” but undeserved public interest, because, by answering, his very response would become the “issue.” That is, Biden would take a position on an issue, and therefore either delight or offend many voters. And he must avoid that at all costs.

Biden’s answer may be the most surreal response of any presidential candidate in memory.

But it is emblematic of his entire stealth campaign, in collusion with a cheerleading media — a virtual candidate who has no answers to questions that are now rarely asked.

Any reporter, debate moderator, or journalist who asked a question that Biden could not answer or that would in any way embarrass Biden would now earn lifetime ostracism and career beltway ruin for aiding and abetting the Prince of Darkness and the enemies of progressivism.

The current Democratic Party, hostage to the hard-core Left, has asserted that in victory it may seek to pack the Supreme Court and thereby end a 150-year law governing that nine-member body. It has also said it might end the 170-year-old Senate filibuster, on cue from Barack Obama, who as a senator nonetheless found the filibuster useful when he was in the minority. It claims it might do away with the 233-year-old Electoral College, a foundation of the U.S. Constitution that sought to ensure a republic rather than a democracy ruled by the 51 percent and urban centers.

Biden will no longer repeat his earlier no-fracking pandering, but his party (“I am the Democratic Party right now”) has often said it will end fracking. Fracking, remember, has helped to lower world oil prices, to the detriment of Russia and the Middle East. Fracking has helped to keep American troops out of Middle East interventions (remember the now calcified slogan “no blood for oil”?), aided middle-class commuters, created millions of well-paying jobs, and made electricity cheaper, and the air far cleaner.

On all these questions, Biden will offer no answers to voters who do not “deserve” to know. Yet he could very well seek to change the core rules by which America is governed — as part of a larger project to ensure systemic progressive dominance.
He has no answers because to answer honestly would either reveal himself to be a leftist pawn now and thus an anathema to the suburban swing voter; or, contrarily, he’d be exposed as an oath-breaker in the eyes of the AOC–Bernie Sanders socialist near majority of his own party.

So in Orwellian fashion, “issues” can no longer be issues, even if they could alter the United States in a way not seen since its founding.

Sleepwalking to the Revolution

To paraphrase Sophocles, 2020 saw many strange things and nothing stranger than peak Trump derangement syndrome, COVID-19, a self-induced recession, our first national quarantine, and riots, looting, and arson, all mostly unpunished and uncontrolled, in our major cities.

So we are in revolutionary times, even as we snooze about a recent systematic effort, hidden with great effort by our own government, to destroy a prior presidential campaign and transition, and now a presidency.

We are asked to vote for a candidate who will not reveal his position on any major issue of our age, because he feels to do so would enlighten the undeserving electorate and thereby cost him the election. So we continue to sleepwalk toward a revolution whose architects warped our institutions in 2016–2020, and they now plan to alter many of them beyond recognition in 2021.

Translated, that means that they don’t regret what they did in 2016–2019, only that they belatedly got caught for a brief time.
And so by changing the rules after 2020, they are vowing never ever to get caught again.

[DougMacG]

Great piece. Also this:
https://ricochet.com/podcast/ricochet-podcast/house-of-deplorables-victor-davis-hanson-makes-his-final-case-for-trump/

[ccp]

https://thepostmillennial.com/bob-dole-suggests-commission-on-presidential-debates-is-unfair-biased-against-trump

The questions are always based in worded in ways in cinque with anti Trump talking points

But they are always anti Republican

I think Chris Wallace did ask Hillary a tough question in '16 and chased her some
other than that I can never recall ever seeing a Democrat put on the Defensive with the questions like the Repubs
in general and Trump in particular are.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/the-fragments-of-a-civilization/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202020-10-13&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

[G M]

"Translated, that means that they don’t regret what they did in 2016–2019, only that they belatedly got caught for a brief time.

And so by changing the rules after 2020, they are vowing never ever to get caught again."

They would rather burn it all down, rather than let Trump be president for another term.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/the-fragments-of-a-civilization/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202020-10-13&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

[Crafty_Dog]

https://taylormarshall.com/reset?fbclid=IwAR2dfxhCpFICbcXqonYNNx3IuVm91-TlnD-5ppChMF-GC4WDP_WJ3qwusgI

[G M]

https://taylormarshall.com/reset?fbclid=IwAR2dfxhCpFICbcXqonYNNx3IuVm91-TlnD-5ppChMF-GC4WDP_WJ3qwusgI

I am so old, I remember when "Is the Pope Catholic" wasn't a serious question to be debated.

[ccp]

https://pjmedia.com/election/stephen-kruiser/2020/11/02/turncoat-idiot-joe-scarborough-thinks-the-constitution-is-voter-suppression-n1113744

supposed tough guy

former republican who marries die hard Democrat woman then becomes girly

like Arnold

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/great-reset-dummies?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter

[Crafty_Dog]

second post

https://americanmind.org/essays/the-riot-party/?fbclid=IwAR2JZ6exHlpaOsEHoHN5yGrKGbRacsgPEhpJHb40H12dqk4jW1AkKQLb7d4

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uKwoojS9XU&feature=emb_rel_pause

[ccp]

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bronsonstocking/2020/11/07/van-jones-sobs-like-a-baby-while-race-huckstering-over-trumps-defeat-n2579671

This guy does have conservative values

and compared to many of the libs on CNN he is a bit more objective
I noticed

not frequently but he does give repubs once in a while

how can we get someone like him on our side ?

is it possible?

[Crafty_Dog]

N GEOPOLITICS
How the Plight of a Heartland Could Upset America's Balance
Rebecca Keller
Rebecca Keller
Senior Science and Technology Analyst, Stratfor
12 MINS READ
Nov 13, 2020 | 10:00 GMT
(Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
A supporter of current U.S. President Donald Trump (left) and a supporter of U.S. President-elect Joe Biden point to each other's hats in Washington D.C. on Nov. 8, 2020, as people gathered in the streets to celebrate Biden’s projected victory.

(Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
HIGHLIGHTS
The unprecedented threats of violence and unrest surrounding the 2020 U.S. presidential election have shown just how deeply divided the American electorate has become. As the United States prepares for what’s likely to be a highly contentious power transition, we invite readers to revisit this 2019 column on how the polarization of U.S. politics goes hand-in-hand with the U.S. economic core’s continued shift away from the Mississippi River Basin to the coasts....

Editor's Note: The unprecedented threats of violence and unrest surrounding the 2020 U.S. presidential election have shown just how deeply divided the American electorate has become. As the United States prepares for what’s likely to be a highly contentious power transition, we invite readers to revisit this 2019 column on how the polarization of U.S. politics goes hand-in-hand with the U.S. economic core’s continued shift away from the Mississippi River Basin to the coasts.

The death of the American middle class and, with it, large swaths of the American interior, is no secret. Globalization, technological change and other factors have decimated the heartland of the country at the same time as demographic, economic and other trends are beginning to concentrate the country's economic wealth and political influence along the coasts. With the traditional core of the United States no longer carrying the weight it once did, the country as a whole has lost a largely unified center in geographic, economic and social terms. Today, many of the country's growing economic hubs share a similar type of geographical location — a coast — yet they remain geographically, culturally and economically diverse. In this most basic sense, diversity breeds drivers that divide rather than unify, meaning that the continued shift in the U.S. economic core away from its geographic center, alongside other technological and demographic factors, will inflame the nation's social, political and generational divides for some time to come.

The Big Picture
Stratfor's geopolitical methodology rests on seven pillars that drive the actions of all nations: geography, economics, politics, history, technology, society and security. In examining these aspects of a nation's life, it is critical to identify a country's core — the focus of the country's population, economic might and natural resources. What happens, however, when technological shifts propel a shift in a country's core? How does that change the constraints and compulsions of a nation?

Defining the U.S. Core
Many often attribute the United States' modern success to its prize for winning the geographic lottery: the Mississippi River Basin. Stretching from the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Appalachian chain in the east, this vast region offers ample fertile land, navigable rivers, access to raw materials and, in more modern times, transport links to manufacturing centers. It's no surprise, then, that this heartland provided the United States with the economic prosperity that laid the foundation for the country to inevitably become an empire.

For all its historical strength, the Mississippi River Basin is no longer the economic core, or "ecumene," of the United States. After all, technology has evolved and the U.S. economy has shifted; the basin's steel belt has become the rust belt, while containerized shipping, globalization and automation have increased the economic importance of the coastal urban centers. Agriculture, which remains concentrated in the Mississippi basin, still carries outsized political weight compared to its meager contribution of less than 1 percent of gross domestic product, yet even that is beginning to wane in the face of demographic shifts and advancing technology. Naturally, any such transition produces winners and losers; in the U.S. case, it has exacerbated a political divide that has only grown in intensity since the 2016 presidential elections.

A Ditch, a Dream and the Rising Mississippi
The Mississippi basin did not become the undisputed core of the United States until the second half of the 19th century. The U.S. government had been well aware of the land's promise in terms of resources when President Thomas Jefferson acquired much of the basin in 1803 through the Louisiana Purchase, yet the area remained a sparsely populated wilderness for lack of transport links between the Atlantic coast and the interior. (At the dawn of the 19th century, in fact, many in the young republic even regarded western New York, which was part of the original colonial core, as wilderness.) With the Mississippi not yet navigable in the north and the sea route from New Orleans to the economic centers of the mid-Atlantic and northeastern colonies still arduous, transporting goods, particularly bulky ones, over land was more trouble than it was worth. Ultimately, it was technological innovation that increased the ease and reliability of water-based navigation that ultimately transformed the Mississippi basin into the new country's core.


At the dawn of the 19th century, New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Charleston, South Carolina, were all competing for economic superiority in the fledgling nation. In 1825, however, New York gained a clear advantage over its rivals thanks to the Erie Canal, a waterway that transported grains, flour, salt, heavier ores, minerals and manufactured goods from the Great Lakes to the metropolis via the canal and the Hudson River. More than that, the canal was the single greatest factor in the emergence of the cities of Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, New York, as well as the industries that would support them for the better part of a century. Thanks to the upstate canal, New York City's population and economy boomed, leading to a fourfold rise in exports in just the first five years of the canal's operation. But the economic might that emerged along the canal's route did not create a permanent core. Rail, technological improvements and a series of other canals and locks increasingly connecting the various tributaries of the Mississippi basin, while improving navigability eroded the advantages of the Erie Canal. And when the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959, it put the final nail in the coffin of the New York waterway, as the Great Lake states opted for the quicker northern route to the Atlantic.

It wasn't until after the American Civil War ended in 1865 that the Mississippi basin reached its full potential as its agricultural and industrial might helped foster the nation's recovery. In 1879, the federal government assumed responsibility for the river's navigation, facilitating coordination and improving efficiency. The steamboat era, followed by the advent of the river barge and extensive engineering projects during the second half of the 1800s, ultimately laid the foundation for New Orleans to become a booming, diversified export/import hub in the following century. From 1940 to 1984, waterborne trade in the Mississippi basin increased over 13 times, rising from 27 million metric tons (30 million short tons) of goods to roughly 363 million. But just as technological advancements effectively consigned the Erie Canal to history, technological changes in shipping and manufacturing and improvements to the road and rail network have had a similarly deleterious effect on the Mississippi basin.

Without a unifying culture, economy and geography knitting the core together, the new center — fiscally robust as it may be — will not help an already fraying populace mend itself.

The Winners and Losers of Efficiency
As technological advancement and globalization made trade more efficient, the great manufacturing hubs in the American Midwest have begun to close their doors. The economic decline has been well-documented: States that were once powerhouses in coal or steel are now losing population as their inhabitants are forced to seek employment elsewhere. Globalization hit all of America's middle class hard, but especially in the heavy industrial areas in the basin's steel belt, making the American dream — the vision that an individual can become prosperous simply through hard, blue-collar work — so much more difficult to achieve.

And even if U.S. agriculture avoided the same downturn that manufacturing suffered, it has lost its political and economic heft of yesteryear. Demographic trends, evolving technologies, the effects of the U.S.-Chinese trade war and proposed cuts in agricultural subsidies all suggest that the sector's influence will continue to wane in the halls of power. Ultimately, contemporary agriculture requires ever-fewer farmers, yet the local industrial jobs that previously attracted surplus labor are growing equally rarer — political pledges to return to a bygone era notwithstanding. Today, the rural heartland faces difficult times ahead as people migrate to pursue economic opportunities in coastal states and other urban areas.


Of course, the United States is not solely a heartland power; it has long operated a strong navy on both coasts, allowing it to project power around the world. Likewise, coastal urban centers like New York, Boston and San Francisco did not become economic hubs simply at the expense of the interior. Now, however, internal migration trends indicate that once-powerful states like Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania are losing people as western (Oregon and Washington) and southeastern states (Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina) gain them. It's a similar case in terms of economic growth, as western and southeastern regions witnessed growth above the national average while the Great Plains, New England and the Great Lakes regions all posted economic growth figures below the national average in 2016-2017.

But population movement and positive economic growth only tell part of the story. The new U.S. ecumene — which forms a rough "U" shape that traces down the Pacific coast, takes in some Rocky Mountain states, proceeds through Texas and much of the Gulf of Mexico before turning slightly north in the southeastern coastal states — possesses a diverse set of economic interests. No one or two economic factors drive this disparate ecumene; instead, there are tech hubs on the West Coast, energy resources in Texas and real estate and industrial concerns in the Southeast, along with a variety of other economic interests. The lack of a unified economic heartland, coupled with increasing urbanization and generational shifts, sheds light on the roots of an important trend that could deeply affect the near-term future of the United States: the disappearance of the political moderate.


Hollowing Out the Political Middle
Societal, economic or cultural change is not always immediately reflected in the halls of Washington, D.C. Some of the change at the political level can be delayed due to the fundamentals of the U.S. political system. Changes in population due to the rise and fall of local state economies will only result in changes in representation every decade and even then, they will be gradual. After each census, the House of Representatives recalculates the number of seats allocated to each state proportionally, meaning that the population declines in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, West Virginia and Michigan that have occurred over the past decade will have a delayed effect on overall political power within the House. In the meantime, traditionally powerful states that see waning power and influence ahead will seek to hold onto influence in other ways and in other branches of the government. See the 2016 presidential elections, when many states that have been facing long-term economic decline gravitated to the candidate who promised a return to former glory. However, the growth of urban areas as economic hubs could slowly change the social and political profiles of the states that host them. Ultimately, the lag between demographic and economic changes and its formal reflection at the level of political representation leaves the U.S. political system in a state of limbo.


Against this backdrop, the United States is witnessing the growth of ideological divides stemming from generational shifts, urbanization, internal migration and economic inequalities. Without a unifying culture, economy and geography knitting the core together, the new ecumene — fiscally robust as it may be — will not help an already fraying populace mend itself. After all, many of the cultural concerns and economic priorities of Los Angeles still have little in common with those in Raleigh. Instead, we are more likely to witness states push more heavily for their own regional, rather than national, interests as a result of the lag of national representation behind economic realities. In fact, this is a trend that is already in evidence on hot-button issues such as climate change and net neutrality. States will continue to exert local power to drive policy toward their own regional interests. But for emerging technologies like automated vehicles, this drive threatens hopes of standardizing the industry, which could eventually temper advances. Alternatively, big states will have an opportunity to exert an outsized political power if they act early to enshrine regulations on emerging technologies, forcing others to follow. Even still, the United States is staring at an uncertain road ahead in terms of policy direction and political volatility as the off-kilter equilibrium, set adrift by a shifting core, will take years to recalibrate.

The disenfranchisement of the blue-collar middle class that helped propel Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 is not the only thing pushing the partisan divide wide. Numerous other issues are fomenting greater political division — all of which is a manifestation of the country itself metaphorically hollowing out its core. Though the Mississippi basin will remain an agricultural resource base, the effective core, where economic might, population centers and connections with the rest of the world are consolidated, will be centered on the U.S. coasts in the decades to come. With the country's modern-day ecumene located on both sides of the country and the former center seeking to cling to its previous influence, the next several election cycles have the potential to swing widely between poles as the political divide continues to grow. And just as China rises as a global competitor (even amid its own internal geographic divisions), the United States will be forced to grapple with the reality of an urban, coastal core and a potentially restive rural interior that will chafe — potentially to the point of social or civil unrest — at its limited economic opportunities.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/30/the-amorality-of-the-lefts-equality-extremism/?fbclid=IwAR19prVblqSf1DKsDcjPfpk4bYXyHzAy7b6Fq9JADVcEFAJek7WGVPWqels

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVPKw4H-h90&fbclid=IwAR3D9DXA7uiyrzThRzRsqtTFqNmXSvNCl-inUsZFHNpLvtrOMTRWF40wCLc

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.gingrich360.com/2020/12/why-i-will-not-give-up/

[ccp]

Newt at his best!

https://emojiguide.org/thumbs-up

[Crafty_Dog]

https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/07/great-debate-edmund-burke-thomas-paine-yuval-levin-shaun-rieley.html?fbclid=IwAR3nV1wr9c6vhhjgb3ez_lL35v-NObAwUPDpZ6pQZTGYZFZFUEpPpAFrE-Y

[ccp]

https://news.yahoo.com/somehow-congress-lackuster-covid-19-013900426.html

Pelosi and Maxine get to cameo in Marvel movie #79

Maxine could go down in history as first black Wonder Woman.
And the first one over 100 y old

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4cgLgJ52MQ

[ccp]

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5uwsjk

the 60 's hippies and radicals were arguing the same stuff as today

difference  is they are in charge now.

I never liked the show growing up or now but this is exactly same Democrat talking points   as today

Notice one character reminds me of Saul Alinsky.

[DougMacG]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXjFLUGMuSE

[Crafty_Dog]

   
First Thoughts on a National Tragedy
By: George Friedman
A physician is taught to avoid emotional involvement with patients. If he suffers with them, the pain will break him and his judgement will be impaired. He must be clinical and disinterested in order to understand what he is seeing. Avoiding emotions is necessary, but it exacts an extraordinary toll of either pain or an insensitivity to pain. Striving to understand demands distance, but that distance inevitably breaks.

The task I have set myself is to try to understand the way the world works, and to do that, to some extent, I must not allow myself to participate in it. The world is filled with opinions about what ought to be, and the cacophony of self-certainty is a luxury from which I must imperfectly try to remove myself. As Wednesday unfolded, the opinions were overwhelming. I am a citizen of the United States, and it is at times impossible to keep my distance, much as it would be for a physician to treat his own child.

My job is to say something, but what can you say about the unthinkable? How can you speak when you are grieving? The capital of our country was invaded by a mob, some carrying weapons, who had been encouraged to do so by the president. Nothing that was said for or against Donald Trump was sufficient for the moment, and all those who claimed to have foreseen this or claimed that what we saw did not happen are merely continuing the routine chatter of political discourse. I am supposed to be able to explain what has happened, but the ordinary criticism or defense of Trump doesn’t comprehend the moment, and in any case it misses the point. It is not Trump but we ourselves who are to blame, and what we have become toward each other that has somehow been corrupted. None of this could have happened without the rancor tacitly or deliberately embraced.

I am not able to think analytically about this, nor can I pretend that my writing predicted this. I must approach this as what I am: a citizen of a nation that gave me sanctuary, to which I owe my life and which I tried to serve as best I could. I have traveled the world and seen many acts of political rage and cruelty. I have seen coups. This may have been a blundering one, but it was a coup nonetheless, carried out with the intent to change the outcome of an election. It happened in my country, and in its capital city, and in its Capitol building. That moment made us simply another country, and not the city on a hill, shedding light on the world.

I was forced into silence by grief. When something enchanting dies, it calls for a moment of silence over what was lost. Every word uttered demeans the moment. And so I was silent. Now I speak, but what is there to say? The light of the shining city on a hill must be relit, and to relight it we must begin by willing ourselves to friendship and to refuse to despise each other regardless of disagreement. That is the start. I don’t know if we have the will or the strength to do it.

This is all opinion, not carefully thought-out analysis. And much of it is cliche. But cliches carry some truth. I have tried to understand, but now I am reduced to grief. Others will say they told me so, but then they have said so much that they must at times be right.

We did not lose our country yesterday, but we received a warning that our country is in danger. And it is most in danger, I think, from the spirit of self-righteousness that has gripped our nation. Each of us seems to hold our views as unassailable. Each of us regards other views as monstrous. From this cauldron only poison will be brewed.

I have spoken for myself here, not for my method. For the moment I don’t care for the method, or for the understanding. I long for a lost world in which reasonable people could disagree over politics and still be friends. Donald Trump did not rip friendships apart. We did that to ourselves.

There is no wisdom or genius in what I have said. For now, it is what it is. I will seek to return to ironic distance soon. But my country is in danger, and now is not the time for distance nor the endless chatter of opinions passionately repeated.

I love this country. It is time for its citizens to get a grip.

[G M]

"We did not lose our country yesterday, but we received a warning that our country is in danger."

BULLSHIT

   
First Thoughts on a National Tragedy
By: George Friedman
A physician is taught to avoid emotional involvement with patients. If he suffers with them, the pain will break him and his judgement will be impaired. He must be clinical and disinterested in order to understand what he is seeing. Avoiding emotions is necessary, but it exacts an extraordinary toll of either pain or an insensitivity to pain. Striving to understand demands distance, but that distance inevitably breaks.

The task I have set myself is to try to understand the way the world works, and to do that, to some extent, I must not allow myself to participate in it. The world is filled with opinions about what ought to be, and the cacophony of self-certainty is a luxury from which I must imperfectly try to remove myself. As Wednesday unfolded, the opinions were overwhelming. I am a citizen of the United States, and it is at times impossible to keep my distance, much as it would be for a physician to treat his own child.

My job is to say something, but what can you say about the unthinkable? How can you speak when you are grieving? The capital of our country was invaded by a mob, some carrying weapons, who had been encouraged to do so by the president. Nothing that was said for or against Donald Trump was sufficient for the moment, and all those who claimed to have foreseen this or claimed that what we saw did not happen are merely continuing the routine chatter of political discourse. I am supposed to be able to explain what has happened, but the ordinary criticism or defense of Trump doesn’t comprehend the moment, and in any case it misses the point. It is not Trump but we ourselves who are to blame, and what we have become toward each other that has somehow been corrupted. None of this could have happened without the rancor tacitly or deliberately embraced.

I am not able to think analytically about this, nor can I pretend that my writing predicted this. I must approach this as what I am: a citizen of a nation that gave me sanctuary, to which I owe my life and which I tried to serve as best I could. I have traveled the world and seen many acts of political rage and cruelty. I have seen coups. This may have been a blundering one, but it was a coup nonetheless, carried out with the intent to change the outcome of an election. It happened in my country, and in its capital city, and in its Capitol building. That moment made us simply another country, and not the city on a hill, shedding light on the world.

I was forced into silence by grief. When something enchanting dies, it calls for a moment of silence over what was lost. Every word uttered demeans the moment. And so I was silent. Now I speak, but what is there to say? The light of the shining city on a hill must be relit, and to relight it we must begin by willing ourselves to friendship and to refuse to despise each other regardless of disagreement. That is the start. I don’t know if we have the will or the strength to do it.

This is all opinion, not carefully thought-out analysis. And much of it is cliche. But cliches carry some truth. I have tried to understand, but now I am reduced to grief. Others will say they told me so, but then they have said so much that they must at times be right.

We did not lose our country yesterday, but we received a warning that our country is in danger. And it is most in danger, I think, from the spirit of self-righteousness that has gripped our nation. Each of us seems to hold our views as unassailable. Each of us regards other views as monstrous. From this cauldron only poison will be brewed.

I have spoken for myself here, not for my method. For the moment I don’t care for the method, or for the understanding. I long for a lost world in which reasonable people could disagree over politics and still be friends. Donald Trump did not rip friendships apart. We did that to ourselves.

There is no wisdom or genius in what I have said. For now, it is what it is. I will seek to return to ironic distance soon. But my country is in danger, and now is not the time for distance nor the endless chatter of opinions passionately repeated.

I love this country. It is time for its citizens to get a grip.

[ccp]

"I love this country. It is time for its citizens to get a grip."

I thought I posted reply to this but I guess I didn't

my response is this

similar to GM

Ok George go ahead and get a grip,

while the Left continues to wipe out conservatives and everything we stand for

Ha ha what a joke:

This is who we really are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=982quaGZLCM

[G M]

MUST! VOTE! HARDER!

"I love this country. It is time for its citizens to get a grip."

I thought I posted reply to this but I guess I didn't

my response is this

similar to GM

Ok George go ahead and get a grip,

while the Left continues to wipe out conservatives and everything we stand for

Ha ha what a joke:

This is who we really are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=982quaGZLCM

[Crafty_Dog]

Bring the Insurrectionists to Justice
The politicians who egged them on should also be made to pay a heavy price.

By Peggy Noonan
Jan. 7, 2021 7:19 pm ET

A rioter carries a House podium at the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 6.
PHOTO: WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES



How do we deal with all that has happened?

We remember who we are. We are a great nation and a strong one; we have, since our beginning, been a miracle in the political history of man. We have brought much good. We are also in trouble, no point not admitting it.

We regain our confidence. We’ve got through trouble before. We love this place and will keep it. We have a Constitution that’s gotten us this far and will get us further.

We lower the boom. No civilized country can accept or allow what we saw Wednesday with the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol. This was an attack on democracy itself. That is not just a phrase. Rule by the people relies on adherence to law and process. The assault and siege was an attempt to stop the work of democracy by halting the peaceful transfer of presidential power, our crowning glory for more than two centuries.

This was a sin against history.

When something like this happens it tends to be repeated. It is our job to make sure it is not.

And so we should come down like a hammer on all those responsible, moving with brute dispatch against members of the mob and their instigators.

On the rioters: Find them, drag them out of their basements, and bring them to justice. Use all resources, whatever it takes, with focus and speed. We have pictures of half of them; they like to pose. They larked about taking selfies and smiling unashamed smiles as one strolled out with a House podium. They were so arrogant they were quoted by name in news reports. It is our good luck they are idiots. Capitalize on that luck.

Throw the book at them. Make it a book of commentaries on the Constitution. Throw it hard.

They have shamed and embarrassed their country in the eyes of the world, which is not only a painful fact but a dangerous one. The world, and the young—all of us—need to see them pay the price.

Now to the devil and his apprentices.

As for the chief instigator, the president of the United States, he should be removed from office by the 25th Amendment or impeachment, whichever is faster. This, with only a week and a half to go, would be a most extraordinary action, but this has been an extraordinary time. Mike Pence is a normal American political figure; he will not have to mount a new government; he appears to be sane; he will in this brief, strange interlude do fine.

The president should be removed for reasons of justice—he urged a crowd to march on Congress, and, when it turned violent, had to be dragged into telling them, equivocally, to go home—and prudence. Mitt Romney had it exactly right: “What happened here . . . was an insurrection, incited by the president of the United States.” As for prudence, Mr. Trump is a sick, bad man and therefore, as president, a dangerous one. He has grown casually bloody-minded, nattering on about force and denouncing even his own vice president as a coward for not supporting unconstitutional measures. No one seems to be certain how Mr. Trump spends his days. He doesn’t bother to do his job. The White House is in meltdown. The only thing that captures his interest is the fact that he lost, which fills him with thoughts of vengeance.

Removing him would go some distance to restoring our reputation, reinforcing our standards, and clarifying constitutional boundaries for future presidents who might need it.


READ MORE DECLARATIONS
In 2021, All the World’s a Stage December 31, 2020
A Look Back at the Pandemic Year December 24, 2020
The Monday When America Came Back December 17, 2020
Mrs. Smith’s Tips for New Lawmakers December 10, 2020
Who’ll Be 2020’s Margaret Chase Smith? December 3, 2020
As for his appointees and staff, the garbage they talk to rationalize their staying is no longer acceptable to anyone. “But my career.” Your career, in the great scheme of things, is nothing. “But my future in politics.” Your future, even if your wildest schemes are fulfilled, is a footnote to a footnote. There are ways to be a footnote honorably. “But my kids.” When they are 20 they will read the history. You want them proud of your role, not petitioning the court for a name change.

It was honorable to arrive with high hopes and idealistic commitments. It is not honorable to stay.

As for the other instigators, a side note.

True conservatives tend to have a particular understanding of the fragility of things. They understand that every human institution is, in its way, built on sand. It’s all so frail. They see how thin the veil is between civilization and chaos, and understand that we have to go through every day, each in our way, trying to make the veil thicker. And so we value the things in the phrase that others use to disparage us, “law and order.” Yes, always, the rule of law, and order so that the people of a great nation can move freely on the streets and do their work and pursue their lives.


To the devil’s apprentices, Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. They are clever men, highly educated, well-credentialed, endlessly articulate. They see themselves as leading conservative lights, but in this drama they have proved themselves punks practicing punk politics. They are like people who know the value of nothing, who see no frailty around them, who inherited a great deal—an estate built by the work and wealth of others—and feel no responsibility for maintaining the foundation because pop gave them a strong house, right? They are careless inheritors of a nation, an institution, a party that previous generations built at some cost.

They backed a lie and held out the chimera of some possible Trump victory that couldn’t happen, and hid behind the pretense that they were just trying to be fair to all parties and investigate any suspicions of vote fraud, when what they were really doing was playing—coolly, with lawyerly sophistication—not to the base but to the sickness within the base. They should have stood up and told the truth, that democracy moves forward, that the election was imperfect as all elections are, and more so because of the pandemic rules, which need to be changed, but the fact is the voters of America chose Biden-Harris, not Trump-Pence.

Here’s to you, boys. Did you see the broken glass, the crowd roaming the halls like vandals in late Rome, the staff cowering in locked closets and barricading offices? Look on your mighty works and despair.

The price they will pay is up to their states. But the reputational cost should be harsh and high.

Again, on the president: There have been leaders before who, facing imminent downfall, decide to tear everything down with them. They want to go out surrounded by flames. Hitler, at the end, wanted to blow up Germany, its buildings and bridges. His people had let him down. Now he hated them. They must suffer.

I have resisted Nazi comparisons for five years, for the most part easily. But that is like what is happening here, the same kind of spirit, as the president departs, as he angrily channel-surfs in his bunker.

He is a bad man and not a stable one and he is dangerous. America is not safe in his hands.

It is not too late. Removal of the president would be the prudent move, not the wild one. Get rid of him. Now.

[G M]

If only they felt such rage regarding a stolen election...

Bring the Insurrectionists to Justice
The politicians who egged them on should also be made to pay a heavy price.

By Peggy Noonan
Jan. 7, 2021 7:19 pm ET

A rioter carries a House podium at the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 6.
PHOTO: WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES



How do we deal with all that has happened?

We remember who we are. We are a great nation and a strong one; we have, since our beginning, been a miracle in the political history of man. We have brought much good. We are also in trouble, no point not admitting it.

We regain our confidence. We’ve got through trouble before. We love this place and will keep it. We have a Constitution that’s gotten us this far and will get us further.

We lower the boom. No civilized country can accept or allow what we saw Wednesday with the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol. This was an attack on democracy itself. That is not just a phrase. Rule by the people relies on adherence to law and process. The assault and siege was an attempt to stop the work of democracy by halting the peaceful transfer of presidential power, our crowning glory for more than two centuries.

This was a sin against history.

When something like this happens it tends to be repeated. It is our job to make sure it is not.

And so we should come down like a hammer on all those responsible, moving with brute dispatch against members of the mob and their instigators.

On the rioters: Find them, drag them out of their basements, and bring them to justice. Use all resources, whatever it takes, with focus and speed. We have pictures of half of them; they like to pose. They larked about taking selfies and smiling unashamed smiles as one strolled out with a House podium. They were so arrogant they were quoted by name in news reports. It is our good luck they are idiots. Capitalize on that luck.

Throw the book at them. Make it a book of commentaries on the Constitution. Throw it hard.

They have shamed and embarrassed their country in the eyes of the world, which is not only a painful fact but a dangerous one. The world, and the young—all of us—need to see them pay the price.

Now to the devil and his apprentices.

As for the chief instigator, the president of the United States, he should be removed from office by the 25th Amendment or impeachment, whichever is faster. This, with only a week and a half to go, would be a most extraordinary action, but this has been an extraordinary time. Mike Pence is a normal American political figure; he will not have to mount a new government; he appears to be sane; he will in this brief, strange interlude do fine.

The president should be removed for reasons of justice—he urged a crowd to march on Congress, and, when it turned violent, had to be dragged into telling them, equivocally, to go home—and prudence. Mitt Romney had it exactly right: “What happened here . . . was an insurrection, incited by the president of the United States.” As for prudence, Mr. Trump is a sick, bad man and therefore, as president, a dangerous one. He has grown casually bloody-minded, nattering on about force and denouncing even his own vice president as a coward for not supporting unconstitutional measures. No one seems to be certain how Mr. Trump spends his days. He doesn’t bother to do his job. The White House is in meltdown. The only thing that captures his interest is the fact that he lost, which fills him with thoughts of vengeance.

Removing him would go some distance to restoring our reputation, reinforcing our standards, and clarifying constitutional boundaries for future presidents who might need it.


READ MORE DECLARATIONS
In 2021, All the World’s a Stage December 31, 2020
A Look Back at the Pandemic Year December 24, 2020
The Monday When America Came Back December 17, 2020
Mrs. Smith’s Tips for New Lawmakers December 10, 2020
Who’ll Be 2020’s Margaret Chase Smith? December 3, 2020
As for his appointees and staff, the garbage they talk to rationalize their staying is no longer acceptable to anyone. “But my career.” Your career, in the great scheme of things, is nothing. “But my future in politics.” Your future, even if your wildest schemes are fulfilled, is a footnote to a footnote. There are ways to be a footnote honorably. “But my kids.” When they are 20 they will read the history. You want them proud of your role, not petitioning the court for a name change.

It was honorable to arrive with high hopes and idealistic commitments. It is not honorable to stay.

As for the other instigators, a side note.

True conservatives tend to have a particular understanding of the fragility of things. They understand that every human institution is, in its way, built on sand. It’s all so frail. They see how thin the veil is between civilization and chaos, and understand that we have to go through every day, each in our way, trying to make the veil thicker. And so we value the things in the phrase that others use to disparage us, “law and order.” Yes, always, the rule of law, and order so that the people of a great nation can move freely on the streets and do their work and pursue their lives.


To the devil’s apprentices, Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. They are clever men, highly educated, well-credentialed, endlessly articulate. They see themselves as leading conservative lights, but in this drama they have proved themselves punks practicing punk politics. They are like people who know the value of nothing, who see no frailty around them, who inherited a great deal—an estate built by the work and wealth of others—and feel no responsibility for maintaining the foundation because pop gave them a strong house, right? They are careless inheritors of a nation, an institution, a party that previous generations built at some cost.

They backed a lie and held out the chimera of some possible Trump victory that couldn’t happen, and hid behind the pretense that they were just trying to be fair to all parties and investigate any suspicions of vote fraud, when what they were really doing was playing—coolly, with lawyerly sophistication—not to the base but to the sickness within the base. They should have stood up and told the truth, that democracy moves forward, that the election was imperfect as all elections are, and more so because of the pandemic rules, which need to be changed, but the fact is the voters of America chose Biden-Harris, not Trump-Pence.

Here’s to you, boys. Did you see the broken glass, the crowd roaming the halls like vandals in late Rome, the staff cowering in locked closets and barricading offices? Look on your mighty works and despair.

The price they will pay is up to their states. But the reputational cost should be harsh and high.

Again, on the president: There have been leaders before who, facing imminent downfall, decide to tear everything down with them. They want to go out surrounded by flames. Hitler, at the end, wanted to blow up Germany, its buildings and bridges. His people had let him down. Now he hated them. They must suffer.

I have resisted Nazi comparisons for five years, for the most part easily. But that is like what is happening here, the same kind of spirit, as the president departs, as he angrily channel-surfs in his bunker.

He is a bad man and not a stable one and he is dangerous. America is not safe in his hands.

It is not too late. Removal of the president would be the prudent move, not the wild one. Get rid of him. Now.

[ccp]

".If only they felt such rage regarding a stolen election."

Exactly

We know the truth but is will never be proven enough

And now with the Dems in power the evidence for it will be erased

I know what that feels like personally

[G M]

https://tomluongo.me/2021/01/07/tiananmen-avoided-d-c-as-trump-era-ends/

[DougMacG]

The protest was mostly peaceful and we don't know much yet about who instigated violence.

Noonan: "The president should be removed for reasons of justice—he urged a crowd to march on Congress, and, when it turned violent, had to be dragged into telling them, equivocally, to go home—and prudence. "

Umm, removed for high crimes and misdemeanors, not justice.  Didn't MLK urge a crowd to March on Washington?

She's entitled to her opinion, but to me she is a contrary indicator on all topics Trump.  She goes all negative, misses the good, and lost her objectivity somewhere along the way.  Frankly that's lousy journalism IMHO, though she was once great. No excuse for calling for impeachment without an impeachable offense.  That is reckless and disqualifying.  Most of it is blah, blah...  This was a sin against history. Right out of the Obama vocabulary. What part of history lacked sin? 

[Crafty_Dog]

GM's "Her Name Was" post has eloquence, but climbing through the busted window of a barricaded door against LEOs with guns out defending those whom they are sworn to protect fits under the heading of "Stupid games winning stupid prizes."

Our side needs to get that a lot of rational Americans have looked at the Trump-Giuliani-Wood-Sydney Powel clown show going 0-60 in court (including Trump appointed judges) and look at Trump's proven track record (e.g. his performance in the first debate) think he lost,  he's a crybaby and a bully (see e.g. attempted treatment of Pence) who is now a sore loser in denial thrashing about.

The other side has more "to get"--: the rationality of our perception of the Hillary investigation being thrown, the foulness of the attempted coup via the Russia Collusion, the Impeachment Farce, the oppression by the Tech Oligarchs, and much more-- such as realizing our actions now are a response to  their hubris and lack of American integrity.

[G M]

If only she had been a convicted felon who had jammed a gun into the belly of a pregnant woman during a home invasion robbery and then died of a drug overdose while in handcuffs...

GM's "Her Name Was" post has eloquence, but climbing through the busted window of a barricaded door against LEOs with guns out defending those whom they are sworn to protect fits under the heading of "Stupid games winning stupid prizes."

Our side needs to get that a lot of rational Americans have looked at the Trump-Giuliani-Wood-Sydney Powel clown show going 0-60 in court (including Trump appointed judges) and look at Trump's proven track record (e.g. his performance in the first debate) think he lost,  he's a crybaby and a bully (see e.g. attempted treatment of Pence) who is now a sore loser in denial thrashing about.

The other side has more "to get"--: the rationality of our perception of the Hillary investigation being thrown, the foulness of the attempted coup via the Russia Collusion, the Impeachment Farce, the oppression by the Tech Oligarchs, and much more-- such as realizing our actions now are a response to  their hubris and lack of American integrity.

[Crafty_Dog]

Trump Erases His Legacy
He also destroyed any chance of a political future, all on a single Wednesday afternoon.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Jan. 7, 2021 6:22 pm ET


WSJ Opinion: Trump Erases His Legacy

Potomac Watch: A politician has to work hard to destroy a legacy and a future in a single day. President Donald J. Trump managed it. Image: John Minchillo/Associated Press




A politician has to work hard to destroy a legacy and a future in a single day. President Donald J. Trump managed it.


By this Wednesday afternoon, media outlets had called both Georgia Senate runoffs for the Democratic candidates, handing Sen. Chuck Schumer the keys to that chamber. We now have a Democrat-controlled Washington. The Georgia news came as a mob of Trump supporters—egged on by the president himself—occupied the U.S. Capitol building. Now four people are dead, while aides and officials run for the exits.



It didn’t have to be this way. The president had every right—even an obligation, given the ad hoc changes to voting rules—to challenge state election results in court. But when those challenges failed (which every one did, completely), he had the opportunity to embrace his legacy, cement his accomplishments, and continue to play a powerful role in GOP politics.


Mr. Trump could have reveled in the mantle of the one-term disrupter—the man the electorate sent to Washington to deliver the message that it was tired of business as usual. He could have pointed out just how successful he was in that mission by stacking his cabinet with reformers, busting convention, and overseeing policy changes that astounded (and delighted) even many warrior conservatives.



The withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and the Iranian deal. The greatest tax simplification and reduction since Reagan. The largest deregulatory effort since—well, ever. Three Supreme Court justices and 54 appellate court judges. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. The Jerusalem embassy. Criminal-justice reform. Opportunity zones. He could have noted that the greatest proof of just how much Democrats and the establishment feared his mission were the five years of investigations, hysterical allegations and “deep state” sabotage—which he survived.

Mostly, he could have explained that all this was at considerably heightened risk if Democrats win the Senate—and invested himself fully in Georgia. Every day needed to be about fundraising, rallying the troops, making clear to his supporters that the only way to preserve this legacy was to keep the Senate in GOP hands.


That isn’t what happened. Obviously. Following court losses, Mr. Trump, in his own words, devoted “125% of my energy” to his own grievances. He declared the Georgia Senate races “illegal and invalid,” discouraging voting. He actively undercut Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler with late-game demands for $2,000 stimulus checks and with his veto of a defense authorization bill that provided pay raises and support for Georgia’s military bases. His denial of the presidential results energized Democrats and depressed Republicans. Turnout in Trump counties lagged, while turnout in some Democratic areas nearly reached that of the November election.


Mr. Trump is leaving, and thanks to his final denial of reality, Mr. Schumer will now methodically erase his policy history. Democrats need only 51 votes to eliminate the Trump tax reform, 51 to use the Congressional Review Act to undo his final deregulations; 51 to wave through liberal judges to counter Mr. Trump’s picks. And this is before Mr. Biden gets busy reversing Trump policy by executive fiat, and assuming Democrats forbear from abolishing the legislative filibuster.



So that’s his legacy, largely gone. As for his future, Mr. Trump’s role in inflaming the Capitol mob has likely put paid to that, as well. Dedicated members of his administration are resigning. Longtime supporters in Congress are turning. Millions of Americans who for years were willing to tolerate, often even celebrate, Mr. Trump’s brash behavior in the pursuit of reform or good policy, are less amused by the wreckage he has visited on party and policy. And they’ll be unwilling to go there again in 2024.


Trump loyalists may well condemn anyone who speaks honestly of all this as RINOs or spineless Beltwayers who care nothing of “election fraud.” But to quote the incoming president, “C’mon, man.” It’s one thing to scorn a Mitt Romney. But many of the senators throwing up their hands are the ones who fearlessly rooted out the false Russia collusion accusations, who defended Mr. Trump through baseless impeachment proceedings, and who understand the need for voting reform. Many of the officials resigning are bold conservatives, attracted to an administration they knew would let them break china. They too are stunned, and demoralized, by the president’s decision to tank their work.


“We signed up for making America great again. We signed up for lower taxes and less regulation. The president has a long list of successes that we can be proud of. But all of that went away yesterday.” That was Mick Mulvaney talking to CNBC Thursday. Mr. Mulvaney, the tea-party supporter, founding member of the House Freedom caucus, and the onetime Trump chief of staff. Hardly an establishment weenie.


The pity is that Mr. Trump’s conflagration will mostly burn the Americans he went to Washington to help. They will bear the higher taxes, the higher costs of regulation, the higher unemployment, the loss of freedoms. America became less great this week. And that’s fully on the guy at the top.