Conservatism

2024 Election Plus/Delta

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Pluses: admittedly much the shorter list, but we did resolve a few things.

  1. Thanks mainly to vote shifts in California and New York, the popular vote outcome was not at variance with the Electoral College vote, and it wasn’t particularly close (over 4-1/2 million votes).
  2. Largely as a result, the losing side, and VP Harris herself, have indicated cooperation with formal certification and transition processes.
  3. Harris is gone. She’ll get a chunk of money for a book and retire to the lecture circuit.
  4. Walz, same, and given the likelihood that he would have been a 21st-century version of Henry Wallace, with Chinese instead of Soviet agents in his inner circle, that might be more important than getting rid of Harris.
  5. Taking a somewhat longer view, Trump is gone too (perhaps not a much longer view; see the final Delta item below).
  6. By extension, there is some chance that ’28 will not have the electorate choosing between a crook and an idiot for President.
  7. Whatever one may think of prediction markets, and there are arguments on both sides regarding their functionality, the biggest prediction market of all, the US stock market, was forecasting a Trump victory all year (not coincidentally, the same thing happened in 2016).
  8. By the way, the media will actually report negative economic news now.
  9. I could have put this in either category, but I’ll leave it here: your Cluebat of the Day is a reminder that Trump is as old as Biden was in ’20, and notwithstanding some of my more apprehensive items below, to expect anything much of him is a waste of time.
  10. Likely continuation of relatively good space-industry policy across Administrations, which should be the only thing that matters several decades from now.

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A Skin Suit, Demanding Respect

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You know, the most disgusting aspect of the most recent Trump hit is the fact that it appeared to have been engineered by the management and apparently the current ownership of the Atlantic. This whole skeevy story was rather obviously intended to be the October Surprise, something like the 60 Minutes-Rathergate-Bush/ANG story, calculated to catastrophically hit in time for Election Day 2004. Frankly, I never cared much for CBS 60 Minutes, after a certain point in my development as an adult with a passing interest in public matters. It was all a rather contrived and scripted business, all carefully edited in the furtherance of the “gotcha” narrative o’ the moment. After Rathergate and the faked ANG memo, though, one did rather wonder exactly how many other previous 60 Minutes exposés had been based on fraudulent and/or sketchy documents, which no outside CBS ever got a chance to examine with a gimlet eye.

But the degradation of the Atlantic from a once-respected venerable literary and cultural publication with 160+ years of solid worth … into a purveyor of partisan sleaze is something that hits me rather personally. It demonstrates Iowahawk’s oft-quoted tweet about identifying a notable and influential institution, slaughtering it … and then wearing the pelt as a skin suit, while demanding respect.

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With Dread and Foreboding

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So, how do I regard Election Day, looming up in two weeks? With dread and foreboding, to be absolutely frank – no matter who is declared victorious. It’s absolutely guaranteed that all flaming hell will break out in either case; either within hours/minutes, or in days/weeks.

If the Trump/Vance ticket sweeps to an unmistakable, unarguable landslide well beyond any means of the Democrat Party to fraud – the anti-Trumpists will be insane with baffled fury. The national media establishment will look like Wily Coyote after one of his Acme gadgets explodes – and the entrenched bureaucracy crusted like layers and barnacles all over the various federal government departments … they will see the end of their comfortable gravy train. Ruin, disgrace, impoverishment, possibly criminal charges. The Deity knoweth and the various conservative-sympathetic bloggers and commenters, to include many fellow Chicagoboyz essayists and frequent commenters, remember very well how blatantly they played dirty pool the last time around. What would they venture this time against the Great Orange One, the avatar of their doom … Political assassination? Of him, or any of his allies? At the height of what some commenters have termed a second civil war? Like Lincoln, at the hands of an angry partisan of the losing side? Sadly. I wouldn’t put it beyond the realm of possibility. This will be bad. Very bad.

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Dedicated Followers of Fashion

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It’s kind of depressing, reading the various stories linked here and there by various blogs and social media about pro-Palestinian/pro-terrorist orgies of protest on the grounds of various colleges and universities, and in the streets of certain big cities. This reminds me of the anti-war demos of the Vietnam War era. Massive turnout, lots of signs, lots of free-floating rhetoric … which turned out to mean absolutely nothing at all, in the long run. Much of the ruckus wasn’t motivated by sincere conviction about the welfare of the South Vietnamese, or the lives of our military troops. It was all just the followers of fashion, making a show of their fashionable conviction.

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They Have Their Exits

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I’ve been following the various social media over the last week, reading and watching various reports of how local volunteer efforts are handling disaster recovery in the mountainous areas blasted by Hurricane Helene. FEMA and various other federal departments are helping – sort of – or hindering, interfering, preventing access or flat-out confiscating donations, according to some rather irate reports, which reports are indignantly condemned as rumors by all the established media sources and FEMA’s own public affairs representatives. No smoke without a fire, as the saying goes, and hacks – err, that is “reporters” for the established media certainly don’t appear to be venturing deep into the Appalachian weeds to report on such matters first-hand. Although, recalling the dog’s breakfast that the national establishment media made of covering Hurricane Katrina, that might be all to the good in the long run.

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