Elections

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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The Election, 2024

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Personally, I’m voting for Trump and for Republicans generally.  My issues include:

The overwhelming importance of free speech, which is under pervasive and increasing Democrat attack (the censorship pressures during Covid and the 2020 election were only the tip of the iceberg)…the strange Democrat affinity for the Iranian regime, the failure to stop Houthi depredations on shipping, and the undercutting of Israel’s self-defense (had Harris had her way about Rafah, Sinwar would still be alive)…the spread of anti-Semitism on ‘elite’ college campuses, including interference with Jewish students attending class, and the Administration’s failure to do anything substantive to address this…the chaos resulting from deliberate failure to enforce the border laws (done obviously for electoral reasons)…Democrat failure to take seriously the Chinese challenge and supply-chain dependency…Harris blaming inflation on ‘price-gouging’ and ‘greed’ while ignoring the effects of spending and money supply.

The dismal performance of much of the public education system, which is condemning millions to virtual innumeracy and illiteracy, while being protected from competition and challenge by the Democrat-affiliated teachers unions…A threat to innovation in the form of economic policies centered around subsidies toward favored industries and companies rather than addressing structural problems; also, the proposal to tax unrealized gains. Energy policies which are unrealistically and harmfully anti-fossil-fuel. Overall, the increasing Democrat orientation toward reengineering the entire society from the top down, which is entirely contrary to the spirit that has made America successful and free.

I think Trump is a problem-solver and a creative thinker, he has a lot of what Michael Gibson of 1517 fund refers to as Polytropos, a Greek word that was used to describe Odysseus and which means, basically ‘will get it done somehow.’ There are obviously plenty of things about the man that I wish were different, but as Bill Ackman pointed out, an election is not like a marriage or a business partnership where you have a whole universe of people to choose from–in this election, you choose from two. In my own view, Trump is the better choice by a wide margin.

“Vote Your Conscience”?

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David Reaboi:

I’ve always hated this idea that your vote is “sacred” and that you should “vote your conscience.”

Nonsense. It’s only ever been transactional and strategic. Nobody cares about your lofty ideals; only 1 of 2 candidates will be elected, and abstaining is also making a choice. Sitting out an election is your right—but there’s nothing valorous about not being able to make up your mind in a simple binary.

In most elections the only options are bad and worse. When worse is much worse, writing in your ideal candidate is especially foolish. Nobody will get your point and you make it more likely that worse gets elected.

Public life would be better if fewer people thought about politics and elections as battles between good and evil and more people thought in terms of making incremental improvements by choosing less-bad alternatives. This is unlikely to happen unless the stakes are lowered by reducing the size and power of government.

“When Is Blowing Up the World A Success?”

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VDH’s excellent summary:

Recently, Secretary of State Antony Blinken bragged in an op-ed that “The Biden administration’s strategy has put the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago.”
 
What?
 
This is the latest campaign fantasy narrative also served up by Harris-Walz—analogous to the four-year untruth that “the border is secure” and “the economy is strong”—as they try to explain why the world utterly blew up on their watch and due to their own actions…

Read the whole thing.

On the Waterfront

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The longshoreman strike is a great example of why you need a functioning president at the top of the executive branch.

There has been a lot of gobbledygook from leftist circles over the past several months that Biden’s inability to carry out the functions of the presidency is not a crisis because for the most part government runs on its own. They say, sure he’s not up to another four years but let’s not go crazy and start thinking about invoking the 25th Amendment forcing him to resign; we’ve got smart people in government and can get by.

Well the two arguments against that are the natural entropy of government and the ability to deal with crises. In both cases, someone needs to have both the legitimacy and incentive to knock heads and take the risks needed in a leader; as the sign on Truman’s desk said, “The Buck Stops Here.”

We’ve been skating on thin ice for a while regarding possible labor unrest across various critical parts of our transportation network and the longshoreman strike couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Biden Administration. The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) has maximum leverage given its ability to shut down the ports in the eastern half of the country, at a time when the economy is especially vulnerable and during the final month of an election when the Democrats need union support in a tight election.

The last thing the Democrats need is the economy to go into a tailspin. The second-to-last thing they need is the labor unrest that would stem from invoking Taft-Hartley and breaking the strike.

Outside of the danger to the economy and people’s livelihoods, there is something almost entrancing about the cartoon villainy of ILA President Harold Daggett, who has threatened to cripple the economy if his demands aren’t met regarding pay and automation. You can argue that long-term he is being foolish because he’s converted a viable threat in-being into a dangerous threat in fact — the best threats you can have are the ones you never have to state let alone use.

It also doesn’t help that the productivity of US ports is among the lowest in the world. In the world of tight supply chains and container shipping, inefficiency in port operations has the same effect as a tariff on the cost of goods. To paraphrase William J. LePetomane, Daggett and the ILA need to protect their phony baloney jobs. I’m as nostalgic as the next guy, but not for that ’70s vibe of unions using extortion to protect their cushy way of life.

So basically our cartoon villain Daggett has thrown down the gauntlet and challenged the feds to come get him. The problem in the executive branch is that anyone can make a decision and get it implemented under Biden’s signature, but there has to be somebody willing to take the risks and the heat to see that decision through and that’s where the buck stops. Somebody needs to not just broker across the various interests in any administration but to make the decision stick. There’s only so much our 21st Century version of Edith Wilson, Jill Biden, can do.

Like Zelensky and the mullahs, Daggett knows that a Republican victory will undercut his leverage so he’s in a use-it-or-lose it situation. If Biden does nothing, the economy tanks. If Biden breaks the strike, he weakens a valuable base of support for the Democrats right before the election.

From the Middle East to the Atlantic-Gulf Coast ports, the consequences of the Biden puppetry are coming home to roost.

Side note. It’s a shame Jen Psaki is no longer in government so that when the inevitable shortages from the ILA strike occur she can poo-poo us about “the tragedy of the treadmill that’s delayed.”