Elections

The Coming Storm

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David and Sgt. Mom have done an excellent job expressing their concerns about the upcoming election. Accordingly, I will express mine.

We are on the precipice of a disaster.

There are several reasons for my belief.

The first is our voting system. Our system with the proliferation of mail-in balloting and lack of auditable controls seems purpose-designed to breed mistrust and corruption. Also while we talk about how voting now occurs before Election Day, we do not discuss the implications that in many jurisdictions it takes days if not weeks to count the ballots, which presents opportunities for mischief.

The second is the level of rhetoric from the Left over the past week, call it the “Hitler Gambit.”

There has been a lot of criticism from the Right regarding Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in The Atlantic “revealing” Trump’s affinity for Hitler. The critics says that the revelations are old and thinly sourced. The critics miss the point, which is that Goldberg’s article wasn’t so much meant to be an “October Surprise” as it was to give the Democrats the news hook they needed to launch their final argument that Trump is a fascist.

The Goldberg article was merely the starter’s gun for that final argument. Keep in mind that the owner of The Atlantic is Kamala’s “first friend.” On the same day that Goldberg’s article dropped, as if it was a coincidence, we had both the White House confirming that Biden believes Trump is a fascist, and Kamala remarking that Trump was a fascist and, given that and his affinity for Hitler, could not ever be trusted to return to the White House.

Just in case anyone missed the point, Kamala delivered her remarks not as a presidential candidate with an off-the-cuff comment, but in her official capacity with a prepared statement in front of the Vice President’s Residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory.

After delivering her remarks, Kamala turned and left without answering any questions. That is most curious, because if she thought that Trump was within a few weeks of bringing a dark, fascist night onto America, what did she think her and every American’s moral responsibility would be to stop him? Would President Biden, and she as Vice President, in good conscience ever turn over the keys of the White House, even with a clear electoral result, to a man they thought would destroy the Republic? As Justice Robert Jackson once said, “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

The third is the Democrats’ declining belief in our Constitution.

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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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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.