Politics

Day Two of the Trump Administration

by

Now that the Election is out of the way, Trump can focus on hitting the ground running next January. I hope there is “shock and awe” as he gets down to the serious work of getting the country back on its feet.

There is a lot of work to be done on important things like trade, immigration, ripping the bloated national government down to the studs, and national security. I bet Trump is going to have a stack of executive orders to sign on Day One to address those urgent national issues.

However, there is also time and slack to pursue secondary objectives meant for delivering some well-deserved justice after the past four years. Call it payback, call it game theory, but hopefully after we re-establish some order we can all be friends again. Not only that but some of things are just the right thing to do, for all Americans.

The best part is that these initiatives have all the right enemies and all can be done mostly through the Executive Branch.

First some nice things:

Read more

Sis Boom Bah

by

No, this has nothing to do with exploding sheep.

Linking a Powerline article on the election at Hot Air, Ed Driscoll takes issue with one of its points:

I’ll disagree with my friend John a bit here. There has been a cult of personality around Trump, which is what happens with charismatic figures in politics. There was a cult of personality around Obama too, which Obama purposefully cultivated, and one around Reagan that came together more organically.

Hinderaker doesn’t deny a cult of personality, he just says correctly that personality did not drive Trump’s campaign.  “[H]e ran on the issues. He talked relentlessly and effectively about inflation, the border, and war and peace.” Other candidates with personality cults also ran on issues. The hip, personable Bill Clinton (the last fun Democrat to run for Prez in the general) ran on blaming Bush for the recession, whose root cause was undoubtedly the S&L crisis (in which the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan played a tiny part). The quasi-Messianic Obama ran on War on Terror criticisms and on blaming the Republicans for the Great Recession.

Recall the pep rallies of high school, and their outrageous taunts of the opposing team. People from all factions bring this spirit into politics. It seems that scarcely anyone other than the right applies the other key element: over-the-top aggrandizement of the home team. This looks weird to many leftists and to many conventional schlubs on the right because their approach to their own candidates is more subdued; to them hilarity must directly deprecate the other candidate. As a larger-than-life personality facing outlandish political enemies, Trump is a magnet for pep rally treatment. He is seen in memes as comically heroic, riding an eagle or wearing a superhero outfit or leading dogs and cats to safety away from the clutches of migrant diners. 

Literary Life

by

(A break from the election, for those who can bear to tear themselves away from contemplating Tuesday’s Presidential Election, and the judicial murder of squirrels.)

I was briefly nonplussed when a question for me showed up on my message stack on Quora last week – what did I think of Sally Rooney’s not allowing her books to be translated into Hebrew or be published and distributed in Israel, and demanding that other authors insist on the same. All because of Israeli treatment of the poor, poor, pitiful Palestinians in Gaza. My initial reaction was – who the hell is Sally Rooney?
(Subsequent brief pause for a look-up and a review of sample chapters of her books on Amazon.) Oh, that’s … precious. An Irish millennial with popular literary credentials, much lauded in the correct circles, describing the landscape of a generational navel with exquisitely elaborate original prose of the sort much favored by jaded teachers of creative writing. Four books with pretty much the same plot, it would appear, noted as a significant voice of her generation – a kind of literary Lena Dunham. Also a fashionably self-proclaimed Marxist, which is weird because that type never actually chooses to live in a place currently being run under strict Marxist lines. Curious, that. More importantly for this discussion, a raving antisemite, or as I prefer to spell it in the interests of bald accuracy, a Jew-hater. As an aside, it has always struck me as a peculiarly Irish quality, to rush into a full-body embrace with any movement perceived to be an enemy of their enemy, on the somewhat questionable grounds that an enemy of your old enemy must therefore be an acceptable ally to you. (This explains how Southern Ireland remained a neutral in WWII, while radical IRA members collaborated with Nazi Germany at the time, and decades later took funding from Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi.)

Read more

With Dread and Foreboding

by

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.

Read more