Fair Play

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“The Saxon is not like us Normans, His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, “This isn’t fair dealings,” my son, leave the Saxon alone.
Rudyard Kipling

If there is one concept thought to be more quintessentially English over any other, I think it must be the concept of fair play. Fair dealings, as Kipling put it. That one party should be treated as any other, held to the same standard of conduct, and afforded the same penalties or rewards for the same acts, regardless of economic standing, religious beliefs or racial background. A lot of this concept of “fair dealings” carried over into the American cultural mainstream as well; honored as a concept and an ideal to be striven for. I’d guess that a lot of that general support among Americans generally for the civil rights movement was based on the dawning realization among most of us that Jim Crow laws restricting black Americans were not fair at all.

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Differences Between Left and Right Political Viewpoints

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A friend of mine writes with the following thoughts, which I’ve edited for readability:

This election is highlighting a lot of the distinction between the way people on the Left and people on the Right think and feel. For the people on the Right, this election is about whether there will be a world war, whether the economy will be ruined, whether the southern border will be secured, what material steps need to be taken so that bad things will be prevented and some positive things happen. It’s about policy being implemented and government power being used in positive ways and not being used in damaging ways.
 
The Left is much more about personality and feelings. Identifying with Harris because she’s black and a woman, and feeling that she in some ambiguous but nonetheless important way represents some vague ideal that people care about. I have a friend whose daughter is voting for Harris, and he asked her why, and she said: Because she’s black and a woman and she’s not Trump; I don’t need to know what her policy views are.
 
It’s a completely different way of looking at the world. Frankly, it’s female, and I don’t like it, and it’s destructive if it’s given political power. The idea of this type of female mindset operating a system where people are arrested or people with guns show up at the door is terrifying. Such a system would be based on arbitrary female sentiments, and gestures of submission, rather than some agreed-on set of rules.

Worth Pondering

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In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet–the scientific poet–of a new mythology. Both are justified in their pretensions; for each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant and ignore whatever they choose to regard an inessential; they impose a style, they compel the facts to verify a favorite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection…the dream of Order begets tyranny, the dream of Beauty, monsters and violence.

–Aldous Huxley

Previous Worth Pondering post.

Of First Posts, Coups, and Cabals

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So what to write for a first post? There’s a famous quote, misattributed to Lenin, which states, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” It seems like we live in one of those times

One of my dirty secrets is that I follow the corporate media, scanning stuff like the NY Times and W. Post on a regular basis not such because I need to be informed by events but because as PR outfits of the Left those outlets offers insights into what the other side is thinking.

So this past weekend I saw this column from Maureen Dowd regarding the effort to get Biden to quit the race, “The Dems Are Delighted. But a Coup Is Still a Coup”. As a friend of mine put it, Dowd is the “catty conversationalist for the coastal cognoscenti” who alerts her smug fan base to what is both acceptable to talk about and what opinion to hold. So when she uses the word “coup”, a term many other leftist outlets have condemned the Right for using, it gets my attention.

It’s paywalled so here’s the key quote:

“Even though it was the right thing to do, because Joe Biden was not going to be able to campaign, much less serve as president for another four years, in a fully vital way, it was a jaw-dropping putsch.”

Putsch? An unfortunate term given its history; did Obama, Hakeem, and Pelosi meet in a beer hall before driving over to talk to Biden? What exactly did they say to Biden to get him to quit the race? It must have been pretty good because Biden’s re-election campaign did the equivalent of a car smashing into a wall at 60 mph, one morning he was all in and by the time lunch was finished that day there was the tweet announcing his withdrawal.

Dowd doesn’t go into the particulars, and the real intention of her column is not to offer such explanations but to signal to her faction of the Left that yes, Biden was forced out, but it’s okay and now we need to move on. She is like the trial lawyer who gets out in front of facts that might reflect negatively on her client so that she can spin them. She’s fulfilling the media’s historical role in taking what would be nasty news for the Left and covering it… with a pillow until it stops moving (h/t David Burge). The limited hang-out par excellence.

However we are still left without an explanation of what went down that day when Nancy met Joe resulting in an event unprecedented in American history. If we don’t respect the man then we should respect the office he holds and as even Dowd admits the President of the United States was toppled. To add insult to injury, he was overthrown, but not by by a delegation responding to an ongoing Constitutional process as was the case when Goldwater and Rhodes told Nixon that he was going to be impeached, but by a cabal which found Biden’s presence on the ticket inconvenient for their partisan purposes.

So what offer did Obama, Pelosi, and their fellow cabalists make that Biden couldn’t refuse? What was the kompromat? Biden the man has two personal weakspots, his family and legacy. Hunter was already on his own trajectory through the legal system, but did they threaten Jill or Ashley? Did they threaten to “leak” damning information about those tens of millions in foreign bribes?

The most plausible action was that they threatened to invoke the 25th Amendment, the ultimate hard ball, which would permanently mark his entire presidency as being an invalid.

The buried lede is that all those theories are nothing new, which means of course that their use to blackmail the President of the United States has been a permanent aspect of the past four years. That there always had been an ejector seat upon which Biden had been seated and that his presidency was never his own.

Leave aside that by threatening to invoke the 25th Amendment, the implication was that they were more than willing to put the country at risk and keep an invalid Biden in office as long as he would do their bidding regarding the election. The real problem is that Dowd’s column allows the world a fleeting and final glimpse behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain and exposes the cabal that has been running the country with Biden as its compromised puppet for the past four years.

A final peek to let us all know how things really work, that behind the pretense of a constitutional republic is only a filthy cabal. Now that we have had our look, this whole episode can be safely packed away in the same warehouse as Matthew Crooks, Audrey Hale, and Indiana Jones’s Ark of the Covenant, never to be seen again.

That’s the purpose of Dowd’s column; it’s a psy-op, to let you know that what you see is a lie and to convince you that you are powerless to stop it.

Onto the Joy of Kamala.

Book Review – Stalag Wisconsin by Betty Cowley

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Since I could read I have been interested in WW2 and all that it encompasses. After a while, you pretty much have read about all of the major battles, campaigns and skirmishes. For the last several years I have been trying to read biographies or other books about tiny slices of WW2 that are of interest.

Stalag Wisconsin is one of those books and it is amazing. Before I get into the book review, a quick aside.

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