Tag Archives: #DonaldTrump

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World War III Watch: I’m amazed at how many people actually want war!

August of 1914 saw tens of thousands or men marching off to war, amid cheering throngs, knowing that their brave soldiers would be returning home soon, victorious in what would be called the Great World War. The French managed to stall the invading Germans short of Paris, and the armies dug in for what became four bloody years of stalemated trench warfare. On the eastern front, the German army under General Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff used brilliant tactics and railroading to first engage and destroy the Imperial Russian Second Army and a few days later, the First Army.

Machine guns made a real appearance on the battlefields, and tanks came later. There were air battles, but the airplanes of the time were few and flimsy, and not able to make the deep bombing runs into enemy territory that were seen twenty years later in World War II. Continue reading →

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The college educated elites are at a loss to understand why the working class don’t obey Their Betters

I almost never watch MSNBC or CNN, but I had to yesterday, and this morning, to see the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth following Grover Cleveland 2.0’s electoral win. Joe Scarborough and his fellow travelers were talking, mostly in amazement, at the multi-racial working-class coalition that former and future President Donald Trump put together in winning not just an electoral college but popular vote majority.

Naturally, most of the ‘panelists’ were in the nice MSNBC studio, but one was remote, from home.

And what a nice home it is! A home library, with a green marble surround fireplace, and fire going, plus carpets, deep windows, a nice sofa plus chairs around it for gatherings, and my immediate thought was how we were being lectured by the elites on who and what the working class are.

But there was half of a point made, in which Mr Scarborough said that the Democratic Party was run by the Washington elites. What he doesn’t get, and the left may not ever be able to understand, is that, right now, the Republican Party is a populist party, run by GOP voters themselves. The Democrats combitch that Republican Party leaders are in some sort of fealty to Mr Trump, but that isn’t the case at all. What the party leaders are doing is trying to catch up with the voters, and not all of them do that very well. Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney and their like all think that the educated elites should be running the party, and the voters go along with their wishes. Perhaps it was that way, when the Bush family were ascendant, but not anymore.

The Republican Party leadership were aghast in 2015, when Donald Trump began his first campaign. He just wasn’t going along with the program, and he was financing his primary campaign himself. People like Scott Walker and Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina were trying to play nice, but Mr Trump was not: he was his bombastic self, and the Republican Party primary voters chose him.

Of course, he was going to get stomped by Hillary Clinton in the general election, so yeah, the GOP would lose that election, but everything would be back to normal after he was gone.

Oops!

Today’s Democrats still don’t understand. They’ve spent the past couple of years telling us how the economy was booming, unemployment was low, and everything was peaches but the cream. And they were shocked, shocked! that the peons didn’t see things that way. Yes, inflation is now, at least supposedly, lower than the rate of wage increases, but that didn’t account for the heavy inflation during President Biden’s first two years, which left Americans far behind, and they haven’t caught up.

Jeff Stein of The Washington Post tweeted:

Roughly *67%* of voters rated the economy as “not so good/poor,” per Washington Post exit polls A shockingly poor number amid a hot labor market, booming stocks, much lower inflation, growing GDP But widespread voter dissatisfaction w/ the economy been clear for years

I was reminded of Heather Long’s article, back when she was with CNN, on September 6, 2016, reporting that Americans didn’t really seem to believe that unemployment was down around 5%, seeing it as a lot higher.

The U.S. unemployment rate is only 4.9%, but 57% of Americans believe it’s a lot higher than that, according to a new survey by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

The general public has “extremely little factual knowledge” about the job market and labor force, Rutgers found.

It’s another example of how experts on Wall Street and in Washington see the economy differently than the regular Joe. Many of the nation’s top economic experts say that America is “near full employment.” The unemployment rate has actually been at or below 5% for almost a year — millions of people have found jobs in what is the best period of hiring since the late 1990s.

But regular people appear to have their doubts about how healthy America’s employment picture is. Nearly a third of those survey by Rutgers believe unemployment is actually at 9%, or higher.

As it happened, that “9% or higher” was pretty much in line with the U-6 unemployment number, people who have jobs, but which were only part time, because that’s all they could find.

Back to Mr Stein, I ask: What hot labor market? Yeah, you can get a job at Starbucks or McDonald’s anytime, but manufacturing jobs are now few and far between. You can get a job in construction, though you might have to commute, if you have skills and a strong back and are willing to do something really radical like actually work.

Booming stocks? Yeah, that’s true, too, and that means that people’s 401(k)s and other retirement accounts are doing well, for the roughly half of the population which have them, but for the vast majority of Americans, surging retirement plans don’t put food on the table this evening.

From The New York Times:

Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?

by David Brooks | Wednesday, November 6, 2024

We have entered a new political era. For the past 40 years or so, we lived in the information age. Those of us in the educated class decided, with some justification, that the postindustrial economy would be built by people like ourselves, so we tailored social policies to meet our needs.

Our education policy pushed people toward the course we followed — four-year colleges so that they would be qualified for the “jobs of the future.” Meanwhile, vocational training withered. We embraced a free trade policy that moved industrial jobs to low-cost countries overseas so that we could focus our energies on knowledge economy enterprises run by people with advanced degrees. The financial and consulting sector mushroomed while manufacturing employment shriveled.

Geography was deemed unimportant — if capital and high-skill labor wanted to cluster in Austin, San Francisco and Washington, it didn’t really matter what happened to all those other communities left behind. Immigration policies gave highly educated people access to low-wage labor while less-skilled workers faced new competition. We shifted toward green technologies favored by people who work in pixels, and we disfavored people in manufacturing and transportation whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuels.

That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect. People who climbed the academic ladder were feted with accolades, while those who didn’t were rendered invisible. The situation was particularly hard on boys. By high school two-thirds of the students in the top 10 percent of the class are girls, while about two-thirds of the students in the bottom decile are boys. Schools are not set up for male success; that has lifelong personal, and now national, consequences.

Yeah, perhaps Mr Brooks understands, but he was raised in intellectual privilege, with a father who taught English literature at New York University and a mother who pursued 19th British history at Ivy League Columbia University. When he was 12, the family moved to the wealthy Philadelphia Main Line. Does he really understand?

The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it. Many on the left focused on racial inequality, gender inequality and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality. I guess it’s hard to focus on class inequality when you went to a college with a multibillion-dollar endowment and do environmental greenwashing and diversity seminars for a major corporation. Donald Trump is a monstrous narcissist, but there’s something off about an educated class that looks in the mirror of society and sees only itself.

Here’s where Mr Brooks comes close, but just doesn’t quite get it. Yes, Mr Trump is a billionaire, and born the son of a millionaire. He, too, received an Ivy League education, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. But somehow, some way, Mr Trump actually understands the working class, in ways that the Democratic Party elite just do not. The left may think it all hucksterism, but if Mr Trump’s understanding of the working class is fake, he’s good enough at it to make it real enough to be believed.

Ronald Reagan once said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” The Democrats used to be the party of the working class, the party of labor unions. But, as Mr Brooks tells us, the Democrats, led by their hard left wing, abandoned working Americans, to go for all of the crazy social policy stuff. The labor union leaders are still mostly hard-core Democrat supporters, but the union members are increasingly abandoning what their leadership tell them.

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Who were the winners on election day? It's simple: the winners were normal Americans!

Crying Kamala Harris Emhoff supporter.

I did something I rarely do: I watched CNN and MSNBC this Wednesday morning, to see the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth among the credentialed media and their Usual Suspect panelists. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough blamed misogyny among black and Hispanic men, and the Reverend Al Sharpton — if you can remember how Rush Limbaugh used to mock the pronunciation of his name, go for it! — blamed white voters for not going where logic should have taken them. We had CNN panelists crying about how they’d explain this to their daughters.

In a way, what they were bemoaning tells us exactly who won the election. This election was won by normal people! It was won by people who might have some sympathy for the transgendered and homosexuals, but not the silliness which the far left have used to insist that males who think they’re women should be allowed to compete in women’s sports, nor the groomers’ efforts to push transgenderism and homosexuality as normal and acceptable in schools. They’re the people who hear the Democrats telling us how great the economy is, while having to pay their inflated grocery bills and the price of gasoline to fill their fuel tanks. They’re the people who might not like Russia and Vladimir Putin, but who still don’t want to see their tax dollars, and eventually their children, to fight Russia in Ukraine. They’re the people who like their Hispanic neighbors, but don’t like seeing waves of unregulated illegal immigration with its influx of criminals and the tremendous monetary and housing burdens being put on their communities to house and feed them. They’re the people who might have some sympathy for the ‘Palestinians,’ but don’t like the outrageous anti-Semitism of the pro-Hamas protesters, and who recognize that it was Hamas that started that war. They’re the people who might have some concern — though it’s not the main issue for more than a small percentage — about global warming climate change, but recognize that plug-in electric vehicles are impractical for their lives, and don’t want the government telling them how they can run their lives. They’re the people who might think keeping a pet squirrel or raccoon is silly, but were appalled that the state, a state run by Democrats, broke into someone’s home to seize and then slaughter ‘Peanut’ the squirrel. They’re the people who reject the normalization and excusing of crime.

We have been told, ad infinitum, by the left that if Donald Trump won, this could be our last election. Mr Trump will be in his final term under the Constitution, and is 78 years old; in four more years, he will be 82. Even if he wants to run again in 2028, he’s legally barred from doing so, and who could really run at that age? That’s where the Democrats failed: their claim that there’d be no future elections if Mr Trump won was an unbelievable one.

We were told, by the Democrats, that Mr Trump was ‘literally Hitler,’ something really overworn since the younger George Bush was also ‘literally Hitler,’ but he had already served four years in office, and regardless of his bombastic nature, he wasn’t Hitler and didn’t exceed what he could legally do. We were told, by the left, that the three-hour, unarmed protest on January 6th was the worst attack ever on our democracy, yet we had an actual Civil War between 1861 and 1865, making what amounted to a fraternity keg party spilling out of control seem silly. We were told that Mr Trump would throw all of his opponents in jail, yet it was the Democrats who actually prosecuted the Capitol kerfufflers and threw many in jail. We were told that Mr Trump was an evil, authoritarian fascist, yet it was the Democrats who were advocating restrictions on our Freedom of Speech, and crying that Elon Musk and Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — needed to be restrained for letting people sey what they wanted in public. We were told that Mr Trump really hates Jews, yet not only was he the best friend of Israel during his first term, but it was the left who were holding sit-ins, trespassing encampments, and anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas marches in our cities. We had the Usual Suspects telling us that they’d leave the United States if Mr Trump won, but they said the same things in 2016, and almost none of them did.

Basically, the left were lying to us all, and the credentialed media were promoting their lies.

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The Democrats are running on everything except what matters

The House of Representatives silly “January 6th Committee” held it’s last pre-election meeting, another meeting broadcast on television, as the credentialed media have teamed up with the Democrats to try to maintain their slender majorities in the 2022 elections. The trouble is that the Democrats have no current issues that are important to the voters. The Capitol kerfuffle, a three-hour demonstration of unarmed people, caused a few million dollars in damages — something far, far less serious than the #BlackLivesMatter riots of the previous summer and fall — and they were then over.

The real current issues are the economy and inflation, but the Democrats don’t want to talk, at least not truthfully, about that!

Democrats’ failure to make 2022 about the threat to democracy

Analysis by Aaron Blake | Tuesday, October 18, 2022 | 11:29 AM EDT

Utah voters who tuned into Monday night’s Senate debate were treated to something relatively rare in the 2022 election: a candidate putting Jan. 6, 2021, front and center in his closing argument. Independent Evan McMullin seized upon texts Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) sent to the White House indicating a willingness to help President Donald Trump contest the 2020 election results, saying Lee “betrayed your oath to the Constitution.”

Despite the well-publicized Jan. 6 hearings, including the likely final one, held last week, the insurrection has not been an overarching focus of Democrats’ 2022 campaign messaging. Politico reported last week that Jan. 6 has featured in less than 2 percent of ads run for House Democrats.

Maybe, just maybe, the actual Democratic candidates, as opposed to ‘pundits’ like Amanda Marcotte or formerly Republican #NeverTrumpers like Bill Kristol and Jennifer Rubin who have former President Trump living rent-free in their skulls, need to do something really, really radical like win votes, and they are a bit more in tune with what concerns voters most.

Even President Biden’s handlers minions recognize that truth, not that there’s anything they can do other than lie about it. Yeah, most families are focused on putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their heads, but the ability of the working class to do just that has suffered under President Biden. Most Americans are not better off today than they were in 2019.

This lacuna in their messaging comes even as most House Republicans supported Trump’s baseless last-ditch election challenges that led to the attack on the Capitol, and even as a majority of the GOP’s most prominent candidates have either denied or questioned the 2020 election results.

Indeed, a new poll reinforces that Democrats haven’t really driven the argument home. Many Americans view Trump as a major threat to democracy. But the Republican Party more broadly? Not so much.

Of course, many Americans view that Democrats as a far greater threat, as the far-left wing has pushed ‘transgenderism’ in the schools, in ways that a lot of parents see as personally threatening to their children, which is why Glenn Youngkin rather than Terry McAuliffe is now Governor of Virginia, and Republicans control the state House of Delegates as well. Mr Kristol’s The Bulwark has gone all out pro-transgenderism, to show you just how far the #NeverTrump former Republicans have gone. The Republican neo-conservatism of the Bush years has moved wholly toward the Democratic Party, including their foreign interventionism when it comes to the war between Russia and Ukraine.

A New York Times/Siena College poll shows that 45 percent of Americans regard Trump as a “major” threat to democracy, while just 28 percent say the same of the GOP.

That 28 percent figure is actually smaller than the percentage who view the Democratic Party as a threat to democracy (33 percent) — despite there being no comparable example of Democrats trying to overturn an election. (And no, Stacey Abrams and Hillary Clinton aren’t analogous.)

Actually, yes, they are. When you consider the definition of analogous, “similar in a way that invites comparison : showing an analogy or a likeness that permits one to draw an analogy,” it’s not difficult to see how those two ladies’ reactions to their electoral defeats were attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the victors.

Some of this is partisanship — along with Republicans’ successful attempts to play up the issue of voter fraud, despite the utter lack of evidence that it’s a major problem in American elections. Polls have long shown Republicans and Democrats view the other side as a threat to democracy, but for very different reasons.

But if you dig a little deeper, you’ll see that isn’t the full story: It’s also the case that many Democratic voters haven’t been convinced that the problem goes beyond Trump.

The poll shows that 71 percent of Trump 2020 voters regard Democrats as a major threat to democracy. But just 52 percent of Biden voters say the same about the GOP.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Denial is not a strategy

Despite his rent-free residency in the brains of the far left, Donald Trump simply isn’t immortal; he’s 76 years old, and will be 78 by the time the 2024 elections come around. He’s significantly overweight, and, despite his wealth, eats garbage. Even if he were elected in 2024, he’d be constitutionally limited to just four years in office. But the policies of today’s Democratic Party, mandating plug-in electric vehicles that most Americans cannot afford, pushing drastic social changes that many Americans dislike, and ignoring increasing violent crime rates, would last a lot longer than that.

After several paragraphs, some of which reveal the author’s clear bias in favor of the Democrats, we come to his conclusion:

But the integrity of the democratic process is something Democrats and the Jan. 6 committee have pitched as being of the utmost importance — going to the core of who we are as a country. Yet at this point, with just half of Biden voters and one-quarter of independents saying the GOP is a major threat to democracy, it’s clearly not something they’ve convinced voters is truly at stake in 2022.

Why do I, personally, believe that the Democrats are the far greater threat? Their responses, primarily by Democratic Governors, to COVID-19 were heavily weighted toward dictatorial control and the blatant abridgement of our constitutional rights. That the government can order churches closed, or restrict our First Amendment right of peaceable assembly, ought to be anathema, but Democratic — and sadly, a few Republican as well — Governors did just that, and thanks to the unreasoning fear instilled by the government, millions and millions of people accepted that as reasonable and legitimate.

At least here in the Bluegrass State, Republican state legislative candidates ran hard against Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) authoritarian dictates, and the voters rewarded the GOP with an additional 14 seats in the state House of Representatives, and two more in the state Senate. I’d like to see that be more important to other voters, but I guess that we’ll see in 20 more days.

Well, who knows? The poll numbers favor the Republicans, but the only poll which really matters will be taken on November 8th, and surprises have been known to happen before.

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“There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them,” said no Republican leader, ever.

Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, an extreme supposed champion of the working class in 19th century France, purportedly said what serves as my headline, which came to my mind when I read this from Robert Stacy McCain:

Cast your mind back to November 2012, when you went to the polls to vote for Mitt Romney. Chances are, Mitt wasn’t your first choice for the GOP nomination. Probably, he wasn’t your second or third choice, either. You probably weren’t too excited to go vote for Mitt on Election Day 2012, and might not have been too optimistic about his chances of beating Obama, but you voted for him anyway, because he was the Republican nominee and you’re a Republican voter. If millions of conservatives could vote for Romney — who has always been a moderate, if not indeed a liberal — then why couldn’t moderate Republicans support Trump? Why is it that the demands of party loyalty seem to be a one-way street like this? And, by the way, shouldn’t it matter that Trump was far more popular and successful than GOP Establishment choices like Romney and John McCain? The Republican presidential candidates got about 60 million votes in both 2008 and 2012, but Trump got 63 million in 2016 and 74 million in 2020. Why such hatred from “Republicans” toward a man who increased the GOP vote by more than 10 million?

Think about what Donald Trump advocated to win the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. He advocated control of our borders, something every other Republican candidate did. He differed in one respect: he actually proposed a way to do it, building a wall along our border with Mexico, to make simply walking across the border far more difficult. He took strongly pro-life positions, as almost all of the other Republican candidates did. He advocated tax cuts, as all of the other Republican candidates did.

What was different about Mr Trump? He spoke in terms that the Republican primary voters saw as not just mouthing platitudes, but believed that he would actually do something to achieve the goals he set forth.

The result? We saw thousands of supposed Republicans marshal against him, including both the elder and younger President Bush, the ‘neo-conservatives’ like Bill Kristol, Max Boot, the subsequently scandal-ridden “Lincoln Project,” and, sadly, Patrick Frey. Mr Trump used strong, strong, language, and he wasn’t a particularly nice guy, but the great mass of Republican voters saw in him someone who would actually fight for the things he advocated. It helped that Mr Trump was running against the wholly uninspiring Hillary Clinton, and he flipped stated like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin red. The Keystone State, despite normally being called a ‘battleground state,’ had not been carried by a Republican presidential candidate since 1988.

The nation was stunned, and the Republican ‘leadership’ were most particularly stunned. How could this boorish brute win the presidency? I mean, the guy couldn’t even be bothered to button his suit coat during his inauguration!

The Republican ‘leadership’ would have been much happier had they lost the election with Jeb Bush as the nominee, than win it with Donald Trump. My guess is that they’d have rather lose the election with Jeb Bush than win it with Ted Cruz as well, because Mr Cruz can be a bit on the bull-in-a-china-shop side himself.

But the Republican voters loved Mr Trump, even if the ‘leadership’ did not.

And so we come to Representative Liz Cheney Perry(R-WY). Mrs Perry, who did not respect her husband, Philip Perry, enough to take his name, but to whom I will not show a similar disrespect, decided that President trump should be impeached, even as his term was coming to an end, due to the college-keg-party-gone-wild that is the Capitol kerfuffle. More, she allowed herself to be appointed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to the committee to investigate the kerfuffle, when Mrs Pelosi would not accept the Republican members nominated by the House Minority Leader. Mrs Pelosi wanted a kangaroo court, and got one, with a couple of pro-impeachment Republicans for window dressing.

In 2020, not only did President Trump carry Wyoming, but by percentage of the vote, the Cowboy State was his strongest state; he defeated former Vice President Joe Biden 193,559 (69.94%) to 73,491 (26.55%). The same voters who gave the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney 68.56% of the vote in her 2020 re-election campaign gave Mr Trump even more votes, 193,559 to 185,732.

Back to Mr McCain:

Tuesday, I said that Liz Cheney might lose by a 30-point margin, which was wrong — it was 38 points! She lost more than 2-to-1 and didn’t even get 30% of the vote in Wyoming’s Republican primary. Her contempt for the electorate — her fathomless hatred for Republican voters — was expressed quite clearly in her concession speech:

“The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln, was defeated in elections for the Senate and House before he won the most important election of all,” she said before an audience of what few supporters she has. “Lincoln ultimately prevailed. He saved our union, and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history.”

Hardly finished with her delusional Civil War era comparisons, Cheney went on to equate her ongoing fight with former President Donald Trump to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant during the Battle of the Wilderness.

“As the fires of the battle still smoldered, Grant rode to the head of the column. He rode to the intersection of Brock Road and Orange Plank Road, and there, as the men of his army watched and waited,” Cheney said. “Instead of turning north back towards Washington and safety, Grant turned his horse south toward Richmond and the heart of [Confederate Gen. Robert E.] Lee’s army. Refusing to retreat, he pressed on to victory.”

That scene, portrayed vividly in Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox, indeed captures what made Grant different from any of his predecessors commanding the Army of the Potomac, who had a habit of getting into a fight with Lee, losing thousands of men in a battle, and then retreating to the fortifications of Washington. But how does it function as an analogy for Liz Cheney’s defeat? That is to say, who is the enemy she proposes to defeat if she presses “on to victory”?

Do you get the point? The enemy is you, the Republican voter!

This is the part that’s important: the Republican Party, like any political party, is made up of the mass of Republican-registered or identifying voters, but for Mrs Perry, for the (supposedly) Republican #NeverTrumpers, for the disaffected neoconservatives, what the vast majority of the Republican Party want is not only not what they want, but what is anathema to them. As I said, they’d rather lose with a polite milquetoast than win with a strong fighter.

The problem for them is simple, even if they don’t understand it: the mass of the Republican Party have moved beyond them. Mrs Perry has made noises about running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, but look how the left view them:

As I have noted previously about Bill Kristol and the “Lincoln Project”, the left may look upon them as useful for the moment, but they’ll never actually trust them, while Republicans will never trust them either. Mr Kristol destroyed the opinion magazine he founded, The Weekly Standard, by refusing to allow any articles which supported President Trump, thus alienating a significant portion of his readership, still supports a few, few! conservative positions, positions which are anathema to the Democrats. Given the opinions of some of them, like Max Boot and Mr Kristol, to force people to take the COVID-19 vaccines, the Libertarian Party won’t want to have anything to do with such authoritarians, either. They have nowhere to go!

This is, in the end, a good thing. The mass of the Republican Party have moved toward populism, an ideology which holds that the great mass of the people are not being seriously listened to by the political elites. There’s some of that in the Democratic Party as well, as exemplified by the ridiculous “Occupy Wall Street” movement and some of their far-left but nevertheless back-bench politicians like the anti-Semitic squadristi,[1]The group of ‘progressives’ elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 called themselves the ‘Squad.’ Squadristi, or Squadrista in the singular form, is one of the Italian names given to … Continue reading but, at least thus far, the left of the Democratic Party have nevertheless fallen into line with the (purportedly) more moderate elements to support President Biden.

The Republican elites are looking for their people, so they might lead them, but the mass of the party have no interest in being led along the garden path of squishy go-along-to-get-along Republicanism. They want leaders who will fight, who will fight the left, and that’s why Mrs Perry lost.

References

References
↑1 The group of ‘progressives’ elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 called themselves the ‘Squad.’ Squadristi, or Squadrista in the singular form, is one of the Italian names given to Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts, his paramilitary/thug force in fascist Italy. I think referring to the ‘Squad’ as Squadristi is completely appropriate.