Month: April 2020

01MAY2020 – Quote of the Day

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I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God.

Albert Einstein

The Latest Turn in the Michael Flynn Case

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Well, I guess I might as well put in my two cents on General Flynn’s case.  With the release of the latest withheld notes between the various FBI and DOJ actors in this tragedy it is now obvious to anyone but the willfully blind that this was a takedown without any crime to justify it.

Strzok, McCabe and Comey engineered the prosecution as part of their strategy of undermining faith in the Trump administration and crippling its effectiveness by removing a competent man.  This was part of the whole Russian collusion myth.  Now every man on the street can read the details of how they did it.  The only question is what will be done to punish those who perpetrated it?

Will these criminals be allowed to walk away scot free?  Between this and the Mueller investigation, three years of the Trump presidency was bombarded with false innuendo by the hostile media and the various partisan deep state actors who leaked the fake news to the press.  These unelected tyrants hijacked our country and held hostage the workings of our government.  Strzok, McCabe and Comey should pay a heavy price. They need to go to jail.

And there are other parties that had a direct hand in this conspiracy.  John Brennan and James Clapper are up to their elbows in this thing.  Letting them walk away unscathed would be a travesty of justice.  With respect to the echelons above them, I assume they’ve insulated themselves and only a confession by Comey, Brennan or Clapper could shed light on higher level culpability.  I’ll leave that for later consideration if we ever see justice reach as far as the mid-level criminals.

Strzok, McCabe and Comey should go to prison.  But will they?  Six months ago, I would have said yes.  But it’s six months later and nothing has happened.  Barr made a lot of noise about spying and the inappropriate actions taken by the FBI.  He appointed Durham in May 2019, a year ago, to look into all aspects of the Russian collusion scam.  And what has happened?  As far as I can tell, nothing.  My belief is that Barr and Durham are collecting evidence and waiting to see who wins the 2020 election.  If Trump wins maybe they’ll slap a few wrists and publish a report about how to stop such atrocious things from ever happening again.  If the Dems win, they’ll publish a report saying that everything was done by the book and the system works beautifully.

I had thought that I was as cynical as it was possible to be.  I was wrong.  I now believe that the deep state is basically immune to reform.  Barr is an insider.  He has done nothing and that is all he intends to do.  It will take an outsider who tears it down with a wrecking ball to make it change.  I only hope that when President Trump is re-elected that he appoints a new attorney general whose background is in the military and this man demolishes the alphabet bureaus from the top down and rebuilds them with honest men.  But that is probably a fantasy that will never be realized.

Understand, I would like nothing better than to be proven completely wrong about Barr’s intentions.  If I looked at the news tomorrow morning and it had a photo of Comey being frog-marched out of his house in his pajamas at 3 a.m. I would be the happiest man in the world.  Hearing that Peter Strzok was turning state’s evidence and had implicated his boss McCabe in treason would make me giddy with delight.  But with every passing day I think it’s more and more clear that President Trump is the only honest man in Washington.  And because he is, I guess that the only honorable treatment that General Flynn will experience in this whole travesty is a pardon from the President when everyone else fails to serve justice.

The Loyal Opposition

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Tonight, I intended to write something upbeat.  I was tired of thinking about the mess our economy has been thrown into and of the human toll that the epidemic has exacted from us.  I wanted to talk about changes that the Supreme Court could make that would roll back the restrictions that have been made against the Bill of Rights.  But then I remembered that John Roberts had stabbed us in the back again and refused to defend the Second Amendment against the gun grabbers in New York City.  And that got me thinking in general about the people who run our country.  And as bad as a John Roberts or a George Bush is, I thought about the Democrats and that really depressed me.

And that’s because the Democrats aren’t just our ideological enemies.  Many of the leaders of that party are truly horrific human beings.  Look at Nancy Pelosi and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.  They used their positions as congressional leaders to funnel money to their family members and made themselves outrageously rich.  Look at the Clintons and Obamas.  They used the power of the presidency to set up non-profit foundations that launder billions of dollars that end up in their own pockets.  And looking at the character of Bill and Hillary Clinton I am amazed that neither one of them is in prison.  Look at cretins like Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley who routinely say things so completely moronic that it leaves you wondering if they are kidding us.

And finally look at Joe Biden.  There isn’t a facet of Joe or a time in his life when he isn’t an embarrassment to the whole human race.  In each of his presidential runs he has distinguished himself with plagiarism, stunning ignorance and just outright lying about his record and the historical facts around him.  Even before senile dementia descended on him Biden was a laughing stock.  Calling his intelligence mediocre would be giving him the benefit of the doubt.  And it really is hard to decide whether the shady deals that his son Hunter had going in the Ukraine and China, show that Joe is an out and out crook or just the stupidest man on the planet.  I want to give him the benefit of the doubt again and says he’s a crook.

The weirdness of Joe’s mind has been highlighted best by the campaign speech where he talked about his days as a lifeguard at a pool in a black neighborhood in Maryland when his epic confrontation with the infamous “Corn Pop” took place.  The details about little kids playing with the hair on his legs is so weird that it’s hard even to know what to think.

And we already knew that Joe was this creepy weirdo who fondled women’s shoulders and sniffed their hair from behind their backs.  But now we find out he has sexually assaulted one of his own Senate staffers right on the streets of Washington, D.C.  After all this, Joe Biden shouldn’t be running for President.  He should be in a lunatic asylum.

So has it always been this way?  Morally I think the people at the top have always been suspect.  It must be the power going to their heads and the rewards that are available to those who are willing to work the system.  But intellectually the people running the government have gotten demonstrably more stupid.

I have to assume that the Democrat handlers won’t let Biden debate the President.  From the clips I’ve heard of Biden answering soft ball questions from CNN and MSNBC he can’t get out of his own way.  If President Trump debates him there won’t be anything left of Joe except his new dentures.

I guess it should make me feel better knowing that the Democrats are such dimwitted idiots.  But it doesn’t.  If half the people in this country prefer these people to lead us then half of us are stupid or evil or both.  And that means we’re in a lot of trouble.

Matt Meyer Over at Spectator USA Asks if We are Now in a Fourth Turning Crisis

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Some of you may have heard of the concept of the “fourth turning crisis.”  This is a theory that our civilization going back to the English War of the Roses goes through an eighty year cycle of crisis and renewal.

https://spectator.us/entered-fourth-turning-crisis/

Meyer is speculating that the COVID-19 flu epidemic may be the crisis that drives our country to choose one side in the present Right/Left stalemate and move us forward and to a new consensus.  Is he right?  And is he right in thinking that it will be the right that wins out.  I guess we’ll know in six months whether things will crystallize one way or the other or we just continue to muddle along.

Looking Around at the Landscape as We Enter the Next Stage

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We truly are two nations.  I like reading the headlines on the news website Real Clear Politics.  They pride themselves on laying out a 50/50 selection of left- and right-wing articles.  Sometimes it’s hilarious to see how the titles seem to be screaming back and forth at each other in ideological outrage.  A recent example of this is:

  • Georgia Is a Scary Place to Be Living and Working, USA Today
  • Time for Public Health Experts to Stop Scaring People, Spectator

So basically, they let you pick your poison.  I guess that’s fair if you’re looking to maximize traffic.  But I skip reading the lefty sites.  I just chuckle over their headlines.  Living as I do in New England, I am surrounded by the left-wing echo chamber and basically only one message comes through.  It is COVID-19 FUD 24/7.  Speaking to my grown daughters they are terrified of the virus.  Any suggestion that the lockdown can end anytime soon elicits a look of shock and disbelief.  Discussing things like mortality rates and actual asymptomatic infection rates confuses and frightens them.  Now the fact that they have children in their houses forces me to leave things be.  Mothers protecting their offspring aren’t interested in logic.  Fear is the motivating factor.  But despite this fear it is already apparent that even in the very center of the shelter-in-place orthodoxy there is a dawning realization that not only shouldn’t we be shutting down the machinery of American industry but we can’t survive much longer doing it.  The problem is how to do this without acknowledging that the President was right all along.  But since double talk is their stock in trade, they’ll attempt it.

The next challenge is going to be how the recovery money is going to be distributed.  The Democrats are looking to divert the money into a bailout of states like Illinois and Connecticut that have allowed their public unions pension responsibilities to metastasize to such an extent that they’ve eaten up the entire state budgets.  Hopefully President Trump will be able to resist any such pressure.  But what he still has to do is figure out how he can save the small businesses.  There are probably a million small businesses that have been driven to bankruptcy.  Even if the shutdown ended tomorrow these businesses don’t have the money to pay the two months of bills they’ve racked up and they certainly can’t replace the inventory that they had to throw out when they closed their doors in early March.  I know some of these people personally and it is tragic to see a family business driven into the ground for a totally irrational idea.  But there it is.

Going along with this reclamation work is the public relations job that will also be needed.  Now, the President is lucky in that he threaded the needle.  He followed the advice of the medical experts in allowing the shutdown.  But he was also smart enough to know that as soon as it was clear that the exaggerated claims of millions of deaths weren’t going to happen, he shifted to a script of re-opening the country as quickly as possible.  But the Democrats are starting to realize how bad their talking points are going to look in another few days and they will also switch scripts and try to blame the President for the shutdown.  We’re already hearing Pelosi claim that the President didn’t do enough to prevent travel from China to the US.  She claims he should have also prevented American citizens from returning.  Now this is the same woman who was walking around Chinatown in San Francisco back in January claiming that the virus couldn’t spread from person to person.  Obviously, logic and honesty won’t factor in to what the left will say to shift blame onto the President.

But once again he’ll have a winning hand.  Here are few points:

  • There are all kinds of statements by the Dems calling the President’s shutdown of travel from China unnecessary and racist.
  • The fact that Joe Biden and the Democrats have been in bed with China for decades will tie them in with the cause of the epidemic.
  • The whole open borders policy that the Dems have been pushing forever will be a natural avenue of attack since unchecked immigration is part of the reason that New York City was such a hot spot for the virus.
  • And finally, clips of all the Dems endlessly repeating for weeks the need to keep the country locked down in perpetuity will prove that they don’t know what they’re doing.

All of these avenues of attack can be used separately or in conjunction to hammer home the message that the Democrats and their problems are the source of this problem and also the reason it was allowed to fester out of all proportion to the actual danger.

And lastly the President has to resist any talk by the Democrats to allow voting to become a mail in ballot sent to every citizen.  The opportunities for fraud become so great that if it was to be enacted we’d never see another honest election for the foreseeable future.

These are going to be busy days ahead.  The President will need to get his message out and also orchestrate the rebuilding of the American economy.  If he does all that he really can make a case for being the greatest President in a very long while.