Month: June 2022

Macaroni and Davos

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The ZMan has a very interesting article at takimag.  As is his habit he edifies us about a 17th century English fad among the rich called macaroni, ” In mid-18th-century England, wealthy young British men began to adopt an outlandish fashion style known as the macaroni style. They wore giant powdered wigs with tiny hats on the top that could only be removed with the point of a sword. Their clothes were equally garish, made from expensive materials from the Continent. They adopted a highly affected personal style that was self-mocking and absurd.”

He then goes on to point out how this affected behavior resembles the habit of our elites to espouse outlandish causes like transgenderism just to show that they are different from hoi polloi (the many).

I like his ending, “The emergence of a ridiculous class in an empire is the proverbial bell that rings at the top of a cycle. When elements of the elite begin making war on the rules that make the elite possible, it is only a matter of time before everyone does the same. This is what we are seeing in the Global American Empire. It is now ruled by ridiculous people who care more about mocking the lower classes than doing their duty. It is just a matter of time before they follow similar phenomena to the dustbin of history.”

I fervently hope he is right about that.

Bill Maher as a Barometer of the Center Left

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Bill Maher is a comedian who made his fortune with two talk shows, Politically Incorrect and Real Time with Bill Maher.  Maher calls himself a liberal but a realist.  He also claims to hate hypocrisy.  Well, I’ll let that go.  Suffice it to say that his favorite targets down through the decades have always been traditionalists and other conservatives.  He has made a very good living extolling Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and vilifying all Republicans and especially Donald Trump.  But for at least the last year or so Maher has been calling out the more insane actions of the Left.  In recent days he has highlighted the danger of assuming that young children should be allowed to decide they want to have surgeries and hormone therapies to change their sex.  He has derided the  homeless policies in California that have left the streets littered with human feces and deranged drug addicts and he has mocked the positivity campaign that tells heroin and methamphetamine addicts not to feel shame about their addictions.

So, is Bill Maher suddenly a champion of the Right?  No, he’s still the same liberal mush head he always was.  But what he’s noticed is that his audience, the Center-Left, feels alienated by what their politicians are letting the Woke do to the country.  This audience is all the people who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and hate Donald Trump and voted for Joe Biden to “get things back to normal.”  But instead of normal, their homes in the cities are besieged by criminals and homeless drug addicts (if there is a difference) and their children are being encouraged to think they are “trans” and should have their sex organs amputated.  And just to top things off the cost of living is draining their life savings, minute by minute.

 

What this tells me is that the voting base of the Democrat party is scared and even if they can’t fire Dementia Joe this November, they can take away his Congress.  And that’s what they intend to do.  And they are certainly receptive to a message by someone who can convince them he has a plan to fix things.  The only problem is the one person they won’t listen to is Donald Trump.  If they were forced to vote for Trump their heads would explode.  Especially the women.  So, are we at an impasse?  No, I don’t think so.  All these people need to vote Republican is a VP candidate who isn’t Donald Trump to give them a narrative that what they’re really voting for is the future.  And I think that’s where Ron DeSantis comes in.

DeSantis is perceived as a smart, savvy leader who gets hard things done.  And he doesn’t have Trump’s baggage.  He doesn’t particularly irk women.  He isn’t as brash.  And he knows quite a bit about building a governing team.  So, what needs to happen is, earlier rather than later, Trump and DeSantis need to work out a strategy to let both of them work to their strengths and in that way hijack the whole center-left of the electorate in 2024.  Of course, it won’t be a permanent shift.  Liberals don’t belong in the Republican party.  As soon as the Woke have been disenfranchised and Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden and have been packed off to nursing homes, some new Obama clone will be exciting the center-left with claims of fiscally responsible compassion or some such nonsense.  But if we can manage to win in 2024, we’ll have a shot at trying to bring back some semblance of lawful government.  But how we do that is a story for another day.

That’s quite a lot of tea leaves reading from just watching a few clips of the Bill Maher show.  Well, I’m not a pundit for nothing, you know.