Author: photog

Swing State Voters Agree, Joe Biden Sucks

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More bad news for Biden: Is it ‘rosy retrospection’ or just fact?

I could paraphrase this whole report as the swing states chanting, “Let’s Go Brandon.”

“The poll covered seven closely contested states considered critical to the 2024 election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In two-way matchups, the survey found Trump leading Biden in six of those states. Trump is up by 5 points in Arizona, 1 point in Georgia, 3 points in Michigan, 6 points in North Carolina, 4 points in Nevada, and 3 points in Pennsylvania. In the seventh state, Wisconsin, the two candidates are tied.

Any way you look at it, it’s terrible news for Biden. Last November, I posted a very simple formula on X. “Trump has the simplest campaign pitch in the world,” I wrote. “1) Things were good when I was president. 2) Everything went to hell when Joe Biden became president. 3) Elect me and I’ll make things good again. That’s the whole campaign.”

Indeed it is. And short of suddenly becoming a great president, there might be little Biden can do about it.”

Of course none of these polls can inform us exactly how much voter fraud would be needed to overwhelm Trump’s legitimate voter advantage.  So none of this should be confused with me declaring Trump the probable winner.  But it does tell you something about what the American people think about Biden.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 02APR20204 – All They Respect is Power

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war pig

As a soldier, when I was stationed temporary duty at Ft Indiantown Gap, PA, I was tasked to assist the recruiting command on occasion. I went to Happy Valley and the University of Pennsylvania in uniform and was usually greeted by Nazi salutes. Disrespectful, especially since I had an uncle in WWII who was one of the group who liberated Buchenwald.

The overall opinion of the general populace in Pennsylvania concerning the armed forces was pretty low. Sure there were veterans but many of them were Vietnam vet draftees and they were disallusioned, especially if they had to use the VA.

What a difference after 9/11! All of a sudden everyone was thanking us for our service. High schools which had tried to block our recruiting activities were suddenly friendly.

The civilians had been frightened. The Homeland had been attacked and they were afraid. Liberals who seldom deigned to recognize our existence suddenly were waving American flags.

But we remembered who called us baby killers just weeks before. We knew once the fear factor lowered they’d be right back to their old ways.

Liberals don’t change. Not really. They only get worse. They went from calling the armed forces Nazis to forcing drag queen shows on to elementary school kids to secretly going behind parent’s backs to try to transition children to change their sex.

Probably all we can do is wall them off and let them devour each other.

Message Transmitted

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I was talking with an acquaintance of mine who is solidly progressive.  She is surrounded by people who are equally progressive.  Her worldview is completely reinforced by the opinions of her circle and details about the people on the other side of the political divide are pretty sketchy for her as it turns out.

She was telling me that her friends were excited about a senate race where moderate (translate as RINO) Republicans are trying to primary an extremist (translate as conservative) Republican out of office.  My comment was that the definition of someone as moderate or extreme was very much in the eye of the beholder and different factions in the Republican party were almost as different from each other as if they were in completely different parties.  Her answer was that the extremists were clearly the outliers from the party and that they resembled Trump.

So that made me laugh and I thought about whether I should bother clarifying a few things.  I said the “extremists” and Trump are outliers from the Republicans that were around a generation ago.  But those older politicians no longer have more than a minority of the Republican voters behind them.  The “extremists” are the true representatives of the majority of the present constituency and in fact most of the “extremists” are rather on the moderate side of where some of the party finds itself.

And then I decided to elaborate, “In fact anyone who considers Donald Trump an extremist is deluding himself.  A part of the political right considers Trump too moderate and tame and wishes he really was extreme on many points.  And that proportion of the party is still growing.”

And then I provided my opinion of Trump, “You think Trump is some kind of fascist madman.  Actually, he’s a shrewd salesman who realized that a huge market was not being serviced and that if he provided it with at least a modicum of what they were being deprived of they’d make him the most important man on Earth.  He’s not a dictator or any kind of extremist.  He’s a New York City Democrat from forty years ago.  He’s selling the same thing Bill Clinton was selling in 1992.  It’s just that the Democrats have drifted so far away from that ideology that it seems alien to them now.”

And then I finished off my spiel, “And if Donald Trump doesn’t win this year, the next Republican probably will be an extremist.  That is if he’s a Republican at all.  There is a large and growing population that is completely dissatisfied with what is going on in this country and no matter what the people in charge say or do they aren’t going away.”

Things got quiet after that.  I wonder if what I said was believed and whether it made any impression at all.  Actually, I’m pretty sure it did.  I think the original discussion was meant as a way for me to embrace the “moderate” wing of the Republican party and show that I was one of the “good” Republicans.  I didn’t do that, so I didn’t provide comfort.  I provided the opposite; distress.

And that is a message that needs to penetrate into that bubble.

The Socratic Method

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We all live in a world filled with human imperfection.  There has never been a time or place where the people have figured out a permanent arrangement for living together without eventually war and oppression destroying human happiness.  Maybe the currently prophesized Super Artificial Intelligence will be able to construct this perfect society and keep it working indefinitely.  Or maybe it’ll just be HAL 9000 creating a termite hive with us as the worker drones and itself as the Queen (or King if HAL is so inclined).

But I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for this Metallic Messiah.  I doubt the possibility that the powers that be would let this new master to be unbiased and allow the little people to get a fair shake.  It’s already been shown that he who pays the bills gets to write the algorithm.

So, I don’t expect a fair shake from the digital gods.  But that doesn’t mean they won’t be put in charge.  I guess the Chinese are in the lead in implementing their social credit system and there’s no reason to believe that this country will be different.  And here’s the kicker.  The young people already believe in this thing.  I was told this weekend that, “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear from the digital gods.”

Now, this was a chilling statement.  And I provided a counterstatement.  I said, “Yes but, who gets to decide what is wrong and what if the definition of what is wrong can be changed by other people?”  Then even if you’ve followed the rules, you can still be considered a criminal for your past actions.

I threw that out there and I think it made an impression.  I further explained that freedom of speech and even freedom of thought were becoming less and less protected and that the loss of these things was very difficult to accept for people who took them for granted.  And that was because we have always enjoyed their benefits.

Now I did say that everybody needed to decide these things for himself but I said I thought it was a good idea for any thoughtful person to test some of the slogans being tossed around by those in charge of schools and governments to see if they were consistent with a free way of life or if they were a way for government to take away people’s freedom.  I also told him to listen and think about things going on around him but to not reveal to just anyone what he really thought.   I hope I was persuasive.

This is becoming a more difficult world to navigate for the younger generations.  That line about having nothing to hide if you haven’t done anything wrong was expressed by the head of the WEF, Klaus Martin Schwab.  This is the guy who wants us to own nothing, heat our homes with windmills and eat bugs.  The fact that he is being echoed by impressionable young people is beyond worrisome.  It’s frightening.

What it’s told me is that it’s important for us to reach out to the young everywhere we can and provide them with some counterprogramming to the propaganda that the Left fills their heads with in school.  And I think it’s not that hard to do.  Be calm and friendly and bring up real life counterexamples to the platitudes from the Left.  It’s relatively easy to do and it lays down seeds in their minds that can sprout at another time when some new occurrence triggers it.  I think the main trick is not to be the angry dogmatist ranting against some present idea.  Instead use the Socratic approach and demonstrate the weaknesses in these ideas and that will be enough to start the ball rolling in their minds.

But I wish it wasn’t called the Socratic method.  I never trusted that guy.  He hung around boys a little too much.