Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.
William Somerset Maugham
All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.
William Somerset Maugham
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.
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.
D’you call life a bad job? Never! We’ve had our ups and downs, we’ve had our struggles, we’ve always been poor, but it’s been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children.
William Somerset Maugham
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.
If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie.
William Somerset Maugham