Rants of a Fuzzy Curmudgeon

How best to support Trump?

Declare your own candidacy, drag as many black and “allied” voters away from Biden as possible.

…

Well, OK, maybe he’s just a dumbass, since he’s bringing anti-vax and some BS about how he’s going to run the White House like (fictional) Wakanda.  Even so, any third-party candidacy that diverts votes from the Democrat sounds good to me.  My prediction is it won’t hurt Trump at all, because the black voters who have come over to Trump have done so because they perceive he’s actually helped them, and are unlikely to drop him for Krazy Kanye.

…since I’d say the same myself about our governor here in Indiana.  And our mayor in Indianapolis.

The current controversy was over a tweet by Adams attacking Governor Roy Cooper in May for shutting down the state. The tweet: “This evening I ate pizza and drank beer with six guys at a six seat table top. I almost felt like a free man who was not living in a slave state of North Carolina. Massa Cooper, let my people go.”

North Carolina has an asshole Democrat governor who has exercised his power in a tyrannical and unconstitutional manner, and is probably going to find himself impeached by the state House of Representatives over it, so I’m not sure how Adams misstated or said anything controversial.

The only thing I’d probably add in Indiana’s case would be, “I was unaware Indiana was a slave state till Holcomb and Hogsett came along.”

Anyone who is offended either by that or by what Mike Adams said is ignoring the facts on the ground.

BTW, UNCW paid big bucks to persuade Adams go away.  I wouldn’t mind a lovely parting gift of $504,000 from my employer to retire, but I guess I’m not that controversial.

H/T Instapundit, who has a couple of other observations.

Several graphs from today’s ISDH aggregation page.  These are all trending down.

The death rate from COVID-19 is getting to where it’s comparable to that of a seasonal flu, and may be lower.

Did we go off half-cocked?  Yes, yes we went off half-cocked.  Especially our politicians.

We’re probably most of the way to herd immunity, at this point.

Fuck anyone who thinks differently.  These aren’t my numbers, they’re real (?) numbers being published by the state.  Trends are DOWN.

And Mayor Hogsett is and remains an asshole.  What good is a mandatory mask order that doesn’t go into effect for a week after you proclaim it?  In one densely-populated county that’s ringed by eight other only slightly-less densely populated counties?  I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again:  I drive a mile north and will be forced to wear a mask, but if I drive two miles north, I won’t.  Geographical restrictions based on political boundaries are ridiculous.

So fuck you, Mayor Hogsett.  Fuck you for being the stupid Democrat we always knew you were.

(If you’re having trouble reading the dates, they range from 3/5/2020 at the left to 7/6/2020 at the right.  All data are from https://www.coronavirus.in.gov/ .)

We bad.  We mad.  Try us.

(Actually found on Facebook a while back, found it again and thought I should post it.)

Because they signed the God-damned thing on JULY 2, NOT JULY 4.

[EDIT:  Yes, I fucked up.  They voted on it July 2, they signed it on July 4.  Vacation rots the brain.]

I categorically refuse to wear a mask.

Masks are for sick people to prevent others from catching what they have. Or for people who have compromised immune systems and probably ought to be wearing them anyway. Or for healthcare workers who are constantly in close contact with sick people.

Fine, but I don’t fit into any of those categories. I am not sick, I’m not immune-compromised, and I’m not a healthcare worker.

That being said, I will not wear a mask and rebreathe my own bacteria and viruses. That’s a perfect way to get my chronic bronchitis to flare up. I haven’t had a flareup in several years. I don’t want one now.

This has nothing to do with constitutional issues or stupid politicians mouthing off about things they know nothing about. I simply refuse, because I know if I start wearing a mask when I go out, I will get sick.

If that means I don’t get to go anywhere until the world regains its collective sanity, well, fuck it, I don’t go anywhere anyway. Amazon and Lowe’s will deliver anything I need. Plenty to do around here without going out.

The rest of you can go around looking cute in your masks that you probably don’t need. And Mayor Hoggybutt can go back to his bunker and stay there till we throw him out at the next election.

I see a number of organizations are posting on FB about Juneteenth.

The thing is, before now, nobody ever seemed to really care about Juneteenth except folks in the South (and then, generally only black folks in the South) until suddenly it became chic to show your non-racist chops by talking about things you never talked about before because previously they were not important to you (or more to the point, to your fans/customers/etc).

My prediction is that by next year, Juneteenth will lapse once again into a holiday that only certain people celebrate or notice.

And I’m not trying to be a butthead, here.  I fully understand what Juneteenth is about and I’m all for people celebrating it.

But don’t turn it into a commercialized observance like so many other things.  I don’t want to see ads in the Sunday paper for the Juneteenth furniture and mattress sales.  Face it, I’m a Jew, and Passover is all about celebrating liberation from slavery.  But it’s a holiday for Jews, not for the general damn public (which is why you’ll never see an “ecumenical” Passover seder held by Jews on the first night of Passover — first night’s for Jews only).

And I don’t imagine the black community wants to see Juneteenth commercialized, either.  But I haven’t asked them, so I won’t presume to speak for them (and wouldn’t anyway; I’m not black, and I haven’t — as a former boss of mine often put it — walked in their shoes).

So I will say, simply, Happy Juneteenth to those who celebrate it, and who memorialize and commemorate their freedom from slavery.

Shared by a (left-wing) friend on Facebook, unironically of course:

Just to make a point, they do that shit in Asia because their usual social distance is a fuckload closer than the average American’s.  But that’s beside (and misses) the point.

The main problem with this Twat is that nobody in America is crying about being oppressed, or taking up arms and storming government buildings, over the wearing of masks in a time of ‘rona.  I mean, I’m flatly stating I won’t wear one, because I can’t breathe with one on (proved that the other night when I got my hair cut for the first time in two months, put a mask on to appease our friend who is also our stylist and things got so humid behind it that, even with dry mouth, I aspirated water and started coughing within five minutes, so go fuck yourself about masks).

But people in America aren’t crying, etc., about masks.  They’re crying about being oppressed and taking up arms and storming government (and other) buildings (and looting them) over the death of a Minneapolis perp who died from a shitty and oft-complained-about cop kneeling on his neck because he was struggling and resisting arrest.  This, of course, was cause for an uprising in many cities around the nation, where peaceful protests turned into armed riots, smashed storefronts, looted stores, and a call to abolish (or at least “defund”) the police.  Who in the event were worse than useless in stopping the rioting and looting, so maybe they have a point.  But it’s a limited point, because the police were typically handcuffed by their local mayors and other politicians, and weren’t allowed to do anything about the rioting and looting.  Like shoot rioters and looters.  Which is what people used to do, when this country still had a soul.

And now they’ve burned a Wendy’s — allegedly black-owned — in Atlanta because another dumb perp — drunk in this case — who managed to get a cop’s Taser away from him and was trying to use it on him and his fellow arresting officer, got shot dead by said arresting officers, who were in reasonable fear for their lives.

The best (or worst, depending on your outlook) part?  In both cases, the only reason anyone is upset is because the perps were black and the officers were white.

So to get back to the Twat posted above:  Foreigners who know nothing about America are self-centered idiots and should fuck off.

Mark Steyn on Facebook this morning:

Five years ago today, round about 11.05am Eastern June 16th 2015, a New York property developer and TV host with no experience of elected office announced his candidacy for the Presidency of the United States.

link

I’ve noted many times that I wasn’t initially a fan.  I agitated for and voted for Ted Cruz in the Indiana primary.  Immediately after which, Cruz capitulated and The Donald “cruised” to victory at the Republican National Convention, and of course, later in the Electoral College as well.

After the Indiana primary and Cruz’s withdrawal in May 2016, I changed my tune.  I didn’t get out and rabidly campaign for Trump, but I was at least amenable to his candidacy.  I could see what he was doing through my historian’s eyes; he was and is, of course, not the first populist in American history to turn out those who usually remain silent and often never bother to cast a ballot.  He brought excitement to a process that has had very little excitement since at least the days of Ronald Reagan, and probably before.  Sure, he’s no Jack Kennedy, but his First Lady is no Bill Clinton.  And for that we should all be grateful.

Certainly there was no way to predict the future and what sort of administration our billionaire bankruptcy-prone TV star “you’re fired” boss candidate would lead.  And I doubt that anyone really foresaw the resistance that would pop up on both the right and left to his presidency.  But quite a few rubes did self-identify, and a number of judges have marked themselves as unfit for the bench in the process.  The “never Trump” movement have made asses of themselves, and the left has found itself tied up in knots by Trump’s willingness — nay, even eagerness — to troll them incessantly.

His opponent, in the meantime, has done little to prove that she’d have been a better president — indeed, she’s done a lot to prove she’d have been a lot worse.  I’m certainly glad she wasn’t president when the ‘rona hit our shores.  I for one didn’t want to live in a John Ringo novel, and thanks to this president, we probably aren’t going to.  Though it’s still anyone’s guess if we’ll have enough food this winter, what with all the disruptions caused by what is increasingly looking like unnecessary state-level shutdowns whose rationale seemed to change by the day as they stretched on longer and longer and longer to little or no good effect (and plenty of bad effect).

The people who riot and complain about his presidency are little more than bad-tempered children who didn’t get their way.  They know as little about America as most of the rest of the world — mostly because Hilary Clinton’s generation of Gramscians brainwashed them from the day they hit the school doors in first grade into being good little socialists.  They have a blind spot about charging Trump with being a Nazi, a fascist, a tyrant, and a bigot — and that blind spot is in their own mirrors when they look at themselves.  There is no bigger fascist or bigot in this country today than those who are projecting their own proclivities on Donald John Trump, and by extension, on the rest of the normal half of this country.

As for me, I don’t give a shit if you’re black, white, brown, yellow, green, or purple.  If you’re a human being, that’s all that counts; as a friend of many years’ standing tends to quote in cases like that, “The thing is, you cannot judge a race. Any man who judges by the group is a pea-wit. You take men one at a time.”*

But then we get down to beliefs and philosophies.  That’s where you can feel free to call me a bigot, because if you’re a socialist left-wing cocksucker who’s bound and determined to destroy this country so you can have Venezuela or Cuba on a grand scale, you can go fuck yourself.  Or if you’re a radical Islamic fundamentalist who wants Americans to kneel and submit to Sharia law, fuck you twice.  Damn straight I’m bigoted against that.

These attitudes, though, pre-date Trump.  They pre-date Obama.  They pre-date Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, and Ford.  They go back to the very formation of my political and moral philosophy.  And I suspect that most folks who will vote for Trump in 2020 hold the same sort of attitudes.

So you will find that we believe strongly in civil rights, and in the various Civil Rights Acts as passed over Democrat objections back in the day, at least up to the Civil Rights Act of 1968.  (The one passed in 1991 is weak and ought to be repealed.)  Likewise we believe strongly in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, even if it was passed and signed by Democrats.  (Democrats were different, back in the day.)

And I believe strongly that Donald Trump is also a big fan of civil rights.  Other than a couple of fumbles on 2A issues (the bump stock EO was not needed and made him look bad among 2A types, most of whom think bump stocks are stupid anyway), he is clearly a believer in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  Whereas his opponents mostly give those documents lip service and ignore them unless they’re trying to expand the emanations and penumbras that are already total bullshit and inimical to the spirit and glory of the Constitution.

What Trump’s opponents either don’t realize or are hoping nobody else will notice is that if Trump were going to become a tyrant and start oppressing folks and shipping people he doesn’t like to concentration camps, he would already have started doing so.  But this is what they claim will be the result of a Trump presidency, even three and a half years into his term.  (Hey, Don, you’d better hurry up.  Where are those concentration camps I was promised?)

And they call the man a Nazi, even when his daughter is married to an Orthodox Jew (and converted herself and has brought her children up in the faith).  Fucking mind-boggling.

Anyway, it’s been an interesting half-decade.  I’m looking forward to the next half-decade, with Trump still large and in charge after the 2020 elections.  He’s convinced me that he’s worth the vote.

(You’ll note that nowhere in this post did I refer to him as the Intergalactic Grand Master of Trollery.  This is one of the most entertaining parts of the entire administration, and if the press would ever figure out that he’s trolling them unmercifully, they’d stop whinging about it and it would lose most of its effectiveness.  But by all means, left whingers, er, wingers, of the press, please, keep on complaining and looking like the crybabies you really are.)

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* “Pvt. Buster Kilrain”, in the film Gettysburg, when asked what he thinks of Negroes, by Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.