Um, I dunno…

Doesn’t this sound like incitement to insurrection?  By the Democrats’ own rules…if it sounds like insurrection, it must be insurrection.  Right?

Hey, FBI, you might want to investigate this sports journalist who thinks he’s a political pundit.

Racist is just another word for “nothing left to lose”

When everything is racist, nothing will be racist.

Biden administration cites climate change as a ‘racial justice issue’

Yawn.  First of all, there’s no such thing as climate change.  There’s just climate.  And it is continuously in flux because weather systems are chaotic, just like the sun.  Remember the sun?  It drives almost all weather on this rock.  If it goes away for even short periods, temperature drops precipitately.  (Ever stood in the path of a total eclipse?  Or even a partial one?  Wind picks up and it gets chilly immediately, even in high summer.)

The so-called “science” on climate is bullshit, little more than quasi-religious pseudo-scientism ginned up by the usual suspects.  I mean, I remember being told we were going back into an ice age when I was in high school, nearly five decades ago.  So again, yawn.  The so-called science isn’t any more “settled” now than it was in 1977.  Make up your fucking minds, or even better, shut the fuck up and let the real scientists do their jobs.

I will end by noting my conviction that the emerging replacement buzzphrase for “racist” or “racism”, now that they are losing any potency they may previously have had, is “white supremacy”, applied to everything that used to be called racist — even things you wouldn’t expect it to be applied to, like blacks who either have never bought into the crazy, or are starting to back away from the crazy because it’s gotten completely out of hand. When it becomes acceptable to accuse a black (or otherwise non-Caucasian) person of “white supremacy”, you know the left has totally lost it.

But the left were always the slavers, Jim Crows, Kluxers, eugenicists, and abortionists.  The left has always done everything in its power to keep the black man down.  And blacks are finally starting to figure out that, among other people, LBJ absolutely fucked them raw and destroyed their communities with the “Great Society”.

Hell’s jingling bells, it was even too much for many Democrats of the day.  Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for one.  My Dad, for another.

Time to raise the black flag, my friends.

Past time.

This fucking country has gone fucking bugnuts.

Exhibit A:

On Wednesday, Chicago-based Quaker Foods announced it would eliminate the Aunt Jemima brand of pancake mix and syrup in response to civil unrest and protests calling for racial equity across America sparked by the killing of George Floyd, a black man who died with his neck under the knee of a white Minnesota police officer.

Who the fuck actually becomes a racist because they eat Aunt Jemima pancakes with Aunt Jemima syrup on them?

Exhibit B:

B&G Foods, the maker of Cream of Wheat, announced Thursday that it would be reviewing the packaging of the longtime breakfast brand, the latest food company to do so after Quaker announced earlier in the week that it was retiring its Aunt Jemima logo because of its racist origins.

Again, who was prompted to become a racist because Cream of Wheat has a smiling black chef on the box?

I was going to add Exhibit C, the contretemps over Rice Crispies/Cocoa Puffs, but that got started by some idiot BLM activist who used to be a UK MP before she lost her seat over lying about a speeding ticket (see at bottom of the article), so technically not “this country”:

Onsanya was expelled from the Labour Party and lost her seat in 2019 after lying about a speeding ticket. She was jailed for the offence for three months.

Which is all you really need to know about that.

We’re down to complaints about how black people are portrayed (or not portrayed) on breakfast products.

Time to start treating these things with the derision they deserve.

The answer is to shut up and play

Suddenly, the NFL is in the news again, because one of its superstars couldn’t keep his mouth shut on a question he should never have agreed to answer.  And the NFL is apologizing and kowtowing and being sensitive and shit all over the place.

As usual, Roger Goodell screwed the pooch by leading the chorus of apologia.  He was insufficiently specific and was immediately set upon by certain black players for his vagaries of expression.

I have a different attitude about this.

I see the NFL as an entertainment monopoly.  It hires the best athletes it can find to play what amounts to a boy’s game with a ball (don’t snicker, all pro sports are the same) in huge arenas with tens of thousands of people watching and cheering (and booing) them on.  This is similar, to be honest, to the games played at the Colosseum in Rome, two thousand years ago.  No, really, stick with me, here.

The only real differences between our modern pro sports spectacles and, say, the games played at the Colosseum in Rome two thousand years ago, are:

  • Modern players are paid huge amounts of money to play these boy’s games
  • Modern players don’t play to the death (frankly, I sometimes think this is a mistake)
  • Modern players aren’t actually slaves, which a lot of the ancient gladiators were
  • Animals generally aren’t involved, other than as team mascots

In order to create these spectacles, in both instances, very large, very athletic, and (usually) very smart people were encouraged to sign up to play.  Back in Rome, the encouragement was often, “play or die.”  These days, it’s “sign this contract for a bunchatonamoney and effectively enslave yourself to the NFL [or whatever league covers your pro sport] and your agent.”  And what, you don’t think NFL players are smart?  You have to have smarts to play a game that’s effectively a war game in miniature, folks.  The day of the big, dumb hulk playing pro football went out the door years ago.

The only thing they’re not smart about is knowing when to keep their fat yaps shut.  Like most celebrities who have too much money and too much time on their hands, they think it’s their duty to step up and speak on the social issues and ills of the day.

Sometimes they get it right — Drew Brees was NOT wrong in his initial statement — but then they break under pressure and apologizing for making a statement that was absolutely honest and non-triggering to anyone other than people who hate this country.  And that’s what Brees ended up doing, apologizing for saying something as innocuous and admirable as “I would never agree with anyone disrespecting the flag of the United States of America or our country.”

Again, remember:  Only someone who hates this country and all that it stands for would raise hell over that statement.  Yet Brees got pummeled by not just the usual suspects in the press, but by other athletes and MEMBERS OF HIS OWN TEAM.

And Goodell, who hasn’t made a good decision since he rescinded his own policy of no tolerance for drug fuckups in the NFL, once again blew what could have been a teachable moment and probably wouldn’t have lost him a single fan (indeed, it might have gotten some back who left over the Kaepernick lunacy) by making some vague bullshit statement about the league’s attitude about how the league had failed to listen to players in the past, and that players should have the right to protest peacefully.

Which of course earned him scorn from black players for being mealy-mouthed and not specifically addressing black players’ issues.

With all due respect (and note that means I have little), what the fuck, Felix?  Black players in the NFL never had it so good.  You get paid a huge amount of money to play 16 regular-season games a year in a sport at a level most Americans couldn’t hack for sixty seconds.  You’ve got millions of fans and you’re considered hot stuff in your local NFL market.  Even if you’re a low-level player, someone out there is a big fan and figures you’re going to be great some day.

And the bottom line is, you’re playing a GAME for ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES.  And you’re doing it because someone noticed you at an earlier level, high school or college, and you thereby gained admittance to a very small and very rich fraternity.  All based on the fact that you have a very athletic body type and the smarts to make the right move at the right time.  Granted, stipulated, not going to argue about that.

What you apparently don’t have is the smarts to know when not to blow your good thing by making statements that piss off half the people in the country.  Or perhaps you do, but sometimes, like the Indian guide who is never lost, but acknowledges “sometimes the path wanders,” your brain goes off somewhere to take a break, your mouth wanders on autopilot, and you say something on camera or into a live mic that reflects what you really believe but know you dare not say publicly lest you be crucified for it.

Drew Brees found this out when he got hoist onto the cross for his patriotic statement.  And then didn’t have the balls to hang there and say, yes, this I believe, this I would die to defend.  What are the Saints going to do?  Fire him?

The same problem infests every aspect of the entertainment world (yes, sports are entertainment, get over it).  I’m not going to waste my time going through all the examples we’ve seen over the years.  Laura Ingraham even wrote a book about it, Shut Up And Sing, when the music industry blew up over the Dixie Chicks stupidity over George W. Bush.

Entertainment celebrities aren’t important enough for any of us to give a shit about their opinions on issues of the day.  They have been hoist onto a pedestal because of some special talent they have that the great unwashed generally don’t (although I’d argue I can sing better than a lot of people who make money at it, but that’s just my opinion and you’re free to ignore it).

The dirty little secret is, just being hoist onto that pedestal doesn’t give them special insight into anything but what they happen to be on that pedestal to do.

Thus, their opinions on the issues of the day should not be given any more weight than those of your barber or bartender.

And they need to be taught this lesson by seeing their popularity and their income dry up when their fans have finally had enough, and say, “I don’t give a shit what you think about George Floyd, shut up and do that thing you do.”

Which is why (to get back to Roger Goodell and his football league) I have not watched an NFL football game for four seasons and don’t plan to be watching any this fall, either.

Exit thought:  Condoleezza Rice would have made a better NFL commissioner, hands down.

People simply do not say “fuck you” enough.

Comes now Jack Baruth at Hagerty with a rebuttal to another Hagerty contributor (!) who says, “You don’t need that half-ton pickup truck.”  Where “don’t need” is actually “shouldn’t be allowed to own”, because half-ton pickup trucks are destroying the world or some shit.

Baruth in turn makes a (half)* ton of great points, including that the McClaren Senna is a much worse gas hog than his Silverado 6.2 fully loaded and towing a race car trailer.  (Admittedly I don’t believe many of us own a McClaren Senna, but that’s not the point.)

Sadly, his article is just another example exposing how a small group of the Perennially Indignant seek to force the vast bulk of American citizens to bend to their will.  It doesn’t seem to matter what the subject is — something that none of the rest of us find unusual or particularly dangerous becomes the cause du jour for regulation and banning.  Guns are only one part of this breakdown of the concept of liberty.  The Brits have proven that once you ban guns, knives are next.  Hell, they’ll probably ban hammers after they finish putting GPS trackers in knives.  (H/T:  Tamara Keel, on Facebook yesterday.  And yes, that moron is a sitting MP.)

Other whinging ninnies have managed to get whole cities to put consumption taxes on sugary drinks and other food items they find repulsive, despite the fact that people simply go outside the tax zone to obtain them and businesses inside the city limits suffer as a result.  Yes, I’m talking about you, Philadelphia.

Still other do-gooder microcephalics with no more understanding of economics than AOC with her alleged degree in same pass $15 minimum wage laws in their jurisdictions, and then, shockingly, complain when their favorite restaurants and stores close because the owners can’t afford to pay that kind of wages.

But getting back to pickup trucks, shoot, we’re already seeing de-facto attempts to ban large vehicles from city centers, what with heavily-traveled city streets being made even harder to navigate with unused bike lanes and idiotic mass-transit choices like Indianapolis’s highly-touted, over-priced, and frankly damned dangerous** Red Line bus route that is currently a-building.  The last federal administration bent over backwards to raise gasoline efficiency ratings so high that Ford started building trucks with lightweight aluminum bodies that seem to catch fire at the drop of a hat, and tried to restrict the fracking industry that — under the current administration — has brought the price of a gallon of gas down to something reasonable for the first time in four decades and made auto manufacturers throw up their hands and stop building high-gas-mileage sedans because nobody wants them anymore.

And face it, what are you going to pull that 30-foot Airstream with?  You’re not going to do it with a Prius.

The fact is that nobody has the authority to tell Mr. Baruth, or me, or any other American that they can’t own a pickup truck.  Even if Congress passed such a law, you’d have to ask whether that actually falls under the aegis of one of the Constitution’s enumerated powers.  I don’t think it does, much as I don’t think most of what the Federal Government does in these fading years of the American Republic passes enumerated powers muster.  But let’s see what Jack Baruth has to say about that:

Does your neighbor own a King Ranch with a squeaky-clean bed and a completely useless lift kit? Well, thank your deity of choice that you live in a place where you don’t have the right to regulate his enthusiasms and he, in turn, does not have the right to regulate yours, lest you find yourself discomfited by what he considers to be necessary, tasteful, or appropriate.

Fuckin’ A, brother.  Fuckin’ A.

___________

* Sorry.  Couldn’t resist.

** It will be just as dangerous as the old interurban rail was, particularly considering that there are a fuckload more private vehicles on the streets today and that cell-phone-wielding pedestrians cross streets in a manner more resembling Brownian motion than any sort of organized, disciplined “cross only at the crosswalk and only when you have the WALK light, and GODDAMNIT PUT THAT FUCKING CELL PHONE DOWN AND PAY ATTENTION” way.

The economic fairyland of the modern progressive

A friend — sadly, a progressive friend — recently got all bent out of shape because the little cafe at Target now boasts an automated “front of the house”, thereby putting someone out of a job.  This is, according to him and his little progressive friends, little more than the rich getting richer, giant tyrannical Target Corp. with more money than it needs simply grubbing for more of the same.

Yeah, right.  Before you go to the barricades, think about this.

Automation at this level was never worth the candle until mandated minimum wages outstripped the value of human labor.

You can blame the rich all you want, but the fact is, at $15 an hour, nobody can afford to have humans doing this sort of work. And without a reasonable return on investment, businesses shut down. Even the little cafe at Target can’t afford to operate at a loss, because on the company’s balance sheet, it’s a cost center that needs to turn a profit at the end of the day. So unless you want to pay $10 for that $3 hot dog, it’s going to be a self-serve proposition.

Minimum wages were never intended to be living wages. They were supposed to be entry-level wages for inexperienced workers, like high school kids working part time at the local burger joint. Do these types of jobs have value? Sure. They teach basic skills to entry-level workers. And they’re not worth $15/hour plus all the other expenses incumbent on employers, like unemployment insurance, workman’s comp, employer’s half of Social Security — all of which are based on a percentage of the worker’s pay as opposed to being a flat cost, so whenever the minimum wage goes up, so does all that hidden-to-you cost to the employer, which runs (according to an MIT study that you can Google) another 25 to 40 percent of the employee’s base salary.

If you’ve never run a business or made a payroll and then had to pay all the additional squeeze to the government, that’s all invisible to you. And you complain when prices go up or something like Target automating their little cafe happens, and you don’t understand why that could possibly be, or how it could be anything but an amoral money grab on the part of a rich corporation, because Target obviously has more money than it needs.

Why this sort of thing happens is just basic economics. I understood that in high school, maybe before.  Yet one of my friend’s little Commie commenters opined, “Avarice is not just a sin. It is a sickness. They just can’t get enough. I do pity those poor wealthy souls.”

Yeah well…fuck you, you fucking idiot.  Go crack a book on econ, sometime, if you want to learn why businesses don’t like paying $15/hr minimum wages.

Beavering away at beating a dead horse

Badgering us with this cock and bull is very pig headed of them and displays a very dog in the manger attitude. I believe they’re just crying wolf, and the whole dog and pony show will go away because in a dog eat dog world hounding people to go along with something like this, like lambs to slaughter, is a harebrained idea – because a leopard can’t change its spots. They’re just setting themselves up as a shaggy dog kangaroo court.

— Seen on Facebook, in response to PETA’s campaign to eliminate “anti-animal language”

Seriously, PETA steps on their dick a lot these days with their brain-dead ideas on how to make the world safe for veganism.  Google “Jimmy’s Seafood” for a pretty good example of a business punching back.

Gun haters gonna hate guns

Here we go again. Per the NRA:

On July 16th, Councillor La Keisha Jackson of the City-County Council of Marion County and Indianapolis introduced Proposal No. 275, 2018, which will call for a resolution to declare “gun violence” as a “public health crisis.” While there are no specific gun control actions to be debated, this proposal is potentially filled with misinformation.

Such misguided attempts to only focus on the violent crime they deem “gun violence” and to declare it a “public health” issue do not address the causative factors that lead to violence or the criminals responsible, but instead seek policies that would only impact law-abiding gun owners.

Plus, they are completely meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Why doesn’t the City of Indianapolis start clearing the panhandlers off of city street medians, instead? Or concentrate on fixing its century-old infrastructure that’s steadily collapsing into the ground? Or figure out how to start making some actual coin on properties it owns but doesn’t control? (Lucas Oil Stadium, Bankers Life Fieldhouse)

And on reading this piece of crap, it becomes clear that she’s relied on the biased Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence (AKA “Brady Bunch”) for her statistics.  Sigh.

Public health crisis? Bah. I’ll bet you have armed security, Councillor. So stuff your hatred of guns where the sun don’t shine and do some actual good for the City.  Or get the hell out of public office.

Turnabout is fair play, except when it isn’t

At work, we recently had a customer who wanted to partake in the training courses for our software.  Training is generally done by one of our consultants, who (these days, anyway) does a GoToMeeting or Skype screen-sharing session for that purpose.

It will probably not surprise anyone that I work with a bunch of left-wing progressive types.  That seems to be common in IT anymore.  But our product is purchased by companies and organizations that span the political spectrum.  And as a result, for many, many years, I have had to deal with certain customers whose ideology I considered (and still consider) repugnant. But by and large, the people I dealt with were gracious, intelligent, and kept ideology and politics out of the relationship.

And that’s fine with me.  In my opinion, we’re not doing business with their ideology. They are paying us a significant chunk of change for our product (and additional coin for the training), which in and of itself is non-ideological. What they do with it after they purchase it is their business, not ours (so long as they’re not spamming with it — we’re death on spammers). I’ve been dealing with people in business for a long, long time, and frankly all I care about is that their money is good.  Everyone with a message is free to distribute that message in any media they choose.*

Therefore it should come as no surprise that refusing to deal with a customer for ideological reasons is not a viable excuse in my book.  But we had two of our engineers who refused on principle to provide the training for this customer.  One said flatly that he did not know if he could control himself if he were required to train them.  The other made wishy-washy mouth noises about how he did not feel he could train well on this subject and asked to be excused — but I know what his political philosophy is, and I know he knows the product better than that.

We did end up providing the training, but we had to pull in one of the product developers to do it.  Which was interesting, but not optimal — he has other things to do and training is not his bailiwick.

So let’s think about that for a moment.

This really is not the same thing as the wedding photographer or the baker who is forced against his or her religious beliefs to use their creativity in support of events that go against the grain of those religious beliefs.**  Naturally, the left will claim that training a right-wing organization to use the company’s sofware is a violation of the personal beliefs of the engineers who refused to do that training, but hang on a sec.

The wedding photographer and baker are (more than likely, and in all cases to date I think they were) sole proprietors or, at most, partners in a family business — that is, working for themselves.  They are perfectly able to determine for themselves what jobs they want to take on, and what jobs they do not want to take on.  The fact that their religious ideology precludes them creating art for gay couples is what has gotten them in trouble.  Being honest about that didn’t help.  On the other hand, the people who entered their shops and offices and asked for their services more than likely did so for the specific purpose of landing them in court and forcing them to do things that they believed violated their religious freedoms.***

In our case, without a word being said by the organization in question other than “We’d like to pay for training,” our two brave engineers said “We’re not playing that” — and they did so strictly because of the ideological bent of the customer in question.

However.

The two engineers aren’t the company.  They don’t own the company, they don’t call the shots.  But they got away with it anyway, because the boss isn’t the kind of guy to fire someone for that sort of thing.  And frankly, at least one of them would probably sue him if he did.

Nevertheless, they got away with something that a number of folks on the other side of the political spectrum got called on the legal carpet for.  The company didn’t suffer because we found someone else to provide the training.  But our engineers hid behind the corporate monolith and none of that got out to the customer, who was just happy to be trained.

Because I know the makeup and history of the customer, I have exactly zero doubt that, had either of our engineers been independent consultants who had refused to service the customer’s request for training and said it was because of the customer’s ideology, they would have wound up in court answering a judge’s questions as to why not.  Turnabout is fair play, and the customer would not have hesitated to file that sort of legal grievance.

Hiding behind the corporate wall, though, these two got away with it.

And that irritates the hell out of me.  Because I’m absolutely certain both of them think — no, they firmly believe — the wedding photographer and the cake baker were wrong.  That they don’t see their own situation the same way only proves once again that progressives don’t give a fuck about you — it’s all about them and their feelings.

______________

* Recipients of the message, however, are also just as free to dump it straight into the trash.

** Which is my round-about way of saying, “in support of gay weddings”.

*** Frankly, they would have been better off saying, “Sorry, our schedule is full up and we simply can’t take any new orders/jobs right now.”  And I’ll make the point that it seems like refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple due to strongly-held religious beliefs about homosexuality doesn’t sound all that different from refusing to serve blacks or Irish or Jews because of the color of their skin or their national origin or their non-Christian religion.  If you start saying you won’t do X for person Y because of Z, when Z has something to do with the other person’s beliefs and prejudices, it’s a goddamned slippery slope back to the back of the bus or separate drinking fountains or simply refusing to serve someone because you don’t like their ancestors back in the old country.  And it’s VERY hard to reconcile the fact that on one hand, we have the concept of freedom of association and freedom of religion, while on the other hand, we have the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Acts which say we’re supposed to treat everyone the same.

And yeah, this is a footnote rather than a full-on philosophical post of its own, because I am fucking confused about the whole thing myself.  It’s why I won’t take a real stand on the subject, other than to note that the only time anyone seems to care is when it’s a left-winger trying to force a right-winger to do something the right-winger doesn’t want to do, and never the other way around.  That’s the unfair part, and it’s the part I tend to focus on rather than worrying about people’s religious or ideological stances.

Either apply the law indiscriminately, or fuck the goddamn law.  And that’s my bottom line.

Many reasons Democrats seek Trump’s impeachement

blares the headline over the letter to the editor in Monday’s WSJ.  A gentleman from Massachusetts opines that an op-ed from May 26 “notes that ‘many Democrats want to impeach Mr. Trump because they simply don’t like him.'”

He continues,

That’s a misleading oversimplification. Many Democrats (at least the ones I speak to) are happy to explain why they don’t like him. They don’t like him because he makes America unsafe, because of his disdain for important American principles (e.g., inclusiveness, heroism, respect, etc.), valued American institutions (the White House, FBI, science) and for his manifest disrespect for potential allies and essential friends. The president’s behavior, rather than making America great again, is weakening and defacing America’s integrity, making us more vulnerable.

OK, but what’s your point?  Absolutely none of that refutes the statement from the op-ed, and proves once again that the Democrats who have been agitating for Mr. Trump’s impeachment since the day after the 2016 election really don’t understand what constitutes grounds for impeachment.

The fact is that nobody cares that you don’t like him.  Hell, a lot of people who voted for him aren’t really all that fond of him.  But what seems more ludicrous to me is that most of the shoe this fool gentleman wishes to fit to Donald Trump actually fits his predecessor much, much better.  Let’s take this apart a bit.

He makes America unsafe:  Obama drew a line in the sand in Syria and promptly wimped out when the Syrians crossed it.  His SecState allowed the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi to be overrun by insurgents.  We took out Osama bin Laden on his watch, but by all accounts, he just sort of stood around and watched while Seal Team 6 did the dirty work, and then took the credit.  His “leaders” in the DoD left us less prepared to go to war (and more prepared to go to culture war) than we’ve been since before World War II.  Our allies considered him a joke and borderline undependable.  He clearly hated Israel and actively strove to undermine Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election bid.  And of course, there’s the whole Iran “deal”.  And the recognition of Cuba, which simply resulted in a bunch of our diplomatic folks having to come home because the US embassy there was being bombarded by sonic waves that made them all sick, and Trump finally bringing everyone home and suspending the opening Obama made.

Conversely, Mr. Trump has fearlessly asserted US interests in Syria and the WestPac (now known as the “Indo-Pacific”) and has called Kim Jong-Un’s nuclear bluff.  Folks like the editorial staff of the WSJ think Trump is going to be steamrollered by Kim at the Singapore summit, but I suspect Kim is not going to like some of the things he hears at the summit table.  Trump, not Obama, put ISIS on the run in Iraq and elsewhere.  Whigning that “the plan was Obama’s” doesn’t wash, because Obama didn’t execute.  Trump, not Obama, has developed excellent relations with reform-minded (and Israel-neutral, at least) Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia.  Trump’s SecDef “Mad Dog” Mattis is demanding that the Pentagon shape up and that the services resume preparing for war rather than turning them into the Diversity and Inclusion Corps.  Trump has got Vladimir Putin over an (oil) barrel and isn’t taking Putin’s shit, regardless of all the screaming about “collusion” from the left (and if they want to complain about collusion, let’s not forget Obama’s open-mic “after the election I’ll have more flexibility” gaffe). Trump is alternately kissing up to and smacking around the Chinese to the point where I don’t think they know if they’re coming or going, and while that can be dangerous, it’s still better than letting the Chinese get away with whatever they want.  Hell, even the Japanese are growing some of their backbone back and getting themselves on a war footing, now that they have some assurance the Americans will not back down in the IndoPac.

The only thing I can think of that Trump is truly getting wrong is remaining in Afghanistan, but he didn’t make that mess, he’s just trying to clean it up.

Frankly, even if we go back into Cold War mode because Trump is asserting US global power, that’s fine with me.  We’ve sat on our complacent asses spending the non-existent “peace dividend” for far too long.

His disdain for important American principles (e.g., inclusiveness, heroism, respect, etc.):  Come on.  This is Obama projection writ large.  Obama never met an American principle he didn’t disdain.  Any time he stepped up for Americanism, it was because it was part of his job, not because he believed in it.  He certainly pooh-poohed the concept of American Exceptionalism, and his wife made it clear that the only thing that made her happy to be an American was the election of her worthless husband.

Trump, on the other hand, is all about American Exceptionalism.  He includes everyone, doesn’t care if they’re white, black, Asian, Hispanic, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Zoroastrian, gay, lesbian, what the hell ever.  For goodness’ sake, his daughter married an Orthodox Jew.  His only criteria is patriotism and a love of this country.  He came down hard on the NFL anthem kneelers because he found their attitude unpatriotic and not a little rude to the people who were paying their inflated salaries.  To this day, mediocre NFL player Colin Kaepernick doesn’t have a job because he is unrepentant and has cost the NFL billions of dollars and millions of fans — not because Donald Trump tweeted about what a jerk he is.

Trump is all about heroism.  He supports our military and wants it to excel as it has in the past.  He is deeply respectful of all of the things that make America great.  He clearly dislikes cowards, traitors, and people who want to tear America off the pedestal it has occupied since it became the World’s Policeman after WWII.

Now, if someone would just take his Twitter account away…

[His disdain for] valued American institutions (the White House, FBI, science): Um, what?  Apparently the Obamas left the White House in tatters, and Trump’s comments about the White House right after his inauguration were about infrastructure maintenance (the replacement/installation of new air conditioning ductwork, as I recall) that was making the House unlivable.  Because the White House generally doesn’t get redecorated on the taxpayers’ dime, for people like the Obamas who don’t give a shit, it’s not a priority, and yeah, the place was probably fairly ratty after eight years of neglect.

The FBI…how do you write something like that with the shit that is coming out about the FBI?  The inspector general’s report is apparently scathing.  Things haven’t been this bad at the FBI since Hoover was running it.  In fact, as bad as Hoover was, the folks who have been running the FBI for the last decade or so seem to have been even worse.  How can you blame Donald Trump for “disdain” of the FBI when it’s starting to look like that’s an attitude mirrored by the majority of the citizenry?

And since when is “science” a “valued American institution”?  Science in this country has been going to shit for years, turning into a biased handmaiden of diversity and the left.  I note that the writer did not come right out and say “climate science”, because that’s really what has most people’s knickers in a knot.  I disdain climate science, too, because it’s international propaganda bullshit aimed at making the US no better than any other shithole country in the world.  And yes, there’s that word:  “Shithole”.  Which is what the Obamas were trying to make of America for eight years.  So thank you Donald Trump for withdrawing us from the joke of a Paris Agreement.

[H]is manifest disrespect for potential allies and essential friends:  Again, what?  Sorry, again, that’s Obama projection.  May one simply mention “Israel”?  And one presumes that the writer thinks Iran was a potential ally and essential friend?  Man, has he drunk the Kool-Aid, with extra-strength cyanide.

Donald Trump knows who our allies and friends are.  Well…we don’t have any friends.  Because there are no friends in global diplomacy.  We have allies, of course.  But anyone who has ever studied American Diplomatic History (raises hand) knows, nobody is our friend, and we should not be acting as if they are — not even the “special relationship” Brits.  Trump’s genius is that he knows how to pat an ally on the back until the tip of a hidden knife blade appears from between his fingers and pricks the ally’s skin — and then he promises to remove the blade if the ally will simply agree with him that America’s interests come first.

I keep trying to tell people that you have to evaluate Trump as a businessman — not as a politician.  Politicians are always hail-fellow-well-met types or they don’t succeed in politics.  Trump is not a politician.  He’s a businessman and he makes deals.  You make business deals by making an offer that’s probably outrageous in some way, the other side counters with something a little less outrageous, and then you meet somewhere in the middle.  If other countries truly understood how Trump is trying to use tariffs, we wouldn’t be dancing around the edge of a trade war.  But with Trump, it’s always about the Deal, and the Deal is always negotiable.

The president’s behavior, rather than making America great again, is weakening and defacing America’s integrity, making us more vulnerable.  Nah.  This is the Democrat/progressive short view.  They can’t take the long view anymore because they’ve weakened their intellectual chops so badly as a result of their Gramscian march through the institutions.  They simply aren’t capable of pulling all of the things Trump is doing together and seeing how there is going to be some short-term pain for long-term gain.  But that’s what has to be done, because frankly, the progs have dropped us so deeply into the pit that we’re going to be a while getting out of it.

What the progs really want is a third Obama term, and they thought Hillary! was going to give it to them.  The American people seem to be a little smarter than that.  Although in fairness, the progs’ champion ran a pretty poor campaign for someone who’s been in politics for most of her life.  Must be pretty harsh to get beaten by a guy who’d never run for a political office in his life.

The bottom line here is that it looks to me like Mr. Lawrence H. Climo of Lincoln, Massachusetts, simply made Allen Guelzo’s (the author of the original op-ed) case for him, viz., “Many Democrats want to impeach Mr. Trump because they simply don’t like him.”  Mr. Climo has brought absolutely nothing to the table to refute that and has made himself and his compatriots simply look more petulant and silly than Mr. Guelzo intended.

Progressive Trump Derangement Syndrome.  On second thought, let us not go there.  ‘Tis a silly place.