“Worse off than 100 years ago.” Really?

said someone in response to a post on Facebook of an LA Slimes, er, Times, article entitled “Our Dishonest President” (to which I refuse to link, go look it up yourself).  Specifically, she said:

this is so true and the people fell for it now they are complaining. oh well so what let them suffer his idiotic ways until it will take years to recover from what he already has done. you people who voted for him in my opinion are just as hateful as he is and self centered. you were afraid of hilary and what she would have accomplished to make america greater than it was but now we are worse off than we were 100 years ago. lets stop him before its to late and keep him under careful watch. but you people who thought he was a change for good may you all suffer the consequences. its to bad you had to drag us into it with you.

Ignoring the last eight years and the near-irreversible damage they did to the Republic (national debt doubled, healthcare in a shambles, international reputation wrecked), not to mention your near-complete inability to write like an educated person, really doesn’t reflect well on your thesis, sweetie.

Further, as an historian by training who spent quite a lot of time studying the first half of the 20th century, I take issue with your assertion that we are “worse off than we were 100 years ago”. I doubt you would like to live in 1917, if for no other reason that you would not have a vote.

Suck it up, snowflake.  Or do you want more Trump?  Because this is how you get more Trump.

You want more Trump? Part I dunno what.

So, this happened.

New GOP Star Born When California Dems Forcibly Remove Vietnamese Senator for Criticizing Tom Hayden

Sen. Janet Nguyen (R) was the star of last weekend’s California GOP convention because she was forcibly removed from the floor of the Senate on Feb. 23 for criticizing the late Sen. Tom Hayden (D), who was honored by his former colleagues two days before.

I’m going to make it plain that I am lukewarm as hell about Trump, even if I think most of the things he is pledging to do need to be done (and wouldn’t get done with a more “conventional” GOP president, and may still not if the “conventional” GOP Congress doesn’t start playing ball).  And I hope people understand that when I repeatedly say, “if you want more Trump, this is how you get more Trump”, I mean, stupid moves like the one linked above are how the Dems unintentionally solidify GOP support, i.e., “more Trump”.

All the protests and the heckling and the sit-ins and the crocodile tears from the press and the unfunny assassination jokes — that’s how you get more Trump.  And you’d think the Dems would be able to wrap their minds around that and find a different, more adult way of dealing with their loss.  You know — like the right did when Obama was elected.  We weren’t happy about it, and we snarked about it, and certain idiots came up with conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory about him, but in the main, the right does things differently from the left — primarily, it doesn’t act like a spoiled baby with a poopy diaper when it doesn’t get its way.

At this point, the left is just damaging itself to no good purpose.  If you think this hasn’t resulted in the creation of a ton of closet Trump Democrats, kind of like there used to be Reagan Democrats, you haven’t been paying attention.  And the last thing I’m going to say about that is that the American Republic is not a healthy place if the balance of power swings too far either direction.  I can get along with a Kennedy Democrat, or a Scoop Jackson Democrat, or even a Zell Miller Democrat.  It’s these far-left socialist redistributionist anti-capitalist Democrats that I have a problem with.  This country was designed to be run from the center, and we’ve almost completely lost track of that.

It’s time for compromise, and neither side will ever have a better chance to do that than right now.  That’s what Trump is all about:  The Deal, which by definition requires compromise.  If you don’t want to compromise, don’t expect to get more than short shrift from him.

Children should not be allowed to vote.

This kind of thing makes me more and more convinced that Robert Heinlein was right and we need to require intelligence tests with a reasonably high passing grade to qualify to vote.  He suggested the solution of a quadratic equation which would be randomly generated and shown on a screen before you got to the ballot.  He also suggested that there should be no minimum voting age; if a 13-year-old girl could solve the quadratic, she should be allowed to vote.

Heinlein also suggested that voters should be military veterans with an honorable discharge in order to vote.  Which would disqualify me since I never served, but that’s on me, not anyone else.  (Besides, Heinlein left open the possibility that anyone could serve a term, discharge honorably, and obtain the franchise.)  For some reason this position got Heinlein labeled as a Nazi — or worse — by the soi-disant cognoscenti, few of whom ever actually read Starship Troopers and didn’t understand the logic behind it.

The childish minds at work in this video cannot possibly encompass the intelligence or the moral discipline to evaluate properly the issues of the day and cast a ballot accordingly.  Want to secure the ballot?  Start ensuring that the people who cast them can actually articulate their personal political and moral philosophy.  Mooning the Trump Tower in Chicago doesn’t rise to that level.  Kids and drunks do that kind of thing, not intelligent adults.

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Boycott, shmoycott.

The 68 or so ‘critters who are “boycotting” the Inaugural are, I suppose, entitled to suddenly find they have something else to do that night — wax the dog, shampoo the cat, make a drug buy, whatever.

But I remember something from my American Diplomatic History classes in college, which were (the way the professor taught) sort of an advanced Civics class on steroids. Not quite Heinlein’s History and Moral Philosophy, but elements thereof.

The prof said that our tradition is that the outgoing President always attends the inauguration of his successor — even if he has to be dragged there kicking and screaming.  Apparently the Secret Service (and their predecessors in that job) see to that.  The story was that Truman absolutely did not want to attend Eisenhower’s inaugural — he and Ike didn’t get along very well — but he manned up (as Truman always did) and soldiered on.*  And I can imagine Hoover probably would have happily given FDR’s first inaugural a miss.  Can you imagine Johnson and Nixon?  Ditto Obama with Trump.  But it just isn’t done.  Why can’t the wayward congresscritters man (or woman) up and do the same?

The prof also said that no foreign dignitaries are invited to join the official party or to attend the major ceremonies.  This is OUR time.  We owe our independence, wealth, and power to nobody but ourselves. Contrary to a soon-to-be former president’s pronouncement, we DID build this.

Politics aside, when we get done fighting our quadrennial intramurals and actually elect a new president (or re-elect the incumbent**), the nation is supposed to come together, put that all behind us, and acclaim the new president.  None of this “he’s not MY president” shite — at least not until he turns out to be, well, Obama, who was, for at least his second term, hardly representative of anyone right of center’s idea of the direction the country should be taking.

By and large, though, in 2009, the right was willing to give Obama a chance.  He blew that chance, of course, as many of us figured he would, and his lock on Congress with it (which really should have told him something), and then he simply played a six-year game of “I won” and “I have a pen and a phone” to avoid working with Republicans.  At that point, no, he wasn’t my president.  The question, of course, is whether he was anyone’s president after the 2010 midterms.

But the time for divisive politics is over.  Donald Trump says he wants us to unite.  He wants this to be a country we are all a part of and can be proud of.  To him, the things that unite us are stronger than the things that divide us.**  In truth, it has always been thus, if we are willing to admit it.

The ‘critters who are boycotting the inaugural are, in that tradition, almost committing an indiscretion beyond the pale. They believe in division and are being divisive.  They believe they can force failure on Donald Trump by turning their backs on him and declaring him illegitimate.  And yet…they do not have majorities in Congress, they are losing governors’ mansions and state legislatures left and right, and they control only small slivers and bits of America.  This attitude on their part seems destined to lead to more failure on their part, not failure on Donald Trump’s part, because Trump is not obliged to seek compromise with them.  (I think he will, because that is his nature, but I certainly think they’ve burned most of their bridges with him at this point.)

But let’s think about this for a moment.  According to official results of the 2016 election, 136,628,459 Americans voted for president.  That’s a lot of voters, about 7 million more thain in 2012.  Yet, “[e]stimates show more than 58 percent of eligible voters went to the polls during the 2016 election”.  Folks, that means that 42 percent didn’t think this election was important enough to cast a vote.  That means about 98,937,850 voters went completely untapped for one reason or another.

I don’t know about you, but I suspect that if Trump had spent more money on GOTV efforts in the last couple of months of the campaign, he might have picked up enough votes to landslide Hillary.  They were only separated by a couple of million votes.

Of course, that’s entirely meaningless, since we’re not a democracy — we’re a federal republic, and we have an Electoral College that expresses the democratic will of the states as to who will be the leader of the federal republic.  The states vote in the Electoral College based on whatever manner they have each provided to choose their electors.  In all 50 states that happens to be by holding an election and either handing the winner all of their electors or dividing them up in some way that has been determined by the state legislature.  They could as easily choose them by reading a horoscope or taking the augurs, or by having the elector candidates play Russian roulette.****  But all of the states, one way or another, have chosen to give the people a voice by letting electors be chosen based on a democratic election within the state.*****

The Electoral College is part of the Constitution, and has been from day one, and it’s how we have run our federal elections for president since 1789.  It’s hardly the first time the Electoral College winner hasn’t won the total popular vote, either — but again, that’s completely irrelevant.

And that’s why claims that Trump’s presidency is illegitimate fall flat, and the bad attitude on the part of the 68-odd Democrat congresscritters who’ve found something better to do with their day tomorrow don’t look like they are standing up for principle at all.

They just look like sore losers.  And they are.

__________________

* As I recall the story, Bess and Mamie hit it off famously when the two couples met for the obligatory coffee at the White House before heading up Pennsylvania Avenue, and that was part of what thawed Truman out.

** Or, in Obama’s case, the incompetent.

*** Hmm.  Where have I heard that before? (If you’re not a Scottish Rite Mason in the NMJ, you probably won’t know.)

**** Say…

***** I think they should be chosen by the legislatures.  But I think senators ought to be chosen that way, too, the way God and the Framers intended, and not the way the ridiculous 17th Amendment changed things in 1913.

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Thank you, Dennis D. Oklak

Even though I have no idea who you are, or particularly care, you have made my day.

Some bunch of commie progs sent me this card, I have no idea why; I’m clearly marked as a Republican in the primary books and haven’t voted for a Democrat in thirty years or more.

“One party will control all three branches of government thanks to Republican donors like Dennis D. Oklak.”

Yep.  Works for me.  What’s your point?  Beats another four years of failed Democrat policies.

“Oklak is a wealthy Indianapolis corporate executive who has donated over $93,000 to Republican candidates and committees.”

Go, Mr. Oklak!

“What kind of people has he supported?”

Looks like three great folks to me.

Todd Young, “The science is not settled.”  Well, fuck you, assholes, it isn’t settled.  It’s not in the green proggie academic interest for it ever to be settled, to be honest; if it were settled, all their grants and freebies from the .gov would run out and they’d actually have to work for a living.

Mike Pence, “Smoking doesn’t kill.”  Jesus, that’s the best you could do?  Nothing about how he allegedly hates fags?*

Richard Mourdock, “Something that God intended to happen.”  Well, sure, if you take a certain religious view of the world and free will.  I don’t agree with Mourdock per se, but on the other hand, he’d have been a lot better Senator than Joe “Lick Obama’s Boots” Donnelly.

But the best part of this card is where it came from.

As if I give a particular fucking damn about anything anyone in Hawaii has to say about Indiana politicians.  Their proggie racist state government is a poster child for how not to run a railroad.

ETA:  I happened to look at the postmark and kind of snorted to think that some poor bastard had to sit at a meter machine and run all these cards through it (yeah, I know, it’s automated, but somebody has to fill it, watch it run, and collect the cards after they’re franked).  And I noticed the originating ZIP code: 10001.

ZIP code 10001 is roughly Hudson Yards/Midtown Manhattan.  Looking closer, there is a union stamp on the postcard that reads (in tiny print) “OPEIU 153”.  That would be the Office & Professional Employees International Union, Local 153 — IN NEW YORK CITY.

So a political postcard allegedly sent out by a union local in Hawaii was printed and mailed by a completely different union local in New York.  Talk about taking food out of Hawaiian workers’ mouths, Local 5.  Good job!

___________________

* See what I did there?

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Doesn’t matter how many advanced degrees you have

Once a prick, always a prick.

This is the kind of thing that, if it had been done to Michelle Obama and the children during the transition period (or, hell, any time during the last eight years), would have earned the perpetrators universal condemnation.  The left would have screamed treason (actually they would have meant lèse majesté, but most of them aren’t smart enough to know the difference), and the right would have shaken their heads and pitied the poor misguided jerks.  Actually most of us would have done the latter; the number of people who are going fucking apeshit in this country today over Donald Trump is, relatively, pretty damned small.*

It makes no sense to continue to be assholish about the Trumps.  It certainly seems meaningless to take it out on Ivanka; it’s her father who ran for President and won, not her.  Moreover, apparently the main jerk in the drama was planning to raise hell with her as soon as he spotted her in the terminal.  His “husband”, another jerk with too many degrees for his own good, tweeted about it from the get-go and then (reportedly) hastily deleted his Twitter account after they were booted off the plane and word got around.

But that’s not the only Ivanka news out there.

Here are more deluded idiots, ordering Ivanka to take their art off of her walls.  You mean art that she paid for and for which you gladly and greedily accepted her filthy lucre?  And framing it as “we’re embarrassed because of your father and we think you should be, too”?  I’ll tell you what Ivanka is too gracious to tell you:  Fuck off and die, assholes.

The sad thing is, these people probably don’t reflect the vast majority of Americans, regardless of which side they supported.  The radical frothingmouths who are getting all the air and press time are a small, tiny fraction of the electorate, acting out in an immature, outré fashion in order to attract the cameras and make it appear that everyone hates the Trumps.  Joe and Jane Regular American, meanwhile, sit at home and cluck-cluck over the fuss — if that; they probably turn the news off and go back to binge-watching The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones.  Even if they supported and voted for Hillary, even if they were Never Trumpers, they’re probably sick and tired of the bullshit just like those who did vote for Trump.  Because that’s quintessentially American behavior after an election, not spastic childish asininity and petulant cries of indignation that the other guy won and he’s not our president or some shit.  Hell’s bells, people, if it were otherwise, we’d have had civil wars in this country continuously for the past 200 years, and in the last 20 for damn sure.  People came to America tired of all that crap in the old country, and in general successfully inoculated their children and grandchildren against radical bullshit behavior.  Yeah, they joined unions, but our unions (bad as they are) are not the same as European unions.  And that resistance to rocking the political boat is still ingrained into most of us.  How many conservatives hit the streets and organized mass protests against the Obama administration?

Not as many as railed against Bush 43, but again, we’re talking about a small subset of the proggy commie Left, here, not half the country as people (particularly journalists with an agenda) are trying to make us believe.

There’s that great quote from the preface to P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores (written after the Bush 41 win in 1988) that says so much about why proggies always have shit fits in Republican adminstrations:

Not long after Andy [Ferguson] and I met, we were driving down Pennsylvania Avenue and encountered some or another noisy pinko demonstration. “How come,” I asked Andy, “whenever something upsets the Left, you see immediate marches and parades and rallies with signs already printed and rhyming slogans already composed, whereas whenever something upsets the Right, you see two members of the Young Americans for Freedom waving a six-inch American flag?”

“We have jobs,” said Andy.

And Rush Limbaugh has long observed that liberals are much funnier out of power than they are when they’re in power.  But that’s beside the point.  Who actually has the time and personal wealth to sit out and protest or march up and down day after day protesting the powers that be?  Look at that fucking mess up in North Dakota, over something like half a mile of pipeline out of 1,172 miles total that is, to all intents and purposes, complete.  Yet there are people up there camping and protesting.  Don’t these people have jobs and families?

The answer is that these are all tiny movements punching way above their weight class, paid for lock-stock-and-barrel by people like George Soros, Tom Steyer, and their ilk.  Commie assholes who would rather spend their money destroying this country than building it up.  Soros in particular is a massive prick who has zero love for his adopted country and would rather see it turned into the 50 Soviet Socialist Republics of America, probably with himself in control of the Politburo, than for it to be rich and free, a shining city on a hill and a beacon of freedom for all.  Steyer is just an asshole who’s managed to make a bunch of money and wants to lord it over the rest of us.

Fuck those guys, and fuck their billions of dollars.  It’s good to see a lot of it was wasted on the late campaign for Queen Bitch.

But the point is, the prickishness displayed this afternoon on Jet Blue toward Ivanka Trump is not just an isolated incident, nor is the group of artists trying to tell her what to do with their art that she paid for fair and square.  The insanity is fostered at high levels with lots of left-wing money.  Luckily, out of the 300 million people who live in this country, the total number of the deranged is quite small.

If we could get the news media to stop reporting on this crap, it would stop.

But that’s like trying to stop a force of nature, in this country.  Sadly, the media have cast off the idea that along with freedom of the press comes great responsibility.  And they’re just as bad as anyone else in the camp of the deranged.  The prickishness and the derangement will continue, it appears, until someone with sufficient authority can put a stop to it, or (more likely) until the pricks and the deranged finally realize that nobody fucking cares about their little tantrums.  And by “nobody,” I mean “nobody on either fucking side.

Meanwhile, Ivanka Trump will just keep smiling and ignoring you.  Just like all the hot girls and hot boys did back in school when you acted like a fucking idiot, which was probably most of the time.

__________________

* I can state this with some authority, because I don’t see the left and right coasts seceding.  The clowns in California who want to break away, well, they’re just clowns…and not particularly funny ones.  If literally half of the country was up in arms about Donald Trump, there would be an actual, hot civil war going on right now.  The fact is that it wouldn’t even take half of the country — but it would take a number of highly-placed politicians, none of whom are interested in a repeat of the late unpleasantness of the 1860’s and would like to keep their phoney-baloney jobs at just about any cost.  That goes for you, too, Texas.

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So, that’s how you’re gonna play it.

H/T:  Instapundit.

So yeah, homeless.  Eight years of Obama and the homeless are still with us.  I’d like to know what Obama was going to do about that back in 2008.  Because whatever he said he was going to do back then either didn’t work, or was just a lie.  Like Obamacare.

Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t need to say much about homelessness because he believes, as Reagan did, that a rising tide floats all boats.  If he can turn the economic blender up to “puree,” there are going to be a lot of people who currently don’t have jobs (but want them) going back to work.

The hard-core, long-term, chronic homeless — the boats with holes in the bottom that won’t float, regardless how high the tide — are another story.  Many of them are either incapable of working or simply won’t work.  They’re the folks Reagan gets blamed for turning out of the institutions onto the street, and for good reason:  They were costing a shitton of money and wasting resources that could have been used for other patients.  That’s harsh, but it’s an economic reality.  It’s also a constitutional reality, because the “general welfare” “clause” notwithstanding, the federal government has NO AUTHORITY to operate sanitoria for citizens who can’t deal with everyday life.  That is not one of Congress’s enumerated powers, so they can’t authorize that money be spent on such things.  If anyone has the authority to do that, it’s the states, with their own money, if it fits the guidelines of their own constitutions and laws.

Reagan closed the institutions because the federal government did not have the authority to operate them, or pay for people to live in them.  Not because he was an old meanie who’d spit in the eye of any homeless man he met in the street.

Trump, likewise, takes a pragmatic approach toward such things.  He seems to understand the Constitution better than the soi-disant Constitutional scholar who’s currently occupying space and wasting good oxygen in the Oval Office.

And yet, we have to ask:  In eight years, what has Barack Obama done for the homeless?

Since they’re still around, I’m gonna say, “not much.”  It’s easy to pontificate from your comfy chair in your nice warm office about how it’s so terrible for these folks.  But ya know, Jesus said, more or less, that we’d always have poor people.  That some of them are homeless is indeed bad.  But the hard, dirty, and unavoidable fact is that quite a few of the homeless wouldn’t come in out of the cold if you gave them a free place to sleep and eat and get the occasional once-over by someone with a medical degree.  (Because we do, and they don’t, for their own reasons, most of them having to do with trust — which they ain’t got much of.)

So stick that in your bong and suck it, Mother Jones.  Or get out on the street and start helping instead of pontificating.

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