Fixing A Mistake

 

Many investors have had the experience of buying the stock of a failing company and seeing the price decline.  Such mistakes are common. The thing to do after making one is to acknowledge one was wrong,  cut one’s losses,  try to learn from the experience, and move on instead of riding the loser all the way into the ground.  The same thing can apply in other areas of life.

Republican voters  made a bad mistake in 2016 during their presidential primaries. The party was in a good position for success. Many Americans wanted a change after Obama’s administration, and the Democrats were nominating an especially unpopular and unlikeable candidate in Hillary Clinton.  Besides Donald Trump there were sixteen or so others seeking the nomination of the Republicans.  An easy half dozen of them  – say Cruz, Kasich, Rubio, Bush, Walker, and Perry – had resumes  and qualifications typical of  successful candidates for president.  All of them were better qualified than Donald Trump in terms of knowledge, experience, and temperament.  (Carly Fiorina, for example, had the same amount of experience in government as Trump, none, but was far better informed, more thoughtful, and more decently behaved than he was. The same goes for Ben Carson.  Trump was not even the only outsider for whom disgruntled Republicans could have voted.)

Yet the voters chose Trump.  Now they and their party are stuck with him and the results.  Republicans got hammered in the midterm elections of 2018, and are at risk of losing the senate this year. In Joe Biden the Democrats have nominated a dull, uninspiring, political careerist who has not campaigned much,  who gives the appearance of having lost at least a step or  two mentally,  and who seems on his way to trouncing an incumbent president  in next week’s election. That should tell Republicans something. They need to recognize they made a mistake, accept the consequences, and try not to repeat  it.  In the next few days they should focus on holding the senate and let what happens to Trump happen.

Then, assuming Biden wins, they should  rebuild as a party of limited government, free international trade, lower spending and deficits, less rule by bureaucrats and regulations, freedom of expression, strong national defense and alliances, economic progress,  limits on executive power, and social tolerance and respect.  They should reject Trump and his brand  and style of ignorant, ultra-nationalist, xenophobic, yahoo  populism.   If so they should have a good opportunity in 2022. The Dems are likely to overplay their hands once they get in power, and the economic and social consequences of the epidemic are unlikely to be done  by then.    

 

Voting Time

 For a good while this year I thought that Trump, bad as he was, should be reelected as the lesser evil. I have changed my mind for several reasons and now think the country will be better off with Trump gone.  (I still think he was less bad four years ago than Hillary Clinton.) The main reason is Trump himself.  He has been an arrogant, ignorant,  bullying, deeply un-presidential, bombastic,  jackass all along.  People hoped he would learn to behave decently  over  time. That has not happened, and he has continued to show he lacks the level of character, temperament, dignity, and knowledge minimally required for his office.  Now at a  time when political advisors surely are telling  to clean up his act and behave more nearly as an American president should if he wants to be reelected, he is getting worse.  He has refused to commit to an peaceful transition if he loses the election, tweeted that Osama is still alive, and President Obama had members of Seal Team Six murdered to cover that fact up, joked publicly about wanting a third or fourth term, told people who might want to dispute the results of the election in the streets to stand by, and at least sort of endorsed QAnon’s malicious nonsense.  It enough to make one wonder about the firmness of his grip on reality.

His proponents argue that one should overlook his character and personality because of his policies and actions. That can be reasonable  in judging among the usually sorry lot of politicians, but it goes only so far and for me not far enough to excuse Trump. Besides the policies and actions have not been consistently good.  Some  have been beneficial – lowering taxes, reducing or eliminating some harmful regulations, defeating ISIS, appointing better judges than Hillary would have, and favoring school choice, among others.  But he has been wrong on spending and deficits, wrong on international trade, wrong on NATO, wrong on freedom of the press, wrong on the value of immigrants, and troubling wrong in his disdain for limits on presidential power and his penchant for ruling by executive order and decree. To put it mildly, he is no principled friend of limited government. He has shown little evidence of principles of any sort, and there is no reason to believe his good actions in a second term would have to outweigh his bad.

Also the Democrats look less threatening than they did at the start of the year. The candidates of the  hard, authoritarian left did not win the party’s  nomination.  This does not mean that electing Biden will be a good thing apart from getting rid of Trump.  Biden is a dishonest, wrongheaded, big government Democrat who will do some bad and unpleasant things if he can, but he is not an America hating leftist.  He appears to have lost a step or two mentally but does not seem far enough gone that he will be the left’s puppet or that  Harris will  remove him using the 25^th Amendment.  The Dems are due for a turn in the White House soon anyway. It might make sense strategically for them to have it now when the Republican alternative is so poor,  the Democrat candidate is a likely one termer, and whoever wins in November probably will be bogged down for a year or two dealing with the epidemic and its consequences.  

I voted early, and I voted for Jo Jorgensen. 

Hearings on Judge Barrett

 

Regardless of whether one likes the nomination of Judge Barrett to the Supreme Court, and I would have preferred a libertarian leaning judge of the sort Trump would never nominate, she is competent, intelligent, and qualified.  Yet during their speeches and questioning the Democrats have made it clear that their disgraceful behavior with Kavanaugh  was less an aberration than a template.

Democrats have spent a lot of time making campaign stump speeches, asking  Barrett questions about specific possible cases that they knew no nominee would answer, impugning her character,  and trying to make her guilty by association for Trump’s real or imagined failings. It's a repulsive display of phoniness, ignorance, pettiness,  irrelevance, and malice.

Senator Hirono went beyond even her colleagues and asked Barrett if she had ever sexually assaulted anyone. One presumes the senator was hoping Barrett would confess to holding victims down while Kavanaugh raped them. Hirono and others also pretended to be offended when Barrett spoke of sexual preference instead of using the supposedly correct term “sexual orientation”.  In the first place the two terms are fairly synonymous in ordinary usage. Beyond that it is a little strange for people who believe that a person’s manifestly genetically determined sex is merely a matter of choice to pretend to be morally outraged over any suggestion that a person’s conjecturally genetically influenced sexual preference might be other than determined at birth and from on high.  One can wonder if they have ever known a person whose preferences changed over time from heterosexual to homosexual or vice versa. Such people are not that rare, but as we are dealing with politicians, it is probably useless to look for much of a connection between their statements and experience or reality.   

Still the show has been useful. It has been a good reminder that the Dems in the senate are what they are, and that if one cannot stomach Trump, one should vote for other Republicans in races where they are the lesser evil while picking a third party person in the presidential contest.

I wish some Republican toward the end of the day would do something like the following:

“In an effort to match the level of intellect and relevance of the questioning from some of my Democrat colleagues I will now ask you three questions. 

Do you like pancakes?

Were you ever stung by a dead bee?

And, finally, do you know the way to San Jose?”

 

It would be an appropriate way to wrap up the farce.

 

I'm with Jo, Without the e

 

I did not watch all of the debate between Trump and Biden last week. I would watch as much as I felt like standing and then switch the channel for a while, (there was a good Star Trek episode on), but I saw enough to get the flavor of the thing. My overall impression was that it was sufficiently bad that if Strother Martin had walked to the stage and shouted that he nominated Liberty Valance,  people might have cheered, not knowing who the vicious outlaw was, but figuring anyone should be better than these two.

Trump was bombastic, arrogant, rude, unfocused, dishonest, deeply un-presidential, and generally personally repulsive. Biden was rude,  dishonest, and un-presidential, but at least in the segments I saw,  was not bombastic  or as pugnaciously misbehaved as Trump. He avoided showing signs of being demented – though some people are claiming his advisors were feeding him lines over a wire. Neither one came across as someone who could be trusted with a seat on  the local school board or hospital district.

Throughout the campaign I have thought that people should reluctantly re-elect Trump as the lesser evil, given the Democrats’ swerve to the left.  Now I am rethinking that – partially because of the debate but also because of some points writers have made about longer term strategy.  With the one exception of Reagan’s defeating Carter, being re-elected, and followed by Bush’s winning what was effectively his third term, the two parties have taken turns every eight years in holding the presidency  since Eisenhower was elected. So it is reasonable to expect that the country will have a Democrat president sometime soon, probably  in four years if not this year.  If Trump wins, we will have four more years of his ignorant populism, awful policies on trade, over reaching rule by executive order, and big government, big deficit policies, perhaps to be followed by a strongly leftist Democrat. If Biden wins, we will have a one term, fairly moderate Democrat whose administration will be bogged down for its first year or two in dealing with the epidemic and its economic consequences,  and who could be followed in four years by a Republican.  The country needs a major party that at least nominally favors smaller government, reduced deficits, freedom of expression,  international trade, and less regulation and rule by bureaucratic or executive decree. That is what Republicans have been, but it is not what Trump is, to put it mildly. With him gone the party might get back to that.

So I now think that while Trump may be the lesser evil in the very short term (though that is not certain), he likely is the greater evil for the middle and long term. So right now in this election, I am with  Jo. That’s without the “e”. I plan to vote for Jo Jorgensen.  I cannot support Biden and Harris, and no  longer care to support or put up with Trump.  It may be only a protest vote, but goodness knows the two characters in that debate deserve to be protested against.