Trouble at the Debate

 

A couple of things went very wrong Thursday for the people running the country. The first and most obvious is that millions of people saw directly that Joe Biden is in some stage of at least intermittent dementia and is not qualified to serve as president. The second is that millions of people who might not have thought about it before got pretty clear evidence that they had been lied to consistently about Biden’s condition by people in the traditional media.

Such lying is fairly typical behavior for many in that business. They lied for years about the origin of the Covid epidemic. They lie about apocalyptic claims on climate change. They lied about the riots in the summer of 2020. They lie about conditions on the Mexican border. They lie about critical race theory, DEI, BLM, “systematic racism”, and anti-white bigotry. They lie about the politicization of the FBI and the DOJ. They lie about the war in Gaza. They lied about Hunter Biden. They even lie a little about Donald Trump, which is silly since there is plenty of true stuff to go after there. What is not typical is getting caught at it so fully red handed by so many people.

They are important supporters of and public relations agents for the Democratic party and the bureaucratic state. To be effective they have to be believed. Public skepticism is the main danger for them. What happened on Thursday night should have made and probably did make for more skeptics.

Jerry West

 

One of the things that remind a man he is getting old is seeing the great players of his boyhood die off. There was another one today – Jerry West. Bill Russell and Jim Brown went in the last couple of years. Mantle, Musial, Williams, Unitas, Aaron, Berra, and most of the rest have been gone a while. Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax, and Oscar Robertson are the only ones I can think of who are still alive, and they are very old men. And we boys who followed them and collected their cards in the 1950s and early 60s are old enough.

Jerry West was special – a great offensive player whom Russell rated as also a great defensive player. He was one of my favorites. I still remember vividly how good he was.

Pride in June

 

The first week of June is a very important one in the history of the armed forces of the United States. Between June 4^th and 6^th,1942  an outnumbered and outgunned American naval force defeated the Japanese navy at Midway in the most decisive and historically important naval battle since Trafalgar, ending Japan’s offensive in the Pacific. On June 6^th,1944, American forces landed in Normandy, securing their beachhead and beginning the great campaign leading to the destruction of Nazi Germany.

It’s a free country, and people can select what they want to be proud of and when they want to show their pride. For me this June, it will be the armed forces of the United States from the time of the revolution to the present. This year is the 80^th anniversary of the invasion in Normandy. I have read that there are major commemorations every five years on June 6^th , and that this year’s may be the last one with any veterans of the battle attending. We should honor and be proud of them and their valor especially.

Trump's Conviction

 

Statement A:

Donald Trump is a man who is unfit for any public office in the United States. He is an arrogant, vulgar, bullying, graceless, power mad ignoramus, and he doesn’t hide the fact. From December 14^th 2000 to January 6^th ,2001, he functioned as an enemy of the republic, conspiring and attempting to overthrow the government and remain in power illegally and unconstitutionally. The rally and riot of January 6^th had no other purpose. His order to Pence to change the results of the election was by itself an attempted coup. In 2022 he called in writing for overturning the Constitution and returning him to power immediately. He has made it plain recently that the only thing he regrets about the coup is that if failed. He is erratic to the point of instability, and apparently incapable of strategic thought beyond superficial transactional considerations.

Statement B:

The basis for the indictment of Trump in New York was farcically weak. The prosecutor was a Democrat party hack and scoundrel who acted for purely political reasons. The judge was another party man clearly biased in favor of the prosecution. There is evidence that the Biden administration was involved in the case in an attempt to ruin the leading candidate of the opposition party. The whole thing was a travesty and miscarriage of justice that Trump’s supporters have rightly called worthy of a banana republic. It also created a dangerous precedent, made millions of people more convinced that the ruling establishment is both corrupt and their enemy, and weakened the civil order.

These statements are not mutually exclusive. Both can be true, and I think they are. People celebrating this should be ashamed. They also should realize that from now on it is going to be harder to take their homilies about democracy and the sanctity of the rule of law very seriously. Besides that,  the thing probably will not even work. Unless the judge sends Trump to jail and keeps him from functioning as a candidate, it likely has raised the probability of Trump winning in November. If he does win, and this helps him do it, it would serve the people who did it right.