Laughing at the Jefe

 

I know many people are worried about the state of the republic. There are things to worry about - from Trump and company, from their opponents, and especially from authoritarian left and right wing enemies of the liberal order and liberal principles of individual rights. People who care about that order and those principles should expect to have to stand up and promote and defend them.

However, they should not let worry get the best of them or become too fearful. I agree with those who have pointed out how lucky we in America are to live in a country where the maximum jefe, in command of the armed forces and the federal secret police and prosecutors, announces he is altering the fundamental law of the nation by decree, and people just laugh at him, and nothing happens. It is still a great country. It would be a better one if we could create a political environment in which even a demented big chief and his gang would know better than to try such a stunt. But we should recognize and appreciate how well off we are.

Finishing the Job

 

The Israeli armed forces have begun a land campaign on Lebanon against Hezbollah. This war and their continuing war against Hamas in Gaza are conflicts of civilization against savagery and barbarism. Americans should be unequivocally for Israel in this war and against the savages. I would guess most of us are. However, our government is not. In Gaza the Biden administration has advocated consistently for an end to the fighting that would leave Hamas surviving as a functional organization, an outcome which would be a strategic victory for Hamas and Iran. In Lebanon it has pushed for restraint and diplomacy at a time when Israel seems to be in a good position to eradicate the menace of Hezbollah, a diplomatic outcome which would deprive Israel of a needed victory and leave Hezbollah in place, dangerous, and functioning. Here at home Biden and Harris have treated pro- Hamas, antisemitic, anti-civilization leftist as very fine people, and officials have appeared less concerned about attacks on and threats against American Jews than about conservative parents getting uppity at school board meetings.

The whole thing is disgraceful, and, for Harris, disqualifying. I hope the Israelis ignore our officials and get the job done fully and decisively both for themselves and the rest of us.

Pressuring Judges

Many years ago on road trips with my parents, I would see billboards along the highway reading “Save our Republic. Impeach Earl Warren.” They were put up by members of the John Birch Society who disliked some of the Warren court’s legal opinions and saw him as in league with or at least enabling communists in the United States. There was never any chance that Warren would be impeached, and it seems likely that many of the Birchers knew it. Probably the idea was to stir up hostility to the court and pressure it to take a different direction in its rulings.

This week Joe Biden announced proposals for term limits for justices on the supreme court. Since this would require a constitutional amendment, there is no chance that it will happen, and it is likely that even Biden knows it. Probably the idea is to stir up hostility to the court and pressure it to take a different direction in its rulings.

Making political threats against judges whose opinions one dislikes is a bad idea. There are good reasons the constitution established a judiciary independent of and equal to the legislative and executive branches of government. The Birchers were a bunch of cranks that few people took seriously. Biden is the president of the United States with many members of his party supporting his scheme. It is almost enough to make a person take the cynical view that Democrats and their public relations people in the traditional media might not be sincere in their bleating about saving democracy and preserving guardrails and restoring norms of political conduct, but only pretending for political advantage.

 

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.

Call It Too Close to Call

 

In most elections voting (other than some protest voting) requires deciding which bad candidate is less bad. With the Republicans picking Trump, and the Democrats sticking with Biden, that surely is the situation this year. Neither of them should be elected president, but unless something surprising happens, one of them will be. I have thought that, bad as Biden is, Trump is enough worse that it was clear who was the lesser evil, and Biden should be reelected. I believed that while still respecting the opinions of people who think the plans and policies of the Republicans are better than those of the Democrats or see the green left, the bigoted DEI left, and the anti-civilization pro-Hamas left for what they are want a bulwark against them or figure they should pick the scoundrel likely to do them less direct harm and so favor Trump.

Now I am not sure, because of what has happened in the last few weeks. In the war in Gaza Israel is right and should win, and Hamas’s savages are wrong and should lose. Seven months ago Biden seemed to know that. Now he does not and has betrayed an ally in wartime. The betrayal goes beyond the disgraceful public carping and refusal to give Israel needed munitions. He and his administration effectively have switched sides by advocating for the wrong outcome of the war. If Hamas survives as a capable force, the war will have been a strategic victory for it and its masters in Iran. An end of the fighting without Israel finishing Hamas off in Rafah would produce that result. The savages would have won, and civilization would have lost. Yet that is what Biden and his administration favor. Meanwhile Trump, who I feared would abandon Ukraine, did not go on the warpath against the speaker’s plan to give more weapons and munitions to that country, giving some reason for hope he would show some sense there.

Right now if people asked me who in this race would be less bad for the country, I could not give them an answer. The best recommendation I could make would be to watch both of the scoundrels until November and hope something happens to make the right choice clear, as I thought it was a while back. (As I have written before,  my plan  now is not to vote for either of them, but most people won't see that as an option and will settle on one or the other.)

Biden and Israel

 

As a matter of humanity and human sympathy the killing of seven innocent civilians in a mistaken attack by the Israeli armed forces was horrible. As a factor in deciding whether and how much the United States should side with Israel in its war against Hamas’s savages, it is irrelevant. Informed people know that horrible mistakes happen in war. (I have read that some GIs in World War II began calling the Ninth Air Force the American Luftwaffe after some of its mistaken attacks on American positions.) They also know there inevitably will be civilians killed in wars where civilians are present and especially in a war where the “fighters” on one side have made it a policy to hide among civilians. According to reports from experts, the Israeli armed forces have made extraordinary efforts to minimize casualties among civilians. That is all, and probably even more than, a reasonable person can request of them. In this war Israel is right and should win, and Hamas is wrong and should be destroyed.

Biden began well by siding unequivocally with Israel at the start of the war. Lately he and people in his administration began equivocating in an effort to appease voters in the pro-Hamas left. Now there are stories in the news suggesting that they may be moving away from supporting Israel. That would be a repugnant betrayal of not only a trusting ally but of the cause and values of liberal civilization. If they do not care about that, they should consider that it also could be a political mistake. Neither Biden nor Trump is an attractive candidate. Foreign policy has been one important point in Biden’s favor – especially given his generally good job on Ukraine and the fear that Trump might abandon Ukraine. If Biden turns against Israel, it could cause people to see him as being no more trustworthy on foreign policy than Trump and as throwing in again with the left, making a formerly fairly easy choice between him and Trump less so. It would me. Sitting this one out or a protest vote for the Libertarian might look pretty good. Sometimes the lesser evil is just too rough.

A Time for Hobson's Choosing

 

I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this. I had hoped Republican voters would come to their senses and nominate DeSantis or Haley. I had hoped Smith would get a conviction in one of his cases against Trump. I had hoped Biden would move toward the center, or the Democrats, fearing defeat, would replace him on their ticket with a moderate. None of it happened, and so here we are. Unless something very unusual happens, if they both stay alive for the next eight months, it will be Trump versus Biden in November.

Biden is a bad president. He is a dishonest, lying, unprincipled party hack and scoundrel, as his record over several decades makes obvious. He shows evidence of being in some stage of at least intermittent dementia. His administration has been mainly a leftist one. He and his administration are in bed with some really bad people on the green left and the bigoted DEI left, and recently have become more sympathetic toward the pro-Hamas left. If Biden is reelected and gets some of the things he wants, people’s lives would be worse. Electric power would become less reliable, and it would become harder or impossible to buy the car or appliances one would like. The problems coming from the immigration of too many poor and unskilled people into a welfare state would get worse. Higher taxes and more regulations would make the country poorer than it would be otherwise. Increased spending by the government would add more to the dangerously high federal debt. The nanny state would become more intrusive and obnoxious, and the IRS, the EPA, the FBI, and the rest of the gang more nearly unrestrained.

Then there is Donald Trump, a man who should never be considered 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. His vice president has refused to support him for another term. Other serious and decent people who worked with him in his first administration have warned that he is dangerously unfit to serve. It is possible he would abandon Ukraine to Putin, effectively abandon NATO, and throw away much of our victory in the cold war. His vile demagoguery takes the country’s already low level of civility in politics lower. He has demanded full immunity from any crimes he might want to commit when back in office (including murdering political opponents according to his lawyers). He shows no sense of being or wanting to be bound by laws or the Constitution.

In 2016 P. J. O’Rourke argued for supporting Hillary Clinton on the grounds that, while she was wrong about almost everything, she was wrong within the ordinary boundaries of American politics, while Trump might do something really crazy and destructive. That summarizes the case for supporting Biden for those of us not  Democrats or leftists. The case for supporting Trump is that the plans and policies of the Republicans generally are less bad than those of the Democrats, and the hope that Trump would mainly follow those and be restrained from doing anything really crazy and destructive, likely producing a better outcome for the country than we would get with Biden.

It is truly a Hobson’s choice, and I can see good reasons for people deciding either way. There are serious people I respect who have picked Biden and others who have picked Trump. My choice based on what I know now is that the less bad choice is to elect Biden and work for Republican majorities in both houses to mitigate the damage he would do. But it is not a choice a person can be comfortable with.

The Coming Election

 

Joe Biden is a bad president. He is a dishonest, lying, unprincipled party hack and scoundrel, as his record over several decades makes obvious. He shows evidence of being in some stage of at least intermittent dementia. He and his administration are in bed with some really bad people on the green left and the bigoted DEI left. If he is reelected and gets some of the things he wants, it would make people’s lives worse. Electric power would become less reliable, and it would become harder or impossible to buy the car or appliances one would like. (If Biden wins, it might be a good idea to buy a backup generator, purchase and store for future use functional, affordable appliances while one can, and maybe trade for a new car a little sooner than usual and plan to keep it a long time.) The problems coming from the immigration of too many poor and unskilled people into a welfare state would get worse. Higher taxes and more regulations would make the country poorer than it would be otherwise. Increased spending by the government would add more to the dangerously high federal debt. The nanny state would become more intrusive and obnoxious, and the IRS, the EPA, the FBI, and the rest of the gang more nearly unrestrained. Yet with all that, Biden should be the preferred choice in November.

That is how bad Donald Trump is. He should never be considered for any public office in the United States. He is an arrogant, vulgar, bullying, graceless, power mad ignoramus, and he doesn’t hide that 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 clear lately that he regrets nothing about the attempted coup except that it failed. He has repeatedly and apparently sincerely expressed his admiration and affection for the world’s dictators. It is likely he would abandon Ukraine to Putin, effectively abandon NATO, and throw away much of our victory in the cold war. His vile demagoguery takes the country’s already low level of civility in politics lower. He has demanded full immunity from any crimes he might want to commit when back in office (including murdering political opponents according to his lawyers). He shows no sense of being or wanting to be bound by laws or the Constitution. His vice president has refused to support him for another term. Other serious and decent people who worked with him in his first administration have warned that he is dangerously unfit to serve, something we have not seen when other presidents of either party have tried for a second term.

People who revere the Constitution should not vote for a man who disdains it and wants to overturn it. People who believe in limited government should not vote for a man who demands unlimited power. People who think this country needs to work with trusting allies to defend itself and freedom and liberal democracy in the world should not vote for a man who doesn’t. Republicans and others who usually vote for Republican candidates for president should grit their teeth and realize that between the two choices they have, Biden is the right one. They also can work for Republican majorities in both houses of congress to mitigate the damage Biden can do, something which is a good idea since Biden 2.0 may need all the mitigating we can find.

Lincoln's Birthday 2024

 

Yesterday was Lincoln’s birthday. I suppose there were speeches and celebrations in some places, but it seems that people do not celebrate it much these days – retailers aside. They should. It is good for people to see that such greatness is possible, especially these days. It is easy to be of two minds in thinking about today’s politics in light of Lincoln. A person can feel better about the political situation by remembering that he and the country he led faced far worse and more dangerous things than we do and came through successfully. So maybe we will too if we work at it. But he can surely feel worse after studying Lincoln and reading his writings and speeches and then looking at the sort of people who have sought and won the presidency in the last few years, especially at the leading candidates from both major parties this year. It can ruin a person’s lunch, dinner, and breakfast the next morning. Even worse it is not necessary to measure Trump and Biden against Lincoln or other great presidents to see how bad the likely present choices are. Comparing those two to Adlai Stevenson, Barry Goldwater, Hubert Humphrey, or Bob Dole would make the point well enough. It is a mess, and if nothing changes, we will suffer for it.

Time to Hang It Up

 

Yesterday the special prosecutor did not exonerate Biden as Democrats have claimed. His report said Biden knowingly broke the law in taking classified documents and keeping them when he was a private citizen. The prosecutor declined to recommend prosecution because Biden was cooperative with investigators, his offenses were less severe than the ones with which Trump is charged, and as a well-intentioned elderly man with failing memory, he likely would appear too sympathetic to jurors for them to convict him. The report contained various examples of seriously failing memory. (Attacks by Democrats on the prosecutor as some sort of MAGA agent are both silly since Garland picked the man for the job and hypocritical enough to make a person wonder how serious their worries about eroding respect for the legal system really are.) Biden’s problem is not his age. It is his mental condition. He gives easily noticed signs of being in some stage of at least intermittent dementia with memory loss. He is not fully up to the job of serving as president now, and will become less so over time. (A president is accompanied by the “nuclear football” with which he can order nuclear retaliation. We should hope that Biden or those functioning as Edith Wilson and Colonel House if things have come to that have delegated control of the football to someone, such as Secretary Austin, who is consistently up to the responsibility.) Pointing out correctly that Trump is an ignorant sociopath who often sounds like a raving lunatic changes none of the facts about Biden. The world situation is tougher than it has been since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the country needs a president who is competent, mentally and otherwise. Biden should pull a Lyndon Johnson.

Biden's Debt Forgiveness

 

Biden’s plan to forgive three hundred billion dollars of student loan debt is not only bad. It is much worse in important ways than other recent handouts from government. The bailouts of investment banks and other financial institutions in 2008 and 2009 were accompanied by some arguments that they were less bad and less costly than the alternative of the government having to pay even more through the FDIC and other guarantees in an economic depression. Those arguments may or may not have been valid, but they at least provided a cover story. Similarly when the government sent citizens so-called stimulus money in 2020 and 2021, there were claims that the payments were necessary to keep the economy from falling too far or even justified as compensation of a sort for the burdens the government placed on people during the epidemic. Those claims do not hold up well, but they too provided a cover story.

There is no plausible cover story for this one. Biden is attempting to buy votes by shifting the burden of some people’s often poor decisions in borrowing onto other people who either did not make similar decisions or paid up if they did. It is a simple case of robbing Peter to pay Paul in the hope that Paul will be stimulated to vote for Democrats in November. In the long run it brings the risk of incentivizing people to take out large student loans in the hope they will not have to pay them back and the moral hazard of telling people that they should not worry too much about making bad decisions, since one politician or another facing a tough election will bail them out. It definitely harms the country. To function well a society needs a large number of people who deal honestly, honor their word and commitments, and pay their debts. Biden and company just sent those people a message that they are suckers.

It may not even play well for the Democrats politically. There are lots of voters who either never took out student loans or paid them off fair and square. They may be annoyed. I hope so.

Next

 Trump is gone, and that is a good thing. The Republicans made a bad mistake during the primaries in 2016.  They selected a man who was neither decent as a human being nor qualified to hold office. He was defendable, if at all, only on the idea that his administration’s policies, as distinct from his behavior and desires, were less bad that what the Democrats would do. Many people who were no fans of the Democrats decided before the election that the behavior and desires were bad enough, and the record on policies mixed enough that he needed to go. His inexcusable behavior since the election should have been enough to make those who voted for him reach the same conclusion.  Prior to December 14^th, it was only foolish, mendacious, disgraceful, and harmful to the country. From then to January 6^th it was also a blatant attempt to remain in power by illegal and unconstitutional means.  He deserves impeachment and conviction for that, irrespective of whatever blame he should have for the riot on the 6^th.

Now the Democrats are in control of the executive branch, and that is a bad thing, necessary to get rid of Trump, but still bad. Biden is not an America-hating leftists, but he is a dishonest, wrongheaded, big government Democrat who will do the country a good amount of harm. His policies on taxes and regulation and his choices for judges likely will be worse than Trump’s. He will be worse on school choice, energy, the right to self defense, and maybe spending and deficits  though he would have to go some to outdo Trump there. (On the other hand he should be better on trade, NATO, foreign relations in general, holding local police responsible for their actions, and far better on public behavior and demeanor. He at least is not an enemy of the republic, and at the end Trump was.) 

The behavior of the bureaucrats likely will become much worse.  Biden will follow Trump's practice of getting what he wants by executive order, and many of those orders will give officials more authority. There likely also will be a change of tone apart from anything official.  There are envious, power hungry, resentful people out there who are eager to show  their fellow citizens who is boss, and many of them are employed in the federal bureaucracy.  They now will have more weight to throw around and probably feel freer to throw it. The country still has an independent judiciary, and people probably will need to be ready to take advantage of that and file lawsuits  as needed.

Then there is the risk of political persecution.  John Brennan has declared that libertarians should be treated as enemies of the state. One can hope that this is only an isolated rant from a  nasty authoritarian, but I have not heard of any of Biden’s people disagreeing.  Reporters should ask the new press secretary how the president feels about turning the secret police loose on political dissidents.  A wrong answer there would immediately make his administration  more authoritarian than Trump’s ever was.

In politics the next couple of years will not be fun, and people who believe in the liberal ideas of liberty and individual rights will have a fight on their hands.  Trump and his flavor of bad are gone, but the game has not gotten any easier.

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.