Another great post on Andy’s blog: “Colonel of Truth.” A friend and fellow Marine has a way with words. The New Protestors!
Copy and paste
https://acoloneloftruth.blogspot.com/2020/09/trumps-ruthless-protestors-rock-north.html
Originally posted 2020-09-22 10:56:57.
Victor Davis HansonSeptember 13, 2020
Media bias is not new.
In addition to the Russian collusion hoax and the phone-call impeachment farce, who can forget the marquee media toadies of JournoList and the release of John Podesta’s email trove?
Or the moderator Donna Brazile’s primary debate questions, leaked through CNN, or Candy Crowley’s hijacking of a debate as moderator-turned-real-time-hack “fact-checker”?
Nothing then is new to the media’s fusion and collusion with the “progressive party.”
Yet never in American history have mainstream journalists not merely promoted a candidate but actively fused with his political candidacy to the point of warping, fabricating, and Trotskyizing the news and indeed history itself.
The trope of a vast charade to create an illusionary powerful figure out of nothing is an old one in fiction, Hollywood and television. We remember “The Great and Powerful” Wizard of Oz fakery, a formidable screen image created backstage by gears and levers operated by a tiny man “behind the curtain.” Similar is the famous scene in an episode of the old Star Trek series, depicting a near comatose on-air John Gill used as a televised prop by his puppeteers, in a utopian federation project gone haywire.
But reality has outdone art with the Biden campaign. The concoction is holistic, from the mundane construction of a fantasy, on-the-go candidate to the supposed middle-of-the road old Joe Biden from Scranton radiating an aura of kindness and moderation in times of plague, panic, and protest.
For six months, Biden has run a Zoom campaign on the pretext of mandatory quarantines—our current version of a 19th-century, stationary presidential candidate, who campaigned by spitting out wit and wisdom while immovable on his front porch.
Biden has conducted no free-wheeling, unscripted press conferences. He will not do extended one-on-one interviews with a disinterested journalist. He rarely will even try Trump-like cameo appearances on CNN or MSNBC to answer unscripted questions from supporters. His press events instead are Orwellian, requiring a media mass suspension of disbelief.
The questions are canned. They are submitted in advance by “journalists,” whether formally or via electronic chatter. The inquiries are obsequious—seldom a word about Hunter Biden, China, Biden’s troubling racist remarks, his handsy past, his scary cognitive lapses, or his “contract” with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Instead the softball, known-in-advance inquiries are in spirit carried over from the Obama years, phrased in the manner of “Were you outraged enough by Trump’s outrage?”
Biden’s Oz functionaries seemingly are always experimenting with all sorts of screen props. The trick is to discover how best their challenged candidate can square the circle of completing sentences and remaining semi-coherent, while not giving away the game that his illusionists are feeding him answers to synthetic questions.
When asked point-blank on Fox News by Brett Baier whether Biden used a stealth teleprompter, his national press flak, T.J. Ducklo would not answer with a simple yes or no. Instead, he went on the attack, with the fossilized accusation that right-wing Fox News asks too many partisan questions.
So we were left with a de facto “yes”: Biden does read off a stealthy teleprompter when answering canned press questions—and gives the impression he does not.
But Biden, like the mirage of the Wizard of Oz, nonetheless can’t always keep the curtain closed.
When he strains to see the teleprompter that sits just behind, and thus out of sight of, his camera lens, he slips and mutters “bring it closer”—reminding any who watch, except the media that helps collude in these orchestrations, that the question asked is not a serious one, but a prompt to facilitate the proper nonspontaneous response.
Yet even then Biden cannot act out the part of the Star Trek federation’s addled Gill without someone either giving him the prewritten answer on the teleprompter or writing it out for him in real-time. Sometimes if Biden is not reading a hidden teleprompter script, he looks down in panic for notes or his smartphone instructions in ways that only expose the sheer ridiculousness of this faux media-staged event.
Sometimes he shows off family pictures on screen that seemingly inadvertently reflect and expose the ghostly presence of a teleprompter’s reflection in the background. On other occasions when speaking, Biden searches in vain for his “schedule” and asks handlers to fetch it, whatever that exactly means.
In a presidential campaign first, Biden even reads out the written directives of his controllers as if to say “I’m not really saying this myself, but so what?”
So not surprisingly, during one of these sessions, out came a reference to his script’s talking point “topline” headings. When faking impromptu answers, Biden bumps into and voices his handlers’ notation of “end of quotation.”
Occasionally a “citizen” questioner sort of rebels from the media Borg and asks an unapproved question (e.g. “I’m just going to be honest Mr. Biden, I was told to go off this paper, but I can’t. We need the truth and I am a part of the truth”). In reaction, Biden’s handlers and fact-checkers rush to assure the public that the approved question was written by the questioner’s sympathetic organization rather than from Team Biden itself—as if we are supposed to believe the campaign had no idea what its own surrogates would ask.
Sometimes the effort is scary. When old photos reappear in a CNN puff piece about a younger Biden holding his young son at a long-ago Washington Redskins game, the team logo—the now-politically incorrect Redskins logo—is airbrushed from his son’s stocking cap. And then presto, legions of “disinterested” “fact-checkers” in the media emerge to confess that Biden, not CNN, supplied the doctored image.
But, in turn, the Biden campaign assures the press that the doctoring was only for “copyright” reasons, as if candidates routinely photoshop out all the cap logos they wear. The impression is that Biden is terrified that his new leftist friends in the Ministry of Truth are combing his past and ordering embarrassing moments to go down the memory hole.
As a general rule, the Soviet-style apologia for the media-Biden fusion—usually outsourced to a now utterly corrupt left-wing institution called “fact-checking”—only solidifies the fact that the media and the Biden campaign are indistinguishable.
In Soviet times, one easily just assumed the opposite from Moscow’s party-line efforts and, presto, stumbled onto the truth. In the case of Biden’s optics and press conferences and appearances, we easily deduce that the downside of scripting and programming a compliant candidate far outweighs the existential risk of turning Biden loose to answer questions like a normal human being.
True, even before his cognitive decline, Biden was known in Washington as someone whose incoherent and impromptu loquaciousness usually embarrassed his friends more than hurt his enemies—in addition to his long history of plagiarism and inflating his thin résumés with false data about his past.
But with the onset of his cognitive decline, Biden’s own once-feeble social antennae are now more or less unplugged most of the day.
The result is that he has a creepy propensity to blurt out patently racist tropes as if the old inner Biden who talked of Obama as “clean” and the first “articulate” black presidential candidate, and pandered to his working-class Democratic supporters with references to the inner-city “jungle,” is now free of his harnesses, bits, and halters.
For some time, Biden unchained has shouted about “you ain’t black,” and, earlier, his Corn Pop series of inflated tales as Biden, the white knight, equipped with a chain no less, protecting the inner city from itself.
Biden showed his tough-guy mettle with putdowns of a transitorily noncompliant black journalist and sneered that he is comparable to a “junkie” and drug addict. To a liberated Biden, blacks just don’t think independently like Latinos.
Given all that, the decision of his campaign and their media stand-ins to reinsert Biden into his safe space, wheel him out for scripted occasions, and pray at least that he can follow either the teleprompter, his iPhone, or written notes in his lap, or remember his cues—without including the prompts themselves—seems understandable.
This was all known to Democratic primary voters who initially wanted little to do with Biden. The narratives advanced by primary rivals Kamala Harris and Corey Booker implied that he was either a virtual racist or cognitively challenged or both—insinuations the left-wing media was willing to fuel, in the heydays of a preferable Berrnie Sanders, Elizbeth Warren, or Beto O’Rourke prairie fire candidacy.
All that media fantasy imploded when would-be savior Michael Bloomberg proved little more than a billionaire bore and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders cranky and shrill socialist septuagenarians with even scarier agendas.
So the lightweight Biden was reflated as a sort of centrist hot air balloon to be used to float the hard-Left basket carriage beneath across the election defining line.
But fusion/collusion is not just a matter of a Potemkin veneer. Biden’s agenda is a fantasy creation. His role was to save the party from Sanders, win suburbanites, and pander to the party’s socialist sympathizers of Antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement. That is an impossible task because today’s Democratic Party is a conglomeration of squabbling tribes and looney agendas.
Biden is now ordered to keep still on the issues of the day, because what he once said to get nominated and please the Left would lose him the election. He wants to defund the police, but not to defund the police. He wants to phase out fossil fuels and end fracking but not to end fracking in Electoral College-rich Pennsylvania.
The rioting, Biden insists, is due to police brutality but not due to it entirely. Trump’s COVID policies killed thousands, but Biden’s own bromides are either identical or would be less effective.
And on and on, as Biden is made to wink and nod to the Left that his only role is to get them elected before collapsing at the finishing line.
The media thinks this will work, and so owns the project. Biden will stay sequestered, visit a key state occasionally, pop out of the plane to say he is “barnstorming” Michigan or Wisconsin and then fly back into his Biden bunker for more Zoom puff interviews—and hope progressive polls show that he can endure weekly bleeding until November 3.
Every four or five days the media will blast the airways with, “Trump is ripping out mailboxes,” “Trump won’t concede and will have to be forcibly removed,” “Trump insulted our war dead as ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’ as he hid from the rain to keep his hair dry.” Most recently Bob Woodward’s book queued up for its turn of 72 hours of smears, right after gab-bag Jeffery Goldberg’s anonymous sources faded out.
Will this joint project of progressive ideologues of the Democratic Party and the major media work?
So far the rope-a-dope has succeeded in slowing down somewhat the pace of the erosion of Biden’s lead. And Biden as the tough-talking Wizard projection will continue until, when, or if the polls show an undeniable Trump surge ahead.
For now Biden’s best hope is that some Emerald City media lackey does not play the role of the tiny dog Toto, rip away the curtain, and reveal the tiny man and his machinery behind the
Originally posted 2020-09-17 11:31:04.
For those of you who do not know who Victor Davis Hanson is, here is what Wikipedia says about him:
“Victor Davis Hanson is an American classicist, military historian, columnist, and farmer. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for National Review, The Washington Times and other media outlets. ”
For someone born, raised, and educated in California he certainly has his stuff all in one bag — as we used to say in the Corps. He will be 63 in a week
The story of all Dark Ages is that when civilizations finally prefer suicide, they do it easily, and the remnants flock to the countryside to preserve what they can—allowing the cities go on with their ritual self-destruction.
n February, New York was the world’s most dynamic metropolis. By August, the city was more like the ruins of Ephesus. It is not all that hard to blow up a culture. You can do it in a summer if you haven’t much worry about others.
When you loot and burn a Target in an hour, it takes months to realize there are no more neighborhood Target-stocked groceries, toilet paper, and Advil to buy this winter.
You can in a night assault the police, spit at them, hope to infect them with the coronavirus, and even burn them alive. But when you call 911 in a few weeks after your car is vandalized, your wallet is stolen, and your spouse is violent, and no one comes, only then do you sense that you earlier were voting for a pre-civilized wilderness.
You can burn down a Burger King in half an hour. But it will take years to find anyone at Burger King, Inc., who would ever be dumb enough to rebuild atop the charred ruins—to prepare for the next round of arson in 2021 or 2023.
Today’s looter carrying off sneakers and smartphones in 10 years will be tomorrow’s urban activist, understandably but in vain demanding stores return to a charred no man’s land, to do their fair share, and to help restore the downtown, neighborhood, inner-city, or the “community.”
We are living in the most racially polarized climate since the 1960s. America’s past, present, and future are in the process of being recalibrated entirely through the lens of one’s skin color. Columbus is reduced to nothing more than another racist white Italian sailor of a half-millennium past. Grant might as well have fought for slavery in the mind of today’s campus ignoramus. Apparently, the Antifa thug thinks he could just as easily have written the Gettysburg Address or sculpted a statue of Frederick Douglass.
The old liberal ideas of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage are being destroyed by the Left under the specious doctrines of cultural appropriation, or “acting white” or “how we look is who we are.”
A new fuzzy Jim Crow returns with racially segregated campus safe spaces and theme houses or the race-based reeducation and training sessions in the workplace—all predicated to stop racism! Somehow selecting strangers on the basis of their race to bully in a restaurant, or targeting old anonymous men and women to beat up in the street by their race, or singling out suburbanites by their race for racial taunts and profanity is redefined as reparatory justice or overdue payback—on the assumption that no one would dare say that the arson, looting, and rhetoric are descending into ever more hate-filled nihilism.
Our collective future of nationalized tribalism will become what always results when citizens identify by superficial appearance or shared religion. Just go to Lebanon, the Balkans, or Iraq to see what is in store first hand.
To survive, all groups will self-identify, at first quietly, but eventually unapologetically. Some will form alliances of self-preservation, others will war with each other. Tribal gangs, as they already do now in our streets of fire and looting, will assume they are exempt from consequences; and so will their antitheses of vigilantes who band together to guard their stores in the absence of a defunded police.
Liberal elite whites themselves are now uneasy, since the abstract doctrines they so nihilistically advocated, from defunding the police to recalibrating looting as “redistribution,” are now becoming reified and closer to home. They see that when BLM protestors jam a restaurant to demand fealty or lecture on “white privilege” or march into a suburb to wake up the commuter to apprise him of his immorality, the racialists will not qualify their agendas with “except for woke whites.”
When tribalism is distilled to its innate and terrifying essence, there are never exemptions for individuals: you are reduced to what you appear superficially as to strangers. The white felon is no different than the white Harvard president, the black shoplifter is the same as the black physicist. We are all condensed to a sort of collective nothingness, or rather a racial “allness.”
Professional sports, once an integral part of American life, appears to be nearly in ruins. Professional baseball, basketball, and football might have survived the virus, the lockdown, and the recession—and then maybe they might not have. After all, millions of the bored more quickly than expected got acculturated to the idea of soon not listening to a boring rant from LeBron James or the sad confessionals of Drew Brees.
But what the NBA and NFL, and perhaps MLB won’t survive is cultural suicide as players fragment into causes. The NBA existed on the premise that billionaires were willing to pay multimillionaires to lose billions as a prestige lark—as a franchise became a sort of a huge, showy Louis Vuitton bag. But even billionaires have limits. Snobbery and appearing cool do not always trump losing the equivalent of a Ferrari every hour or a Gulfstream each week.
The NBA, we are told, is a woke industry.
But it’s also the strangest, most nondiverse, right-wing, money-obsessed woke institution in America. More than three-quarters of the multimillionaire players are African-American. Over 90 percent of the billionaire team owners are white.
Yet the entire industry—players, coaches, owners, staff—lecture Americans ad nauseam about their supposed sins. The monotonous sermons have become transparent medieval redemptions—given the mortal sin that the NBA sold its very soul to a racist, genocidal, and totalitarian China—to recover billions abroad for the billions lost in viewership and attendance at home.
Nondiverse multimillionaires, working for even less diverse billionaires, finger-pointing at middle-class Americans on the evils of privilege, in the pay of the Chinese Communist Party, is not a way to win back fans.
Universities are in for hard times. The federal government eventually will get out of the $1.5 trillion student loan subsidy business, and force spendthrift colleges to accept their own self-created moral hazards. Charging $30,000-40,000 for tuition over Zoom is a bad business model in a recession. And the alphabet soups after the names of professors and deans will not make a bit of difference.
Thousands of college-educated protesters and rioters are not especially good advertisements for the building of lifelong character on woke university campuses. Once undergraduate institutions decided to make students socially conscious rather than educated, and once their graduates seem to be neither, then who really finds their mentors essential?
Our major cities, emerging from lockdown, and on the edge of nightly violence, remind us of what Procopius, the Byzantine historian, saw of Rome in AD 538, once the cultural and political megalopolis of the world: a mostly deserted shell of weeds, deserted streets, collapsed stone, choked fountains, and fortified villas where lawlessness reigned and feuding tribes were what was left of a government that once had enshrined habeas corpus.
No city gets a pass from history, not Athens, not Rome, not Alexandria—not Detroit, Baltimore, or Chicago.
After all, there is no rule that just because Bill Gates and Amazon headquartered in Seattle that its mayor, city council, and state governor will not abandon its signature downtown. What once made Portland great can be undone in a few weeks.
Wall Street may run the world, but it certainly does not run the New York City government. Electronic capital really does still have human legs and when the proverbial suited investor thinks he will be infected, short of toilet paper, or assaulted on the street, he leaves, taking his laptop with him. Bill de Blasio is left to govern, like a horned and bearded Visigoth, over an increasing shell of former grandeur.
To venture into San Francisco is to return in a time machine to 1855, a boomtown based on silicon chips, not gold dust, but one likewise lawless, fetid, and safe only for those with private security guards. To the casual visitor, it appears a lunatic place now recalibrated for the homeless, the looter, the assaulter—and the very rich. Crimes like public defecation and drug use, or shattering the windows of a parked car window to steal its contents are not crimes unless the targets are the well-connected.
The story of all Dark Ages is that when civilizations finally prefer suicide, they do it easily, and the remnants flock to the countryside to preserve what they can—allowing the cities to go on with their ritual self-destruction.
So it has begun to seem this endless summer.
My personal view is we have the gun to our head right now. It only has two cylinders, one has a round it it, the other is empty. In November the trigger will be pulled.
Originally posted 2020-09-01 10:33:27.
Conservatives and fair-minded liberals are alarmed that high schools are drawing up plans to teach the “1619 project,” the New York Times ’ revisionist account of race and the American founding, in history classes. The reality is turning out to be worse. The largest state in the union is poised to become one of the first to mandate ethnic studies for all high-school students, and the model curriculum makes the radical “1619 project” look moderate and balanced.
Last year California’s Assembly passed its ethnic-studies bill known as AB 331 by a 63-8 vote. Then the state department of education put forward a model curriculum so extreme and ethnocentric that the state Senate’s Democratic supermajority balked. The curriculum said among other things that “within Ethnic Studies, scholars are often very critical of the system of capitalism as research has shown that Native people and people of color are disproportionately exploited within the system.” Really? Where is the proof of this?
The bill was put on ice, but protests and riots in recent months gave Sacramento’s mavens of racial division more leverage. The education department delivered a new draft model curriculum this month, and AB 331 has been revived. It passed a Senate committee Aug. 20 and is expected to go before the full body soon. If Gov. Gavin Newsom signs it, the legislation would require all school districts to offer a semester-long ethnic studies class starting in 2025.
The model curriculum now on the education department’s website says the course should “build new possibilities for post-imperial life that promotes collective narratives of transformative resistance.” Yes, this is a course for K-12 students. It suggests teachers provide “examples of systems of power, which can include economic systems like capitalism and social systems like patriarchy.” Students can then be taught “the four ‘I’s of oppression”—ideological, institutional, interpersonal and internalized.
The state guidance includes more than 200 pages of approved course outlines. Some of these seem to mandate student political activities, potentially raising First Amendment concerns. “Students acquire tools to become positive actors in their communities to address a contemporary issue and present findings in a public forum,” says one outline. Among the approved topics: “Racism, LGBTQ rights, immigration rights, access to quality health care, income inequality,” and so on. What about the fifth “I” of indoctrination?
It’s not a coincidence that many radical left movements are infused with anti-Semitism. They posit theories of control by shadowy capitalist groups that often echo anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. One course outline tips its hat at this. “Students will write a paper detailing certain events in American history,” it says, “that have led to Jewish and Irish Americans gaining racial privilege.” What about American history? Will the have the benefit of even learning anything about our history or will that simply be skimmed over?
This is ugly stuff, a force-feeding to teenagers of the anti-liberal theories that have been percolating in campus critical studies departments for decades. Enforced identity politics and “intersectionality” are on their way to replacing civic nationalism as America’s creed. Liberals who consider themselves moderate and don’t understand the sense of urgency and assault felt by so many Americans ought to read this curriculum. And responsible statesmen in Sacramento ought to stop it.
Originally posted 2020-08-31 14:19:09.
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Aug 14, 2020
Less than three months from election day, Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans keep telling us (and themselves) that President Trump “is in trouble” in his bid for reelection. Trump’s enemies chant poll numbers like incantations, even though that juju failed spectacularly in 2016. They harp on Trump’s media-manufactured “failures” like his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his response to the ongoing riots instigated by Black Lives Matter and its Antifa brown-shirts. And as has been true from the start, the bulk of their criticisms are really about subjective and self-serving standards of “comportment” and “decorum” and “norms” that reflect the bipartisan “cognitive elite” and big-government functionaries.
But a more sober analysis suggests that the president has a faithful and energized base and a record of accomplishment compared to the Dems’ lunge to the lunatic left. Moreover, the spectacle of civic destruction, increasing violent crime, and nakedly partisan and authoritarian excesses on the part of blue-state governors and mayors will give Trump a decided edge with the bulk of ordinary Americans.
First, Trump’s economic success has been stalled not because of any missteps by his administration, but by a pandemic originating in totalitarian China and worsened by its willful obscuring of the virus’s origins and lethality. Voters with common sense and fairness know that the current recession is not Trump’s fault, and that having rescued the economy once, he can do so again. They also can see that blue-state governors have needlessly exacerbated the economic damage by imposing draconian and arbitrary lockdown orders based not on science, but on their increasingly obvious desire to wound the president politically even if it means immiserating their own citizens.
In contrast to Trump’s successful economics, over the last few months the Democrats have abandoned their traditional center-left governing philosophy and embraced a socialist ideology that for over a century has serially failed everywhere it has been tried. Indeed, during this year’s Democrat presidential primaries, the party establishment was trying to neuter Bernie Sanders and his faction just as they did in 2016. They know that socialism and its growth-killing policies like the Green New Deal are not a winning platform for the mass of voters outside the bi-coastal blue enclaves.
Yet the Dem standard-bearer Joe Biden has endorsed wacky proposals like eliminating cheap carbon-based energy, restoring punitive taxes, and increasing the redistribution of wealth through handouts like free college tuition and Medicare for all, which more centrist Democrats know are electoral poison. It’s hard to imagine that in just six months the same voters who the Dems thought would be repelled by such policies have suddenly develop affection for them.
So on that score, come November voters will have a choice between returning to the policies that created an economy that reduced unemployment to historic levels, elevated GDP to a level Obama’s court-economist claimed was impossible, increased growth in wages, and brought back manufacturing jobs that Obama sneered would require a “magic wand”; or trying once again failed policies of intrusive job-killing regulations, bloated and overweening federal bureaucracies, tax-rates that punish the productive, and an ever-expanding roster of citizens dependent on government overlords rather than looking to their families, communities, churches, states, and own characters for support in managing their lives.
Next, Donald Trump has fiercely waged war on the political correctness and the toxic “cancel culture” it engenders. He excoriates with brutal wit the preposterous charges of thought-crimes like “racism” or “xenophobia,” exposing their vapidity and hypocrisy. He shrewdly contrasts the Democrats’ neglect of average black citizens whose vote they take for granted, with his own achievements such as sentencing reform, increased aid to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and historic rates of black employment. And he mocks the prissy, pearl-clutching dudgeon of the “woke” left who ransack American history for grievous offenders to condemn, even as the monstrous crimes and genocides of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their imitators like Castro, Chavez, and Maduro, are ignored or celebrated.
Additionally, Trump has called out the Dems for endorsing the “woke” culture’s totalitarian intolerance and opposition to free speech, not to mention their eagerness to gut the Bill of Rights. On November 3, voters will have a choice between a president who defends their unalienable rights like freedom of speech, assembly, and worship, along with the right “to keep and bear arms”; or a party that wants to limit or eliminate all of them by passing ever-more onerous gun laws, imposing censorship through “hate speech” laws, and privileging casinos and violent riots over churches and temples.
Finally, he has battled the Salemite persecutions of men falsely accused of “sexual assault.” He vigorously supported Bret Kavanaugh in 2018 when the Democrats turned his televised Supreme Court confirmation hearings into a Democrat star-chamber prosecution of the jurist for an alleged 36-year-old sex crime his accuser could not substantiate with a speck of evidence. And he has ended some of the same sort of unjust, unconstitutional practices rife on college campuses for decades––an early and particularly malevolent form of “cancel culture” that has destroyed the lives of hundreds of college students.
All that would be enough to put Donald Trump back in the White House. But that’s not all.
On top of Trump’s record, the Democrats’ candidate is one of the most disastrous since George McGovern in 1972. In nearly fifty years of “public service,” Joe Biden has no record of legislative accomplishments to run on, and the few he used to brag about, such as the 1994 “tough on crime” bill, he has disowned, denounced, and desperately apologized for. The bulk of his time in the Senate has been spent tending to the interests of banks chartered in his home-state of Delaware. It was Biden who made sure government-backed student loan debt cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. Biden’s and his family’s sketchy financial dealings with China are even more troubling given that we clearly are in a cold war with that totalitarian thug-state. No surprise that the intelligence community has determined China prefers Biden in the upcoming election.
And don’t forget Biden’s history of plagiarism, gaffes, lies, and specious fabrications in anecdotes about his past. He serially accused the driver of the truck involved in the car accident that killed his wife and daughter of being drunk, thus ruining the man’s life, when in fact he wasn’t and Biden’s wife was responsible for the crash. And he has lied about his law-school career. As Derek Hunter writes on Town hall,
Everything Joe said in that exchange [with a voter in 1987] was untrue. He didn’t have an academic scholarship; he hadn’t won a moot court competition; he wasn’t listed as an outstanding student. Even though his claim of being in the “bottom two-thirds” of his class and finishing in the “top half” makes no sense because there’s enormous overlap between the two, he actually finished 76th in a class of 85 students.
From facing down a gang-banger named “Corn Pop,” to attempting to visit Nelson Mandela in prison, Biden has repeatedly told preposterous lies. And don’t forget, there are yards of footage of Joe inappropriately putting his hands on women and girls and sniffing their hair, offenses that if committed by a Republican would have sparked a national spasm of MeToo hysteria.
And if that troubling record of duplicity and unwelcome fondling isn’t enough, it has been clear for months that Biden suffers from the early stages of dementia. FOX News has made a number of video catalogues of Joe’s lapses in memory and bursts of anger of the sort typical of people with dementia. This bodes ill for Biden, as David Catron has pointed out. Reviewing the collapse of Mike Dukakis’ presidential campaign against George H.W. Bush in 1988, Catron writes, “[T]he liabilities of [Biden] in 2020 involve the same issues that dogged [Dukakis] in 1988 — mental fitness to handle the duties of the presidency, difficulty connecting with the minority voters without whose support he can’t win, and the willingness to brand any opponent a racist who dares to bring up ‘law and order.’”
Finally, the “law and order” issue that Catron mentions, one the Republicans have owned since 1968, has been daily advertised in the coverage of killings, injuries, vandalism, and looting springing from “woke” protests and riots, which have led to forced police stand-downs and violent crime rates skyrocketing in blue-state cities––in the first six months of this year, Chicago’s murder rate increased 38%, with 440 deaths including four children under 10 murdered over five weeks. Worse, the Democrats have endorsed and rationalized the violent protests, nor has candidate Biden, the alleged “moderate,” forcefully condemned it. This state of affairs is reminiscent of 1968, when the “silent majority” expressed its anger at the riots and bombings of the Sixties by electing Richard Nixon.
Biden’s handlers know all this, and so have sequestered him in his basement, letting him out only briefly and reducing his opportunities for impromptu speaking. And they’re working mightily to get the presidential debates cancelled, for they know that in an unscripted, personal encounter, the street-fighting orator Donald Trump will beat Biden like a rented mule. It seems highly improbable that anyone can become the leader of the most powerful free country in history by hiding from the voters.
Nor will Biden’s pick for vice-president, California senator Kamala Harris, help him overcome these challenges and deficiencies. Harris is one of the most progressive and aggressively “woke” members of the Senate. She has endorsed the far-left policies of the Sanders-AOC wing like the Green New Deal, Medicare For All, forgiving student-loan debt, free college tuition, and restoring the tax-and-spend excesses of the Obama years that gave us one of the most sluggish recovery from a recession ever. And she is a clumsy, off-putting campaigner, with little appeal for the moderates Biden supposedly attracts.
But Harris will be a problem for leftists as well. Seeking future votes, as a prosecutor and AG Harris took a tough-on-crime tack that saw high incarceration rates for low-level drug offenders, a sore point with the BLM faction of the party. And don’t forget her vicious attacks on Biden during the primary campaign: She clearly implied that he is a racist for saying nice things about segregationist senators like Strom Thurmond, and said that she believed the woman who has accused Biden of sexual assault. Her cringing, treacly acceptance speech graphically highlights her career-long opportunism and hypocrisy, and no doubt will make effective ads for the Trump campaign.
So what will be the saner choice in November: an incumbent president with a style that puts some voters off, but cheers others, who battles against the intolerant and illiberal “cancel culture,” and who has one of the best records of achievement in a president’s first term? Or a mediocre career pol with no record of achievement, a long history of gaffes, corruption, and lies, an economy-killing policy program imposed by the party’s extreme left, and a “woke” ideology that sanctions violence not just against people and property, but America itself and its unique virtues and achievements?
Trump should win on November 3, but as a philosopher once said, “Should ain’t is.” The stakes couldn’t be higher: saving our Constitutional order of unalienable rights, citizen sovereignty, and limited government; or watching it descend further into a technocratic despotism over dependent clients, as our safety and security are increasingly compromised.
Originally posted 2020-08-16 15:07:46.
