I’m afraid of the answer.
If I were really in a nasty state of mind—and I am mighty close—I could make this post and dozens covering the same territory a chain of Nelsons, as in,
The problem with that approach is that nothing’s funny about the phenomenon. In a ridiculous number of ways, across the culture and nation, states, cities and communities are being forced to reverse policies installed at Peak Stupid that were, or should have been, evidently moronic and certain to lead to disaster when they were devised. Nobody, at least not enough bodies, wanted to pay attention; virtue-signaling was more important to them. They really believed this, and I maintain, with all what’s left of my heart, that this was signature significance: anyone who embraced (or, going forward into the frightening future, embraces) this kind of policy approach is unfit to hold any position of influence and power.
To touch on a current Great Stupid debacle for just a second that I’m too sick and too covered in alligators to deal with in any detail right now, the Democratic Party’s determination to renominate Joe Biden for President, someone yesterday described the decision as the equivalent of the Titanic’s captain that night in 1912 backing up and sailing into the same iceberg again. I really like that analogy, and intend to use it whenever appropriate.
This topic could support a book, let’s just look at two recent examples:
Item: Oregon, almost certainly too slowly, but finally, is undoing its idiotic decision to decriminalize all drugs because a black lifetime hood died under the knee of a habitually brutal white cop in the Twin Cities. Let me quote from the most pitiless commentary on the state’s U-turn that I could find:
With the nightly riots in Portland entering their seventh month and the air ringing with chants of “DEFUND THE POLICE!,” citizens were asked that November to vote on Ballot Measure 110, the Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act. Offering addicts a soft landing rather than jail time – those possessing and using hard drugs in public would face no penalty other than a possible $100 citation, waived should the user voluntarily enter drug treatment – was in step with the year’s anti-carceral mood. Its passage would also give Oregonians the distinction of being the first state in the nation to fully decriminalize drugs.
Dozens of organizations supported Measure 110, from the editorial board of The Oregonian to the Oregon ACLU. Harm reduction advocates saw Measure 110 as a “humane, effective approach that will save lives” and a positive step toward granting bodily autonomy to those who chose to do drugs. Portland’s newly elected progressive district attorney Mike Schmidt said Measure 110 “sends a clear message of strong public support that drug use should be treated as a public health matter rather than a criminal justice matter.”
Measure 110 passed with 59 percent of the vote.
Morons. I knew what would happen without even knowing much about Oregon. So did anyone not so addled by John Lennon songs that they could still see, hear and think. Never mind…
“[A]n effort meant to help addicts act instead as an accelerant. Fatal opioid overdoses skyrocketed, especially from fentanyl. The number of homeless in Portland swelled to 6300. Violent crime spiked before dipping in 2023. People stopped going downtown, both because of the perception of danger and because it was too sad, seeing hundreds of people dope-sick, smoking fentanyl under blankets, shooting up in the park, stepping over used syringes and the foil and straws distributed free by advocates of harm reduction.”
What a surprise.
“By 2023, Oregonians had changed their minds about Measure 110, 73% of those polled saying they supported making possession of hard drugs a crime again. Last December, The Oregonian editorial board called for the re-criminalization of drugs… “Fuck no, I wouldn’t vote for it again,” says Aidan Wolff, a musician and bartender from Portland. “It’s 11 o’clock in the morning and there’s a flash-mob, 18 to 20 people in the parking lot of Carl’s Jr. having a fentanyl party. There’s just a general feeling of lawlessness. There are fires, things are burned out, the cops can’t do anything.”
And why, pray tell, couldn’t you figure this all out before voting for this irresponsible, incompetent, unethical madness?
Item: Austin, Texas, having believed that “Defund the Police!” was a rational policy choice and a reasonable response to the above-noted single unfortunate death of a drug-besotted crook of the right skin shade by a long-festering bad cop of the wrong skin tinge, is now facing this:
“The city has been plagued by police staffing shortages and longer 911-call response times since the Austin City Council voted to defund the police department in 2020…Lauren Klinefelter, a resident of Austin, told [reporters] that people can no longer count on prompt assistance after calling 911. Klinefelter was unable to get help following a car accident involving her young children in 2022.
“We needed an ambulance and some emergency assistance because not only was my car totaled, but my children were both bleeding and visibly injured,” she explained. “I called 911 and, to my surprise, it rang and rang endlessly, only to be routed to a 311 operator for non-emergencies.”
…”Nick Kantor, whose brother Doug was killed during a high-profile mass shooting in Austin in June 2021, believes that Doug would still be alive if the police department had not been defunded. The incident occurred when two rival gangs of teenagers engaged in a shootout on Sixth Street, resulting in Doug’s tragic death and injuries to 13 innocent bystanders.The anti-gang task force and other crime prevention measures had been defunded due to concerns about the ethnicity of those targeted by the Austin Police Department.”
As with Oregon’s insane drug law, any idiot should have been able to predict what would happen if you de-funded the police. Heck, I could! Austin is only a microcosm of what has happened in Chicago, the Twin Cities, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, among others. It wasn’t obvious to the leaders elected in those cities.
There are significant numbers of members of Congress—guess what party!—that still support both of these policies. They also would vote to lock down the country again when there is another mystery virus going around. Is any learning occurring, or do the reversals merely indicate a reaction of “Oops, guess we moved a little too fast on this one, let’s back up and try again later”?
Ethics Alarms 
Clearly the failure of these publicly demanded needed progressive policies are the direct responsibility of conservatives that opposed them. Only white supremists, racists, and fascists would blame the Democratic Party for the failures!
Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.
Just a thought on today’s Supreme Court ruling - in contrast to the story on Legal Insurrection which has it in its headline. The WSJ story never said the decision was unanimous.
I read it twice. I wonder how other media will characterize it?
The Washington Times headlined it a unanimous decision writing, “The court ruled unanimously that Colorado’s high court erred when it deleted Mr. Trump from that state’s GOP primary ballot.
“And a majority of the court went further, ruling that only Congress can enforce the Constitution’s insurrection language through laws. And given there is no current such law, that seems to shut down future federal court challenges as well.”
Odd, since its unanimity is especially significant. It’s a serious slapdown.The fact that so many legal “experts,” pundits and journalists were so, so certain that this was a legitimate way to “get” Trump should make very one of them have “Bias Makes You Stupid” brands on their foreheads forever.
I know I’m not wasting time reading Ilya Somin again…
Yeah, well, your friends and mine in Congress have introduced a bill to bounce Trump from ballots:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13155877/Jamie-Raskin-bill-disqualify-trump-ballot-supreme-court.html
jvb
You know. Morons.
Speaking of idiots, morons, and imbeciles:
https://x.com/KeithOlbermann/status/1764672353378652544?s=20
jvb
An update on that story. I looked at it again over the course of the day, and they did mention it was a unanimous decision and finally that wound up in the opening paragraph.
I wonder if it had anything to do with the lead editorial last night entitled “Supreme Court 9, Lawfare 0 in the Trump Ballot Case” Perfect headline.
This only is confusing if you still believe that the people in charge are trying to make life better for the people. Its like asking the question “Why do people keep pushing Communism when it doesn’t work?” Well, what do you mean by ‘it doesn’t work’. If you mean ‘it makes life better for most people and allows them to have the maximum amount of freedom’, then no, it doesn’t work. If you keep thinking that is what the Marxist proponents are going for, their actions make no sense. If however, you realize that Marxism institutes an strictly class-based system that benefits the elites and insulates them from any responsibilities to and gives them strict control over the underclass, then you understand why they want it.
The Democratic Party has been pushing for policies that destroy ALL intermediate institutions in this country to leave only the central government as a monolithic source of power in the country. This government is not elected by ‘the people’, but controlled by an unelected group of the ‘right type’ of people. They have sought to destroy the family, churches, and local government. They have sought to destroy a rules-based society and make it a class-based society. Is it OK to have classified material? Can you leak it or sell it to hostile governments? Well it depends on who you are. Can you protest and riot? Again, it depends who you are. That is the goal. The Democratic Party and most of the college educated Democrats I know support these policies. They feel that they are the enlightened elites and they need to be given complete power. They can’t allow people to have inherent rights, we can’t allow people who don’t support abortion, child molestation, euthanasia, etc to have a say in the government. This means that elections can’t matter. The ‘ignorant masses’ need to be controlled or eliminated. Only the illusion of democracy can be allowed to exist.
Once you realize the goals, you no longer see a group of completely incompetent people pushing policies that have been shown over and over again to ‘not work’. You don’t see people trying to fix problems by pushing programs that will obviously make the stated problem worse. Instead, you will see a group of people trying to take over society by destroying the lives of everyone but the elites. By making the cities unlivable, destroying the livelihoods of the people through inflation and ruinous taxation, encouraging drug use, and destroying all useful employment, they take away all the power from everyone but the elite. In the end, you have the elites, that have sucked all wealth and power from the country, and a ruined, helpless population completely dependent on scraps from the elites. A population stripped of their ‘rights’ and given meager ‘privileges’ dependent on compliance is the goal.
Look at what they tried to push worldwide during COVID. It was the same policy. Lockdown, masking, mandatory experimental vaccines, and let the UN take over was the policy all over the world. Most of those policies had been shown to be wrong by a vast number of studies. Those policies were NOT the pandemic policies that had been agreed upon in advance. They actually contradicted the accepted pandemic policies. If it hadn’t been for the conservatives in the US, this would be permanent worldwide.
So, there are 2 explanations for this.
(1) Democrats are hopelessly incompetent and every time they try to solve a problem they choose a solution that will only make it worse. They also never learn and keep making the same obvious mistakes time after time and they refuse to listen to anyone who points out the mistakes. All the ‘experts’ who study these social problems make the exact same mistakes the Democrats make and they never figure it out either. The ‘top people’ do study after study that show that the policies don’t work, but they keep recommending the policies anyway without seeing the issue with that. Even though common sense would show the problems with their approaches and show solutions that have proven to work, ‘the experts’ will reject this and keep on promoting disastrous things despite all logic, data, common sense, or reason. They all just somehow have the exact same approach to these problems, and they are incapable of seeing that it doesn’t work no matter how many times it is pointed out. We just need to try to get them to see the error of their ways even though people have been pointing it out for 50+ years.
(2) This is all on purpose.
In the group of ‘The Democrats’, you can put the ‘Establishment Republicans’. They are the same group. Remember, the point isn’t to have democracy, the point is to have the illusion of democracy.
Excellent analysis.
jvb
Theologian Carl F.H. Henry is quoted as saying in the late 1980s, “We’re in trouble as a nation. The pragmatic approach to the problems we we have may seem to get things done on an obscure basis, but sooner or later the eclipse of principle will exert its toll. Pragmatism has no enduring assurance in terms of the solution it achieves. Our basic problems are not economic or political. They are moral and spiritual.”
The problem of integrity in government is not new. It has been a common topic for journalists and statesmen to discuss throughout history. So, how do we address this recognized loss of integrity and morality in our culture? And is it too late? Are we too far down the road of rudderless secular humanism to reverse course and save our republic?
They don’t even try to hide the corruption anymore. The double standards are on full display and no one cares. Hillary Clinton can blast classified information all over the worldwide internet for anyone to intercept. She can cut the classification markings off of documents, scan, and e-mail them to people without security clearance and the DOJ says “not a problem”. The head of the FBI can give classified documents to friends to leak to the press and the DOJ says ‘standard procedure’. Barack Obama can keep a bunch of classified documents and the FBI says ‘Let us install a safe for you at taxpayer’s expense for that’. Joe Biden can scatter classified documents all over the country in closets and garages and they say ‘Hmmm, well, he doesn’t know what he is doing, so that is OK, and the senility doesn’t affect the Presidency”. Donald Trump has documents that he claimed he declassified, the FBI had inspected and cleared, and the verdict is “He can’t have that and the President doesn’t have declassification authority, the Librarian of Congress does.”
I’m sure this stuff went on before, but it was hidden before. The conflicts of interest were hidden before. Now, they put them all out in front of us and say ‘it doesn’t matter when we do it’ and everyone just nods. I mean, a judge ruling on a conflict of interest case involving his former boss would be a joke, but today it is reality.
Well said, and it is very disturbing that I can’t refute what you wrote. I have to agree you are correct.