Why? Because six unethical years of Big Lies, fearmongering and deliberately divisive tactics have consequences.

There is one very unlikely scenario—but still possible—that would probably tamp down the threat of violence. That would be if the GOP narrowly wins control of the House but fails to improve its standing in the Senate, and none of the close Senate contests Republicans lose involve dubious vote-counting and suspicious shenanigans. This is, realistically, the best Democrats can hope for. Progressives won’t riot over such a result unless they have completely lost their collective mind. Will conservatives of the January 6 sub-species get violent over the same disappointing outcome? I don’t think so, but we’re talking about idiots now. Who knows?

And that’s the positive 15%. Yes, I’m adopting 538’s cowardly technique: state all predictions as percentages, so when your analysis is proven dead wrong, you can say, “I never said what was going to happen! I just gave the probabilities! This means that it doesn’t matter what splits you use: you can claim any result made you “right.”

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I decided on this format after being click-baited by a headline in the Times: The Dobbs Decision Revealed How Weak the Pro-Life Movement Really Is. In fact, the Dobbs decision itself revealed nothing about the pro-life movement whatsoever. The decision wasn’t a response to the anti-abortion activists; it was a down-the-line legal rebuke to an old SCOTUS decision that was as offensive to the Constitution as Dred Scott. The actual column was about how disappointing the response of pro-life legislators has been (in the author’s view) by not moving faster to ban abortion entirely. How can a decision “reveal” a reaction to it that only can occur after the decision is rendered? Moreover, it should be apparent that while many anti-abortion advocates do not believe there should be not an absolute right to end a human life in the womb, many, like, say, me, acknowledge that abortion is an ethically complex problem that cannot be resolved without careful balancing of interests. That’s not “weakness.” That’s “accepting reality.”

Here are some other headlines that signal ethical confusion:

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It is hard to imagine what kind of deranged arguments, claims, accusations and theories Democrats and the news media will resort to over the next few days. The exhibition could be mordantly amusing, and it could be scary. I can say, however, that based on what I saw channel-surfing while suffering from insomnia at the Boar’s Head Inn and Resort in Charlottesville last night and this morning, no political party has ever sunk so low, or so vividly revealed to anyone capable of paying attention that it regards ethics as a disposable commodity. The main rationalization, after “It isn’t what it is,” of course (Crime? What crime? Inflation? What’s that?) is # 31. The Troublesome Luxury, or “Ethics is a luxury we can’t afford right now.”

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That hilarious screen shot from the same MSNBC session that gave historian Michael Beschloss a platform to claim that Republicans are planning on arresting and killing children is too rich to pas up. What a great sanctimonious, “I’ve been warning” you scowl from Rachel Maddow’s protege, Chris Hayes. I wonder if that deadline to save America is as reliable as Al Gore’s and Greta Thunberg’s deadlines to save the world? How did people this ludicrous get in a position of influence?

But I digress. The simple matter of questioning the eminently questionable Joe Biden won the 2020 election has been somehow blown into some kind of apocalyptic phobia by the Axis of Unethical Conduct, and “election denier” has become almost as ubiquitous and versatile smear as “racist.” Here’s CBS’s “criteria” for labeling someone currently running as an “election denier.”

Democrats questioned the legitimacy of Bush’s two elections and Trump’s, and in Trump’s case, many of them never conceded that Trump was elected at all (they don’t think the Electoral College is legitimate). But you can question the legitimacy of an election and still accept the fact that the candidate was elected, just as one can question the legitimacy of a baseball game decided by an umpire’s bad call (Game 3 of the 1975 World series comes to mind, for some reason), but accept the fact that the game is over and the luckier team won. Continue reading →

Is it racist to expect people who provide communications-related services in the US. to speak competent and understandable English? We have been harassed in recent weeks by one unsolicited phone call after another offering guidance on health insurance matters during the current enrollment period. A particularly incomprehensible barely English-speaking agent called my wife today, who had to keep asking her to repeat what the woman was trying to say. She finally said that she was “a socialist.” We presume she meant a “social worker.” Grace replied, tartly, that she might want to look up “socialist” before she told any other people that’s what she was. Then she said, “good-bye.”

1. Desperation Journal: On MSNBC, historian Michael Beschloss once again hopelessly beclowned himself and his thoroughly corrupted field by saying, after Joe Biden’s absurd speech last night,

“[A] historian 50 years from now – if historians are allowed to write in this country and if they are still free publishing houses and a free press – which I’m not certain of – but if that is true, a historian will say what was at stake tonight and this week was the fact whether we will be a democracy in the future, whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.”

What happened to this guy? He really used to be a respectable Presidential historian; I’ve read, and enjoyed, some of his books, like “Eisenhower: A Centennial Life” (1990) and “The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963” (1991). Then somewhere before 2016 he snapped like Larry Tribe, or bias made him stupid, or something. He was the “expert” who said Hillary lost to Trump because parties almost never hold the White House three terms in a row, which is non-historical offal more worthy of an uneducated dolt like Bette Midler. His statement from last night is even worse, and an abuse of his reputation and position. No one can trust the analysis of a historian who defaults to partisan hysteria. As Thomas More might say, “But Michael, it profits a man nothing to gain the whole world if he should lose his soul… but for MSNBC?”

Here’s proof on how far Beschloss has sunk: He essentially channeled Rob Reiner:

To that, Federalist editor Molly Hemingway replied, “This type of rhetoric seems more like an IQ test than political persuasion. Like, how stupid does a grown adult have to be to find this type of argument compelling?” Well, as stupid as an acclaimed Presidential scholar, I guess… [Pointer: Chris Marschner] Continue reading →

Oh, gee, I guess by using the old folk song “If I had a hammer” to suggest that the Democrats are wildly and absurdly exploiting a lunatic’s one-off hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband as a life-preserver while a metaphoric drowning in a red sea next week looms, I have joined a “brutal mob.”

That’s the sentiment of The Atlantic, which bloviates, “Laughing over a hammer attack on an old man, the GOP has completed its transition from a political party to a brutal mob.” Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, mockery of the Democrats’ obsession with the attack as if it has any larger significance at all (the party hacks surely aren’t interested in the crime-ridden cesspool their policies have created in San Francisco, where mentally ill vagrants like Pelosi’s attacker roam and play like the deer and the antelope), means I am simpatico with Republicans “who conclude that, like Mr. Trump, they will pay no political price for attacks on their opponents, however meanspirited, inflammatory or false.”

Wow. That accusation takes a lot of chutzpah after six years of daily “meanspirited, inflammatory or false” attacks on Donald Trump, his wife, his children, his staff and his supporters, culminating in a “democratic norm” shattering prime-time TV speech by a Democratic President labeling Trump’s supporters as clear and present dangers to democracy,

“Inflammatory attack? What inflammatory attack?”

They can all bite me. I’m not accepting any part of such criticism from Democrats and their mainstream media mouthpieces for calling their framing of the weird Pelosi episode exactly what it is: cynical, dishonest, and frantic. That was the point, a fair and valid one, of my use of the song. (“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” was runner-up), The Left’s silly game is to force everyone to express horror and condemnation over this episode, while thousands of attacks on Americans take place every day. They think such compelled groveling will symbolize acceptance of their ludicrous theory that harsh (but deserved) criticism of Pelosi’s wife caused the attack, so such criticism itself must cease. I see that my friend U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger felt he had to issue a statement toeing that line. Well, Tom works for Pelosi, I don’t, and I also don’t tolerate double standards and narratives that require me to hammer my own brain into submission. I’m on to this desperation ruse—not that it’s hard to figure out—and I refuse to treat it with respect when ridicule is what it warrants.

1. When in doubt, lie, I guess. I don’t get to vote in the newly drawn 7th Congressional District in Virginia, but if I were voting in the close race between incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger and her Republican challenger Yesli Vega, the most recent Spanberger attack ad would settle the issue. A spokesperson for Spanberger who says he is a veteran cop says he is disgusted that Vega has “defended criminals,” meaning the January 6 rioters, and goes on to say that 140 officers were injured in the riot—he gets a point or two for not saying “insurrection”—and “five died.” That statement is an outright lie, and one that has been debunked over and over again. No officers died during the riot. Five died in the days and months after the riot, but none of the deaths were connected with injuries sustained on January 6. This is a particularly egregious Big Lie, one that has been advanced in part by President Biden among others. The Democratic Party’s super-PAC, House Majority Pac, is responsible for the ad.

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