Nicely anticipating what he would be up against—perhaps because it’s so obvious from the recent Presidential election cycles—Robert Kennedy, Jr talked about totalitarianism in a recent interview. “It’s been the dream ambition of every totalitarian regime in the history of mankind to exert total control over every aspect of human behavior,” he said, noting that technology makes this ambition easier than ever to achieve. Junior RFK is the most interesting and potentially the most disruptive of the Democrats planning to challenge Joe Biden for the 2024 Presidential election, but at the time he may not have anticipated his party’s plan to eliminate him and anyone else as serious competition. The Washington Post reported last week that “the national Democratic Party has said it will support Biden’s reelection, and it has no plans to sponsor primary debates.”
There was a time when I thought that Nikki Haley had an excellent chance of becoming the first female President. That chance is long gone, and Haley is 100% responsible. Her announcement as a candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination is just another bit of evidence of why she is unfit to be President and never will be one.
Haley has proven herself to be a hypocrite, a cynical opportunist, and devoid of integrity. It’s a shame, given her other skills, talents and experience, and it is certainly true that some have successfully reached the White House with the same nauseating concoction of qualities. Haley, however, is not in a position similar to any of those men.
Anyone who is going to wrest the nomination from Donald Trump—and somebody better—is going to have to do so without so thoroughly alienating Republican voters who still favor the previous POTUS that they would be inclined to skip the 2024 election entirely. For Haley, that metaphorical horse has left the barn and taken a flight to Borneo. Her flip-flopping regarding Trump is so self-evidently calculated and self-serving, except that it hasn’t served her well anyway.
Haley told the The New York Times in 2016 that she would “not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the K.K.K. That is not a part of our party. That is not who we are.” Then, when Trump was the nominee, it suddenly was who she was, as Nikki accepted the invitation to serve in Trump’s cabinet in the prestige position as U.N. delegate. Ah, but she did it only out of a “sense of duty.” Haley distinguished herself in the job, and when the 2020 election loomed, Nikki was all in for Trump, saying, “This president has a record of strength and success.” However, Trump lost, and Haley calculated that the Jan. 6 riot (which CNN still calls “the insurrection”) would end his viability as a candidate. So she condemned him, once she sensed that was the way the wind was blowing. She told the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting, in her keynote speech, Continue reading →
“Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
—-Former President Donald Trump, simultaneously making a fool of himself and fulfilling Democrats’ most extreme scaremongering regarding his candidacy on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Maybe he reads Ethics Alarms, and sensed that I was beginning to question my hasty designation of him as the 2022 Asshole of the Year after Kanye West’s sudden emergence as a Hitler fanboy and a Holocausr denier. If that was Trump’s objective, he succeeded: that statement laps West, in part because Ye is just a publicity-seeking, unstable rapper with a insatiable thirst for publicity, and nobody should pay much attention to him. Trump is far, far more influential, but is just as reckless in abusing his prominence.
That statement is signature significance and res ipsa loquitur; the latter, because no one should have to have explained to them why it is irresponsible, unhinged, and stupid, and the latter because only a politician who has lost all contact with reality would say something like that, ever, even once. And I’m not going to explain it. If you’re smart enough to come here, you’re smart enough to figure out what wrong with Trump’s quote without assistance.
It’s too early, of course; many a Presidential candidate has emerged out of the primordial ooze to evolve from a near unknown to the nominee in three years. In the case of the Republicans (and the Democrats too) such an emergence is greatly to be wished. However, two objectives will remain constant: it is imperative that the lying, Machiavellian, totalitarianism-embracing Democrats be ejected from both branches of the government with sufficient force that they ponder their sins and reform, and that Donald Trump does not return to the Presidency.
Trump himself isn’t dangerous. If fact, in many ways he was an effective President, and his policies were more often reasonable than not; my objections to him as President involve character and style (and they are major objections that his accomplishments cannot counter-balance). However, the Left’s reaction to him is an existential threat. They have convinced themselves that eliminating him is a mission that must be accomplished by any means necessary, and they will continue to work to terrify the weak-minded, inattentive and gullible from now until the 2024 election…and, if necessary, after, no matter what the consequences may be.
They succeeded in convincing millions of Americans that he would destroy the country when he was elected the first time; he didn’t, but their tactics against him nearly did, and might yet. The nation cannot withstand another polarizing election with both sides claiming the other is trying to wreck all that is good about America, and with Trump as the Republican nominee.
The one in question is Rasmussen, which is the among the few polling organizations that do not have a perpetual left-wing bias, and that may have a conservative political bias. It is also worth noting that the election will not be held today, or even this year. Thus it is in the category of fake news that Ethics Alarms calls “future news.”
Many doubt, with some justification, that Joe Biden will last as President until 2024. He’s 79, and before this year is out will turn 80, what my father called the threshold to “the red zone,” when anyone that ancient or older faces a not insubstantial daily risk of dropping dead with little or no warning. Dad made it to 89 before dying—unexpectedly—during a nap, but he looked and seemed a lot healthier and less on the decline than Joe these days. Comedian Bob Saget was just 65 when his time ran out last week, also without warning, and he wasn’t even in the yellow zone.
Trump is no spring chicken either. He’ll be 76 this Spring: would you want to bet the farm that he’ll make 78 sufficiently hale and hearty to run a vigorous campaign, hold chatty rallies, and insult everyone who disagrees with him daily? The life expectancy of a 78-year-old male now is less than 10 years. That’s cutting it close. I’ll keep that farm, thanks.
Oh yeah, about the poll. A new Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey concluded that if the election were held today, 40% of likely U.S. voters would vote for President Biden, and 46% would vote for the previous POTUS, a large advantage. 10% say they would choose some other candidate in a Biden-Trump rematch, which doesn’t mean much: nobody knows who those other candidates might be, or if there will be any worthy of attention. If the also-rans are no better than the pathetic alternatives who were on the 2016 ballot, 10% is a highly inflated number.
Trump would get 81% support from GOP voters—that’s against Biden, remember: he’d get almost 100% when if he ran against, say, a piece of cheese. Biden would get 75% of Democrats, which is low for a party’s incumbent President. With independent voters, however, Trump would win today by a 16-point margin, 45% to Biden’s 29%.
Part I of this series appeared in May of this year. I bet you thought I had forgotten about it, didn’t you?
The second metaphor explained the election of Trump as President in 2016, as well as his march to the nomination fueled by a populist base that crossed party lines and that took political “experts” completely by surprise. It occurred to me when a friend, a Democrat and progressive (like most of my friends—and relatives) opined bitterly that electing someone like Trump was “stupid.” At a basic level I agreed with that: I had been writing exactly this for more than a year. But his words triggered an epiphany, and, as is often the case with my rare moments of clarity, a movie scene came to mind.
Electing Trump certainly seemed stupid. Yet it served a purpose, indeed several purposes, just like the “stupid and futile gesture” that is the climax and operatic finale of “Animal House,” when the abused members of Delta House turn Faber College’s homecoming parade into a violent riot.
What was the election of Trump supposed to accomplish? Other movies come to mind, like “Network.” A segment of the population decided that the system was rigged against them, that Democrats and Republicans were both involved in a massive, decades long con in which their primary goal was not to do what was in the public interest, but what was most likely to keep them in power and eventually line their pockets, and that their voices were not just being ignored, but that they were being insulted while being ignored. The so-called “deplorables” were mad as hell, and they weren’t going to take it any more. Voting for Trump was an “Up yours!” to the elites, the sanctimonious media, the corrupt Clintons, the hollow Obamas, and obviously corrupt Democrats like Pelosi and Harry Reid, machine Republicans like Mitch McConnell, and pompous think-tank conservative like Bill Kristol.
“Americans got tired of being pushed around, lectured, and being told that traditional cultural values made them racists and xenophobes. They decided to say “Screw that!” by electing a protest candidate whose sole function was to be a human thumb in the eye, because he was so disgusting to the people who had pretended to be their betters. Don’t you understand? It’s idiotic, but the message isn’t. It’s “Animal House”! and “Animal House” is as American as Doolittle’s Raid….In Germany, The Big Cheese says jump and the Germans say “How high?” In the US, the response is “Fuck you!” Obama never understood that…. I love that about America. And much as I hate the idea of an idiot being President, I do love the message and who it was sent to. America still has spunk.
One of the benefits of not having Donald Trump as President—such benefits do not include having Joe Biden in the White House—is that I don’t have to write about him as often or regularly point out the relentless efforts to de-legitimize and destroy his Presidency. However, the Trump Deranged in the news media and the Angry Left in general let Trump live, as the cliche goes, rent-free in their heads, so now he has become a boogeyman. Say his name three times in front of a mirror, and he’ll appear and murder democracy.
On his substack newsletter, Andrew Sullivan, who occasionally called out Trump Derangement excesses but still never could bring himself to extend any respect to The Donald, weighed in today with an essay called “How Biden Could Bring Back Trump.” What the piece is really about is how wretched Biden’s Presidency has been so far, especially regarding illegal immigration. But to get his core readership’s attention, Sullivan felt he had to frame the argument as he does in his final two paragraphs:
“…the immigration debate reflects an elite that simply cannot imagine why most normal citizens think that enforcing a country’s borders is not an exercise in white supremacist violence, but a core function of any basic government. Which is to say that far from taming the brushfire of right ethno-populism, Biden may be fueling it. Trump may not need to send the country into a constitutional crisis in 2024. If mass migration continues to accelerate under this administration, and Biden seems unable or unwilling to do anything about it, Tump could win that election in a romp. And deserve to.”
Andrew can’t bring himself to quite say that Trump was right about illegal immigration all along, that the public mostly agreed with him because they aren’t insane, and that Biden’s policies and rhetoric are incompetence itself. He does write, though, to be fair to Sullivan, “The temptation to reduce every normie concern about immigration to ‘white supremacy’ was too hard to eschew. And the view that “All Borders Are Racist” — as perfect an expression of woke extremism as “Defund the Police” and “Pregnant People” — became an elite cause. Nation-states and borders? That has been left in the dust of the Obama era.” Bingo to that. Still, the big scare isn’t the collapse of the rule of law and the natural disastrous consequences of open borders. It’s that it all might bring Truuuuuuump back.
Ethics Alarms 