Elite meshing

And Veronica Mars strikes again, too. One of its subplots is a weird but not prescient echo of an article I was just reading about Elite dislike of flyover country people which suggests a reason for that is that they're just not "comfortable" meshing or schmoozing with them ("Grey-matter deficient Americans" by Victor Hanson in the NR). In the latest Mars series, a charismatic, up and coming, liberal Arab-American congressman and his mother are definitely uncomfortable that his brother is involved with a "white trash" (the mother's words) woman whose Hillbilly brothers and mother seem to be drawn right from Hilary Clinton's Bucket of Deplorables. What's even more interesting, VM could just as easily have made an old socialist Archie Bunker like Sanders be the congressman, too. If there is one thing our elite increasingly seem to have in common regardless of overt political label it's contempt for those who just don't go to their parties.

Like Trump?

A recent column title reads,"Like Trump, Bernie won't back down." Now, wait a minute. What the writer is talking about is Sanders' doubling down on defending the Castro regime and his enabling the USSR and Nicaragua, too, while he was at it. My memory may be faulty but when did Trump EVER say something like the following:

"Gee, you know I have to say that we do tend to exaggerate about how bad the Jim Crow South was. Stats for blacks socially and economically then were much better than they are now." or,

"I know Hitler was an authoritarian (and BTW I'm NOT an authoritarian, I'm a Democrat) but he did give us Volkswagen and the Autobahn. We can learn from that, you know." or,

"That Mussolini he sure made the trains run on time."

Indeed, contemporaneously, everyone from Shaw to Astor to Lloyd-George to Lindbergh to Miller to, well, Sanders and nearly our entire elite once praised dictatorships when they were in their full flower. The difference between Sanders and the rest of those apologists is that they stopped doing it when they realized they were wrong or it wasn't popular anymore to talk that way. Sanders keeps going like some sort of louche Red Energizer bunny who, in a strange communist impression of the Bourbons, remembers everything but learns nothing. 

Meanwhile, Trump, whose only activity that is anything like Sanders' comments is embarrassing praise from time to time for Putin (a terrible dictator but nothing like in the League of Hitler, Stalin, Castro or Mao)0 and pointing out that the violence at Charlottesville was on both sides, Antifa and the KKK, is therefore defamed when he is compared in any way to what Sanders does and thinks, apparently with impunity. Open ended praise of Putin meanwhile was interpreted to mean Trump is a Russian agent. The Double Standard strikes again.

Demportrait - Land of Confusion

Joe Biden is the single most failed Front Runner of all time. This seems like a cliche now. But, in reality it was a cliche before Biden announced his run. It is only a raw consolation to those of us who believe in some sort of poetic if not formal justice even in affairs as low as politics that that failure may well be the result of American voters not being as stupid as pols like Biden think they are and unwilling to listen to the lame explanations of him and his retainers in the Media that he had "done nothing wrong". A silent verdict is being given then against him much like the one finally given against Hilary Clinton in 2016. (Oh, and let's not forget that even Hilary does not count amongst her many crimes, plagiarism, although she might be POTUS now if she had tried to steal from her husband.)

But, even if it were not for the fact that he, Joseph Biden, is in the words of Political Corruption chronicler, Peter Scheizer, "The most corrupt VP in US History", there would still be plenty of reason for wondering how in God's name this cheap ward heeler became the "Front Runner" for anything let alone a POTUS nomination. First, there is the fact that, aside from being born in PA, his base is the vanishingly small combo of DE and the Naval Observatory. Past VP's that ran at least came from major states like MN (Mondale) or CA (Nixon) or TX (Bush). His track record, beside piggybacking on Obama's victories was to win 6 elections in one of the smallest states in the Union against mainly no-hopers while entering and badly losing a grand total of one presidential primary, the Iowa Caucus in 2008. His bad vote-getting thus should not have been a surprise.

Then there is his senility, first manifested I believe (although I do not claim to make a medical diagnosis as I am not a GP) by his status as a Gaffe Machine. I believe now that his comments like "Chains", "Clean African American" or "Stand up! (to a crippled supporter)" were manifestations as much of creeping dementia as of carelessness or bumptiousness (this also goes for his Me Too moments of tactility). People see that Mr. Biden is simply not all there. They note that he has already (along with his farcical claim that Obama did not endorse him publicly on Biden's request) desperately promised only to serve one term in office. They wonder why and note he will be about 82 then as well.

But, even if he were not going senile, even if he were Father O'Malley when it came to political cupidity, he will still be a monarch if not a president: the King of Confusion. He made all of the moves he thought he had to make to denounce pretty well all of his admittedly meager accomplishments such as the Crime Bill and voting for the Iraq War (oh, did I mention that he is also broadly a jellyfiish to forces he is inferior to and a bully to those beneath him?). But then he refused to disown and disavow his friendships with the many Klansmen who ran the Dem Party when he first got into the Senate. Why throw your precious rep for being "moderate" (that is not being wildly liberal all the time) if you are not going to give it all up? No one was convinced and not only did Biden seem confused, so did anyone considering supporting him. He seems to understand that one person he cannot throw under the bus is Obama yet seems at the same time to buy his Party's far Left narrative that Obama was like Reagan the Second.

His intellectual and ideological confusion seemed to reach its height when, in the NH debate, he refused to put up his hand to show he was bothered by being categorized as a "socialist". The big problem with that is that no one believes anymore than Biden that the once-called "Senator from Visa" is a Bolshie. It looked cynical because it was. It satisfied no one - if you wanted to vote for him because you thought that he was a moderate, you were shocked and appalled. If you were someone who likes your pols to be Socialist, you were both unconvinced and sickened while you read about his shameless efforts to serially enrich literally his whole family with his public offices.

If he is a king then it is that of Cynicism. As the rise of Trump and Sanders shows, it is not a title to be sought in this age. The Bushes and the Clintons, the most keen practitioners of the art and their followers are in bad odour on both sides. For what he has done in the Soft Graft Department, he should be SWAT'ed, perpwalked and jailed like others have for doing far less. It will suffice that, if he loses, that he will be condemned to the political obscurity and oblivion he has earned if biological processes do not make that also a personal darkness.

Sanders Picking

Part of the BS of someone like Sanders is his cherrypicking. Like his organizer saying the Gulag was not as bad as it is cracked up to be (which sounds exactly like his Boss saying the chandeliers were great at Soviet subways and food lineups there were a good thing) or that Castro was authoritarian but he did "give" people literacy (as if the only way to deliver efficient infrastructure and social progress is via murderous totalitarianisms). Meanwhile, what would we think or Sanders say if Trump suddenly said that there were "good things" about the Nazi Regime or the Crow Law South or Slavery? The reality is that a man who is more forgiving of Cuba than the sitting president and even America, herself, is about to bag the Democratic Party nomination for POTUS!

DemPortrait the Next: Doomberg

Mike Bloomberg's biggest problem as a candidate is he hasn't been a candidate for anything in a long time (2009 to be exact), he is gutless and money can't buy everything but especially time, character and love. Oh yeah, he's unlikable and he is a Control Freak. BTW, he and his advisors just threw the 450 million he spent on ads and a smart "below the radar" strategy before Super Tuesday down the drain after negligently getting him involved in the Las Vegas debate for a caucus he was not even taking part in. Ah, but don't forget, he also abandoned the very reasons and premises that made him a candidate for president in many people's eyes in the first place. Other than that, no problem.

But, wait, a word about the gutlessness and the Mission Fail that occurred as a result here. A lot of people thought that the reason MB was the one who could get rid of Trump was that he was politically incorrect enough on some issues to make independents come back to the Democratic Party. He would relobotomize the Party on race, law and order and education rather than kowtow to the Party's leftwing fringe monitors who insist on strict adherence to their Marxist-Leninist standard of ideological hygiene. Instead, not just in the debate but from the start he has done just that, kowtowed. He has, incredibly for a person who is known as being nothing if not tough and smart, renounced his own Legacy.

If Bloomberg does not want to stoutly defend his policies as Mayor, including "Stop and Frisk", then what's the point of MB except to indulge in the usually Climate Change inspired Will to Power and Doom and Gloom that all the other candidates are already foolishly committed to and hamstrung by? If there's no difference between him and the other "moderates" and even on a certain level, Sanders, then no amount of money is going to make people come out and vote for him.

It is a just and good result, for, if Bloomberg can't defend himself, how is he going to defend America and Americans?

Mom v. The World

It took my dear Wife to remind me of that wonderful aphorism about activists first put forward by P.J. O'Rourke way back in the 90's: "Everybody wants to save the World but no one wants to help Mom wash the dishes." Like the song says in "Hair", it's "Easy to be hard", it's so easy, especially for people who care about evil and social injustice to be proud and say no to caring for the ones in your life that really matter.

But my Wife came up with a delightful macro-economic take on this moral. It is best expressed in another of her favourite metaphors: "Take care of the First downs and the Touchdowns take care of themselves." In other words, the biggest problems in the World - war, abortion, crime - could be solved if we just do some simple things to make them less needful, likely or rampant. It is incrementalism at its best.

Instead of grand schemes or transformative programs or pervasive laws, why not just try simple things like trading more freely with each other, creating good ongoing conditions for education and work, being as vigilant in snuffing out petty crime as serious and so on. We just take care of the little things daily, bit by bit, and do some hard work along the way.  We'll be happy and better off in the end. Give people real choices in life and let them take charge of their lives and the big problems will start to look far less daunting, indeed.

What I love about this take the most is that it urgently calls for the government to leave people alone so that they can realize their potential to the maximum. We all then become stronger, better, happier and less dependent on the State so that we are citizens better able to combat the big problems that remain, too. It's not sexy to many who count their success in how many new laws they have deeded to us but I happen to find its emphasis on self reliance, human genius and common sense a real turn on!

Ford Lemon

Thinking of Ford, almost exactly two years after his ascension to the Leadership of the PCO, I am minded of Churchill's comment on the ill-fated Anzio invasion. "I thought we were throwing a Tiger on to the beach but we got a Whale instead!" I thought we were getting a real fiscal conservative who understood that ours was "the most indebted subordinate jurisdiction in the World" TM and that we needed to get control of that or we were all toast. Plus, it might be nice if we make it finally not an indictable offence to do business in this province again. Oh, and BTW, I'm even gonna "consider" ridding you of those larcenous hydro bills we have needlessly stuck you with. Hell, he was not only the Brother of "Stop the Gravy Train", he would be a mix of Ronald Reagan, Max Bernier and Conan the Barbarian with a little bit of Hitler around the edges so how could we political marks, otherwise known as conservative voters lose, right?

Well, despite being told that our Hero was "unelectable", stupid and uncouth Trump Lite, he won the Leadership and then the Election humiliating his only real opposition into the worst result it had of all time. A foolproof 30 seat majority was obtained with an obtuse feckless NDP opposition leftover. All was in front of us. We could do whatever we wanted.  It was Then that the troubles began.

The "consideration" of killing the big Hydro bills was the first to quickly disappear. Then the commitment to a balanced budget faded away. Then the taxes that were to be cut were to be cut...once the budget was balanced. Besieged business owners were delighted to hear that Ontario was indeed "open for business". Doug Ford's signs on Ontario's borders told us so. Aside from an early, no doubt a "pour encourager les autres" award of optimism more than anything for being a "Regulation Buster", all pretence to any real fiscal conservatism was out the door. (it would be interesting to find out if Ford really has promulgated any fewer regs than Wynne did in the equivalent period)

Oh, but you say,"The Star tells me that the Ford government is a vicious fiscal hawk gutting our social safety net to help all of our, er, I mean, their rich friends on Bay Street"? Well, good for you if you think that but none of us who can do the math can see it. What we do see are a bunch of lily livered scuzzbag Albany Club types who have got a hold of our man and told him that it's too early to do anything really tough or "bold" to save our economy. Then, when the term's almost up, they'll say,"Wait until we're re-elected". The same people who did the same thing to Harper. But, I'm not naive. Just like Stephen, I believe Doug is an adult, the most powerful man in the biggest province for God's sake, who really believes that not going too hard will win him re-election while he blames others for his achieving zip. 

Which reminds me of the latest disaster. The question of the day is: would he have won that election if he had said that he was going to enable a province wide teacher strike by paying us $60 a day for daycare? I think not. Just as he surely would have lost if he had said,"I have no better clue how to get us out of this fiscal and economic mess than the others do!" (although he might have got some points for honesty)

Then again Someone might have told him then that Harris (who dealt with the last province wide teachers' strike very differently as I recall) balanced the budget and saw the economy grow like topsy in his first term after being handed a deficit and other disasters that were far larger and seemingly intractable than the ones he's facing. It just takes courage, a real plan and the barest of competence (Harris was a golf pro and a teacher). Sadly, fear seems to actuate Ford and his cabinet and caucus and that makes everything seem more hard than it really is. So soon you are bargaining with yourself, as in the Teachers' mess, giving things away and still not getting even the meagre goals you've set for yourself remotely done while still being called a "Nazi" by the Sainted Press and John Tory for your trouble.

It is perhaps not a surprise that what with being saddled with the "People's Compromise" or whatever that bloody encyclopedic platform of ours was called, that Doug felt constrained from being a Ralph Klein (who actually was initially less fiscally sound than his Liberal opponent). But, how hard was it to articulate a simple truth that all of us, even our professional martyr schoolteachers and taxpayer-to-be charges, should be concerned with the province's finances? It certainly could not have been as hard as suggesting other deep, complex propositions like that we are overtaxed or that we pay too much for that rare, newfangled thing called electric power. Right? Hey, right?! Hello? Are you still listening...

The losers in all this will eventually be the Tories who the People will correctly blame for this, for not doing what they were hired by us to do. The People of Ontario will not get to wait until 2022 to lose. A Martian looking down on Whale Land from 20,000 feet will not have even noticed there was a change in government.