Running on a Democratic Party platform that made him sound like Grover Cleveland, which would have been great, Roosevelt instead was an unprincipled opportunist who had no intention of letting any tradition or precept of American government, or the Constitution, stand in the way of doing whatever seemed like a good idea at the moment. Mostly what seemed like a good idea was to continue Hoover's policy of driving up wages, which then kept unemployment above ten percent, and mostly above fifteen percent, for the rest of the decade. Thus, we have the rather awkward but undeniable truth that the beloved and celebrated New Deal failed to end the Great Depression, which was supposedly what it was for. Also, the other kind of thing that seemed like a good idea was to move to a planned and controlled Command Economy, such as Wilson had experimented with in World War I, and whose good results could be seen in the Thirties in the economic successes of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Communist Russia. Indeed, Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace, would have liked nothing better than to have collectivized farming as Stalin was doing so successfully in Russia (or at least so he, and countless acolytes, said -- the millions of people starving to death were perhaps just the eggs that needed breaking to make the omlette). When Roosevelt's Fascist style industrial plan, the National Recovery Act (NRA), was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, Roosevelt realized that he needed a pliant Court to stand the Constitution on its head and give him the power that he wanted. His "court packing" scheme was a fiasco, but as time passed his judicial appointments accomplished what more direct methods had not:  Soon the Supreme Court was conceding to the Federal government whatever power it wanted, to spend money or regulate anything. In retrospect, these powers seem to have been used modestly, but there was no longer anything in principle to stand in the way of their being used to their logical extreme, which would be the path promoted by subsequent activist Democratic, and even some Republican, Presidents -- as, for instance, in the expansion of the bogus and tyrannical power of administrative agencies. Also, even though Roosevelt enjoyed widespread support, his power base was still in the Solid South, which had voted Democratic since Reconstruction, and Roosevelt did absolutely nothing to alienate Southern white Segregationists. Indeed, New Deal public works and anti-business initiatives fit in with the kind of Populist (quasi-Fascist) anti-capitalism that was prevalent among many of just those Segregationists (e.g. Huey Long). Nevertheless, tears in the increasingly threadbare New Deal began to occur. Unemployment was back up to twenty percent in 1938, and New Dealers actually lost control of Congress in the 1938 midterm elections (to a coalition of Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats). There is no telling how disaffected the public might have become with Roosevelt had it not been for a deus ex machina:  World War II and his death near the end made for the sanctification and apotheosis of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The ironies of this outcome are multiple. First, the wartime economic policy of frozen wages and fiat money inflation to pay for the war absolutely reversed the persistent policy of a whole decade, since Hoover, to drive up wages. Real wages now went down to so low a level that when the war ended, even with millions of men suddenly demobilized, unemployment in 1946 and 1947 was only 3.9 percent, lower any anyone in the Nineties even thinks is possible. Thus, World War II destroyed the economics of the New Deal, even as people thought that the wartime Command features of the economy were pretty much the same sort of thing. The other irony is the credit Roosevelt gets for a political naiveté on the international stage that makes even Wilson look good:  Roosevelt actually liked "Uncle Joe" Stalin, thought he understood him and could deal with him, and, all in all, saw Soviet Russia as a benign and democratic system. This credulous ignorance and folly endears him, of course, to the Left, from then to now, but it condemned Eastern Europe to forty-five years of tyranny, poverty, and murder, with a future still clouded by the expectations of people to have everything done for them. Thus, poor Poland, whose invasion by both Germany and Russia in 1939 started World War II, was left by the agreement of a sick and failing Roosevelt at Yalta, with Soviet spies at his side, to the non-existent mercy of Russia after the war was over. The whole grim and horrible record of Roosevelt's Presidency, of failure and deception, both domestic and foreign, of the end of Constitutional government, of the creation of the wholesale business of the Federal government to hand out subsidies and payoffs to large scale political constituencies, is nevertheless commonly viewed as the greatest achievement of America in the Twentieth Century, as the beginning of a new era to repudiate all the evils and failures of the old America. What the evils and failures of the old America were supposed to be, of course, was everything that made America different from countries like Britain, Germany, and France in Europe, everything that made America a place to which people flocked from supposedly more "progressive" regimes. That being the case, it is not surprising that one continuing characteristic of "progressive" thought is still just, very simply, to despise everything about the United States. Thus, some school districts have decided that schools should not be named after George Washington, because he owned slaves. This kind of hatred of America is implicit in the continuing myth of the New Deal, which is the formative myth behind most political trends for the rest of the century.

Social reform, which the country welcomed and still demands, seems to have been perverted by lesser members of the New Deal general staff to the purposes of making war upon the existing social and economic order, a war inspired by nothing so much as bitter malice against any measure of personal success.

But today the average citizen is so much more inclined to question the New Deal and so much less willing to follow it blindly than he was in 1933 because he has had time to test its results upon his own affairs and, in the light of such incomplete but impressive results, to doubt its usefulness to the country as a whole. -- The Wall Street Journal, March 6, 1935

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong ... somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises.... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started.... And an enormous debt to boot! -- Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury, testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee, May 9, 1939 (17.2% unemployment)

If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he sorely needs, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House backyard come Wednesday. -- H.L. Mencken

... the greatest fraud this country has ever known. An amusing and charming fellow but a man entirely without a conscience.... Roosevelt was the perfect politician. -- H.L. Mencken, New York Sun, June 5, 1946

Two-thirds mush and one third Eleanor. -- Alice Roosevelt Longworth

The President who did the most to destroy Constitutional Government and turn American politics into a general racket of vote-buying and corruption nevertheless stands among the greatest of all Presidents in the estimation of most academic historians and intellectuals. No foreign enemies have ever so imperiled the future of America. -- Enklinobarangus ()

The Roosevelts & Delanos

Philippines Commonwealth, 1935

Harry Truman mitigated some of the worse features of the New Deal. When it came to the economy, Truman did very little, which was just the right idea. For two years he also had a Republican Congress, but this does not explain all his inactivity -- while he could blame the rejection of a nationalized health care plan on the "do nothing" Republican Congress elected in 1946, it was not passed either by the Democrat Congress elected, with Truman himself, in 1948. The result, however, was prosperity not seen since the Twenties. The horrible lie that Soviet Russia was more economically successful than the United States was soon to be decisively exploded. At the same time, Truman awakened to the Soviet threat. It was already too late for much of Eastern Europe, and it may have always been too late for China, but Truman drew a line, built an Alliance, and stopped Stalin's plans to infiltrate, corrupt, and take over the rest of Europe. This alienated the Left, and turned Henry Wallace into a "progressive" candidate for President against Truman in 1948 -- endorsed even by Albert Einstein. At the same time Truman had desegregated the United States military. This alienated the Segregationists, who then formed a Dixicrat Party and ran Strom Thurmond (50 years later still a U.S. Senator) for President. This made things look very bad for Truman, and Thomas Dewey more or less assumed that he would win the election. He didn't. Truman, disliked by both the Left and the Dixicrats, must have been all right. Indeed, Truman had a blunt style that makes other politicians sound like the con-men they mostly are -- Truman said he really didn't "give 'em hell" in 1948, but he just told the truth and "they thought it was hell." And Truman also knew how to tend certain political alliances. His recognition of Israel virtually the minute it was created is often thought of as complete political cynicism (he is supposed to have said, "Show me the Arab voters"), but Truman was probably sincerely convinced of Zionism by his friends in the substantial Jewish community in Kansas City. Truman was just not a very cynical guy, though this move certainly did not hurt him on election day. Nevertheless, soon things began to go wrong. Truman spent too much time playing catch up with the seriousness of the Soviet threat. He was genuinely surprised at Stalin's betrayals of post-war agreements, and incredulous that Americans might actually be spying for Russia right at the heart of our government. When Wittaker Chambers exposed Alger Hiss as a Communist and a Soviet spy, Truman called it a "red herring," and never quite got ahead of the issue that there were other Communists and spies in positions of trust and authority. It didn't help that Omar Bradley, then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, decided to withhold from him the fact that Soviet spy networks had been exposed through the decryption of wartime cable traffic (the Venona project -- whose existence, however, was known to the Soviets, thanks to their spies). Then North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950. The Soviet penetration of the Manhattan Project became public knowledge when the Rosenbergs were arrested. Convicted in 1951, they were executed, despite projests from incredulous "liberal" opinion, for giving atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets. After a brilliant recovery in Korea by Douglas MacArthur, the war settled down into a miserable stalemate. The apparently wild charges of Joseph McCarthy began to appear reasonable to many people. Truman, stymied in Korea and haunted by the specter of Communist sympathizers in Roosevelt's government, began to lose popularity. Firing MacArthur for insubordination, although reasonable, was a very unpopular act. He decided not to run for President again in 1952. Although Truman was hammered at the time from the Right, by the scandals and failures of dealing with Communism, today he is mostly disparaged from the other direction, by the mostly Leftist historians of present academia. These worthies (although thoroughly discredited now by Russian sources) tend to blame the United States for the Cold War, and they must therefore blame Truman, who did stand up to Stalin -- recent "histories" of the Cold War by organizations like Cable News Network (CNN) are essentially continuations of Soviet propaganda, dismissing Truman as "naive" in foreign affairs. Nor did Truman have any grandiose economic or social schemes to destroy the economy or corrupt society. This means that trendy historians are more inclined to see Truman as a failure than, say, Wilson or Roosevelt. However, the truth is that Truman was no fool and no failure, no bigot and no opportunist. From the perspective of history, our estimation of him must rise, as it declines (or should) for the likes of Wilson, Roosevelt, and Johnson.

President Truman told Congress that this nation intends to uphold the dignity of the individual and to insure that men can exercise their inalienable right to live under those social and political forms which they freely choose without coercion. If this country means anything less than that, it had best forget the whole matter. -- The Wall Street Journal, March 17, 1947

The kind of government action that would be called for in a serious economic emergency would not be appropriate now. -- Harry S Truman (1949)

The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know yet. -- Harry S Truman

Ultimately, [Alger] Hiss would be convicted of lying about these matters and wind up in a federal prison, so the vindication of [Whittaker] Chambers couldn't have been much more conclusive. None of this, however, impressed the alleged security hawk, Harry Truman. As late as 1956, he engaged in the following exchanges in a TV interview reprinted by U.S. News & World Report. Question: "Mr. President, is it true that you characterized Richard Nixon's investigation into the Alger Hiss case as a 'red herring'?" Answer; "No, but it was. I never characterized it that way but that's exactly what it was." Question: "Do you think that he [Hiss] was a Communist spy?" Answer: "No, I do not." -- M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted By History, Three Rivers Press, 2007, p.324.

My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference. -- Harry S Truman

Puerto Rico Commonwealth, 1952
Philippines Independent, 1946

The first professional military man to be elected on his war record since Ulysses S. Grant, Eisenhower's Presidency was more successful than Grant's -- and the first one since Grant's to begin assaulting Segregation again in the South. Eisenhower was, in fact, much better prepared to be President. While Grant was out fighting battles, Einsenhower, as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, operated at a rarified level of strategy and politics not unlike the duties of the President. Eisenhower as President tended to give people the impression of doing little, relaxing at golf, and often answered questions with double-talk. It now appears that this was largely an act. Eisenhower was accustomed to working behind the scenes, and so his agency in events was often concealed, like the Taoist ruler who is a "shadowy presence," and whose accomplishments strike people as having "happened naturally." What Eisenhower was then able to accomplish is impressive, both absolutely and especially in retrospect. Accepting stalement in Korea, Einsenhower quickly ended the war. Subsequently, Eisenhower both held the line against Communism and kept the country out of new wars. After the later disaster in Vietnam, Eisenhower's determination to avoid land wars in Asia appears as wisdom indeed. Similarly, the apparent excesses of anti-Communism were reigned in with the Senate censure of Joseph McCarthy, which Eisenhower seems to have coordinated, in 1954. Meanwhile, the domestic economy represented a return to "normalcy" not seen since 1929. Low inflation, low unemployment, balanced budgets, steady economic growth, and a falling poverty rate were all indicators of prosperty such as would not be combined in the same way for the rest of the century. The entire post-War Baby Boom generation grew up thinking that prosperity occurred naturally and was their birthright. For many, the Fifties consequently were a somewhat boring time of safety, happiness, and conformity. Not entirely boring, with the threat of the Bomb present to the minds of most adults, at least, and domestic disturbances like the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. The intitiatives against Segregation that had begun under Truman continued and grew into a political movement under Eisenhower. Einsenhower's own appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, struck down Segregated schools in 1954, and Eisenhower had to call out the National Guard to preserve peace in Little Rock, Arkansas. At the same time, there was little hint that "Civil Rights" would later become an instrument of attacks upon freedom, private property, and Constitutional government, perpetrated by the Democrats and by Warren himself. Nevertheless, there was a deep flaw in the Presidency:  Eisenhower determined to accept the New Deal as a fait accompli. The prosperity of the Fifties then concealed the swindle of Social Security and the diseconomies that had been built into labor law and other Federal economic regulation. These problems, however, and the high tax rates maintained by Eisenhower (for the sensible purpose of paying down the National Debt from the War), hobbled the economy somewhat and resulted in two recessions during the decade. The last recession occurred just in time to hamper Vice-President Richard Nixon in his bid for the Presidency. Nixon's awkward personality, and a fair number of stolen votes, then passed the Presidency to John Kennedy. Eisenhower's fatherly tenure was not a case of inspiring leadership, but he got the country rather solidly on track, did the job, consolidated the anti-Communist cause and alliance, and did not tilt at what, at the time, would have seemed like windmills. What could be done with this, for good or ill, in the future, could not have been foreseen. -- The 48 star Flag flew for 47 years (1912-1959), until recently the longest period for any of the 28 American Flags since 1775. The 49 star Flag only flew for 1 year (1959-1960). Although Alaska and Hawai'i were both admitted in 1959, Hawai'i was admitted after the Fourth of July that year, so the 50 star Flag was not raised until the Fourth in 1960. The 50 star Flag has now flown for more than 50 years (1960-2010).

+49. Alaska, 3 Jan 1959
+50. Hawai'i, 21 Aug 1959

A young, witty, and appealing President, and a genuine World War II hero from PT Boat action near New Georgia in the Solomons, who, with his wife Jackie and their two children, presided over what Jackie herself, after his assassination, called "Camelot." Although Kennedy's father, Joseph Kennedy Sr., may have made some of his money during Prohibition by rum running (perhaps, indeed, a mark in his favor -- today it all would be seized under tyrannical "civil forfeiture" laws), the Kennedy White House, more so than any time since, had a patrician aura of Old Money. Some of the dark side of this was apparent at the time, e.g. the Bay of Pigs invasion in which anti-Castro exiles were left to be slaughtered and captured on the beach after Kennedy backed out on providing them U.S. air cover. While this project was not Kennedy's idea in the first place, his clumsiness in dealing with it can be chalked up to "on the job training." What seemed to be his inexperience, however, led Castro and Khrushchev into thinking that they could get away with placing nuclear missles in Cuba. This "Cuban Missle Crisis" was handled rather better by Kennedy, and he seemed to find his geopolitical feet. More of the dark side of the Kennedy years emerged later. Some of it was political -- e.g. giving the go-ahead for the assassination of Ngo-Dinh Ðien in South Vietnam -- some of it was personal -- e.g. the extensive use of prostitutes by Kennedy. The most curious thing about the Kennedy legacy, however, is how it is that this dedicated Cold Warrior and Anti-Communist, who said in his inaugural speech that we were prepared to "pay any price, bear any burden" for the cause of Freedom, whose most famous statement, at the recently constructed Berlin Wall, was "I am a Berliner," and who was assassinated by a loser would-be-Communist, has become the endless project of Leftists (aided, we now know, by the KGB itself) who want to convert him into a crypto- or about-to-become Leftist himself, the victim of a diabolical conspiracy by the forces of the Right, the Pentagon, and Lyndon Johnson, who suspected, or knew, that Kennedy was about to abandon the South Vietnamese into the hands of the Communists. This seems to come from people who can't believe that someone so charming and appealing could disagree with them about Communism -- perhaps they really don't know that old Joe Kennedy was a great friend of old Joe McCarthy, who was quite welcome at the Hyannis Port Kennedy "compound." They later found Kennedy's brother Robert, who had been an attorney for McCarthy (who became his first child's godfather), agreeing with them rather more, but then he was assassinated by, of all things, a Palestinian, who, since he didn't fit into leftist demonology either, could not, either, have been the real assassin. Although the remaining Kennedy brother, Ted, then became a consistent advocate of socialism and anti-American causes in the U.S. Senate (fighting, also, the kind of tax cuts like what had been his brother's own brain child), John Kennedy's own children, Caroline and John Jr., chose to live private lives. After Jackie died in 1994, John Jr. founded a quasi-serious political magazine, George, but now himself has tragically died, in a private plane crash with his wife and sister-in-law, in 1999. This has provided Americans with the emotional equivalent of the death of Princess Diana for the British. But the real heritage of the Kennedy Administration is still ambiguous. The Civil Rights Bill proposed by Kennedy was later pushed through (1964) by Lyndon Johnson, who, curiously, was rather less concerned about burning bridges with Southern white Democrats than Kennedy had been. The result has been the Republicanization of the white South. This all might have been avoided if Kennedy himself had gotten the Bill passed through a compromise that deleted the more egregious assaults on private property contained in it. This would have been better all around for the future. As it was, Johnson, with his popular mandate and legislative experience, railroaded through a bill that voided the Fifth Amendment (the "Takings" clause), destroyed the principle of freedom of association, alienated the white South, and cost the Democrats the 1968 election. On the plus side, Johnson also got the Kennedy tax cuts passed, the last serious tax cuts ever advocated by the increasingly socialist Democratic Party.

The sculpture of John Kennedy in Rapid City is based on a famous photograph of him playing with John Jr. It is poignant that the two representations of Presidents with their sons among the sculptures, Kennedy with John Jr. and Lincoln with Tad, include boys who also died, like their fathers, prematurely.

The enviably attractive nephew who sings an Irish ballad for the company and then winsomely disappears before the table clearing and dishwashing begin. -- Lyndon B. Johnson

The Kennedies

Karl Marx, in one of his more perceptive moments, said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, next as farce. If Bill Clinton is the final repetition of the New Deal as farce, Lyndon Johnson was its first repetition as tragedy. And it was tragic indeed. The President who ended Segregation through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, destroying the power of his own Democratic Party in the Solid South, also destroyed the rights of private property and freedom of association, guaranteed by the Fifth and Thirteenth Amendments, in the same Act. The President who finally enforced the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, undoing the shameful compromise of 1877 that ended Reconstruction, also created the Welfare State with its subsidies for illegitimacy that did what, as Walter Williams says, slavery and Segregation had not done:  Destroy the black family -- or at least the family among the poorest and most vulnerable members of the black community. The President who decided to bite the bullet and do what it would take to resist another hydra head of Communism, by defending South Vietnam with the full might of America, ended up cursed, smeared, and reviled as few other American Presidents, stuck, not just with a Korea-like stalemate, but with a war that would go down as the only defeat in United States history (excepting the side that Johnson's own ancestors picked in the Civil War). Johnson declined to run again in 1968 and left office under a cloud that made Truman's leaving look like a Hawaiian vacation. Johnson never lived down the shame, neglected his health, and found an early grave (1973), ironically almost simultaneously with the aged and respected Truman (1972). The bitter fallout of Johnson's Presidency continues. The Left continues to dream that the squalid failure of the War on Poverty was just from lack of money (if more than five trillion dollars, enough to buy every business in the country, isn't enough, what is? -- Ah! I bet it would take all the money!). The Left also takes the failure of the war in Vietnam to have decisively discredited anti-Communism. Indeed, the standard account now is that McCarthyism already discredited anti-Communism, even though this is an anachronism of wishful thinking -- neither Einsenhower, Kennedy, nor Johnson saw Joseph McCarthy as doing anything of the sort. Consequently, the Democratic Party of the Seventies and Eighties became the anti-anti-Communist Party, thoughtlessly countenancing Soviet and Cuban penetration in Africa and Central America, until Jimmy Carter was rudely awakened, much too late, by the naked Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The later Fall of Communism was an embarrassing anomaly still neither digested nor explained by the Left (except by absurd theories, like that the Soviet Union was actually a capitalist economy!). Hence, the Democratic Party in the Clinton Nineties still struggled to "build socialism." The damage done by the Johnson Presidency, even while trying, and sometimes doing, good, is thus staggering. There have been few more tragic and catastrophic Presidencies.

These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days, and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. -- Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, 1949

Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There's nothing to do but stand there and take it. -- Lyndon B. Johnson

The only President ever to resign from office. The Watergate burglary became the paradigm for official misconduct for years go come (contributing the suffix "-gate" to multiple scandals). Nevertheless, Nixon left his mark on formative events, which would affect the future deeply, for good and for ill. Campaigning in 1968, Nixon claimed that he had a "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam. Although Nixon never publicly said what the plan had been, in retrospect it would appear to have involved undercutting North Vietnam's support from Communist China and the Soviet Union through Nixon's initiatives to normalize relations with them. This produced the era of "Detente," engineered by Nixon's National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. This produced arms control treaties with the Soviet Union and, most dramatically, an opening to Communist China, which the United States had previously never dealt with. Since Nixon had always been a staunch anti-Communist, it was politically possible for him, as it would not have been for anyone who might have been suspected of weakness against Communism, to make the move to open relations with China and to actually visit the country and meet Chairman Mao. Thus, it was said, "Only Nixon can go to China." Before too long, Jimmy Carter recognized Communist China as the only government of China, dumping America's long time ally, the Nationalist Chinese on Taiwan, into limbo and giving the Communists China's veto seat on the U.N. Security Council. Nixon probably wasn't interesting in going that far. As a stategy for disengagement from Vietnam, however, the Soviet and China initiatives don't seem to have helped that much. Instead, Nixon focused on "Vietnamization," training and supplying the army of South Vietnam until it could hold its own against the Communists, while American forces withdrew. This worked to an extent. U.S. ground forces were withdrawn, and U.S. air support limited the gains made by an overt North Vietnamese invasion of the South in 1972 (the Vietcong as such were so badly battered by their 1968 offensive in the South that North Vietnam had to give up the fiction that they were fighting a "civil war" in the South on their own). Nixon was excoriated at the time and faulted ever since for expanding the war into Cambodia in 1970. However, Cambodian neutrality was already no more than a polite fiction when Cambodian territory had become a major invasion route and sanctuary for the Communists. The outrage over attacking that sanctuary simply came from people who didn't believe in winning the war or saving South Vietnam anyway and whose scruples were offended that prudent and appropriate measures would be taken to win it. As it happened, attacking the Communists in Cambodia resulted in a pro-Western coup there. The tragic result, eventually, was that as South Vietnam was abandoned to the Communists, Cambodia (and Laos) went down with it also. By the time the North Vietnamese decided to void the treaty negotiated by Nixon and simply conquer the South in 1975, Congress and, apparently, the American public, were in no mood to exert the force necessary to hold the Communists to their agreements. Thus, all of Indo-China, the "Dominoes," fell to the Communists. Fortunately, the line was held at Thailand, where no serious Communist insurgency ever developed. The valuable anti-Communist fruit of Vietnam may simply have been to buy time, to delay and exhaust the Communists (who probably lost well over a million men, in comparison to the 55,000 dead of the United States). Any future Communist expansion was then handicapped by a falling out among themselves. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, while proceeding to murder more than a third of the population of their own country, also began attacking the Vietnamese. The Soviets lined up with Vietnam, while China, long estranged from the Soviet Union, lined up with Cambodia. Eventually the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and overthrew their erstwhile allies, installing a puppet government and, to the horror of the world, publicizing the genocide that had taken place. This showed the naked face of Communist terror such as previously never been seen so directly. This was embarrassing for the Leftists who had been arguing that the stories of murder in Cambodia were all CIA lies (as Stalin's mass murder is occasionally still said to have been). Some of the Left was also disillusioned that the Vietnamese instituted a regime of "reëducation" concentration camps in Vietnam, and that large numbers of people began fleeing Vietnam in small overcrowded boats. These were the "boat people," many of whom were taken in by the United States. Overall, more civilians died in Indo-China after the end of the war than in all the years of war preceding. While many of these events took place under the subsequent Presidencies of Ford and Carter, they vindicated Nixon's warning that the result of American defeat in Indo-China would be a "bloodbath." The response to that at the time was often little more than derision; but, when it proved to be the case, there was usually little acknowledgement that Nixon had been right and that the Communists were not entirely the popular, amiable, magnanimous, freedom fighters that the anti-war movement had made them out to be.

I wouldn't trust Nixon from here to that phone. -- Barry Goldwater (1986)

Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal. -- Richard Nixon, to David Frost (1977), apparently invoking the principle of Roman Law that the will of the sovereign is law (Princeps legibus solutus est, "The sovereign is not bound by the laws"), without remembering that the People, not the President, are Sovereign in America

Quod principi placuit, legis habet vigorem: utpote cum lege regia, quae de imperio eius lata est, populus ei et in eum omne suum imperium et potestatem conferat; Whatever the Emperor has decreed [i.e. pleases the prince] has the force of law; since by a Royal ordinance which was passed concerning his sovereignty, the people conferred upon him all their own authority and power; A decision given by the emperor has the force of a statute. This is because the populace commits to him and into him its own entire authority and power, doing this by the lex regia which is passed anent his authority. -- Justinian, Digest, 1.4.1; S. P. Scott, The Civil Law, II, Cincinnati, 1932; Alan Watson, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985, Revised English-language edition, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998

Only President never elected either President or Vice-President. When Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace in 1973, after it was revealed that he had been on the take for years, Gerald Ford was nominated under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which had been confirmed in 1967, to be Vice-President. Then, when President Nixon resigned, Ford succeeded to the Presidency. Ford was well meaning and amiable but had no abilities superior to his predecessor or successor. Thus, nothing was really accomplished about inflation or energy. Ford had the bad fortune to preside over the actual fall of South Vietnam in 1975, about which, with Congress determined to provide for no real help, he could do nothing. He also had the bad fortune to slip and fall in public more than once, which gave him a clownish reputation -- that on top of the often repeated observation by Lyndon Johnson that Ford had played football without his helmet too much. All this, and the fact that Ford had pardoned President Nixon from any possible prosecutions, led to Ford losing the very close election in 1976.

He looks and talks like he just fell off Edgar Bergen's lap. -- David Steinberg

Jimmy Carter was an earnest, dedicated, intelligent, good, and well meaning man, a paragon of the post-Segregationist "New South," who, possibly for the last time, was able to carry all the Southern States for the Democrats. Martin Luther King Sr., at the Democratic National Convention in 1976, said that "God has given us Jimmy Carter." But Carter's Presidency did not turn out well. The Great Society programs had already obviously failed, to anyone bothering to look; the economy was limping along under high taxes and "stag-flation," which Carter inherited from Ford and Nixon but did little about; and, since it still seemed like a good idea, price controls were kept on oil products, which meant that shortages and rationing returned by 1979. The solution to all of these was outside of Carter's largely conventional universe... Except that Carter started the process of deregulation, as of the interstate trucking industry and the airlines, that began the trend to freer markets in the future, and that Carter appointed Paul Volker to the Federal Reserve. Volker would begin policies that later were able to kill inflation. However, Carter derived little benefit from these initiatives, whose good effects would be felt under Reagan (who would then get the credit from the economists and the blame from the Leftists). In foreign policy, Carter's decision to dump the right wing dictator allies of the United States out of human rights concerns, like the Shâh of Iran and Somoza in Nicaragua, became classic examples of why sometimes realpolitik is a good idea. When friendly dictators are just replaced with unfriendly dictators, who are also worse dictators, there is not a net improvement in the situation. The Shâh was replaced with the revolutionary Islâmic fascism, the mass murder, and terrorism of the Ayatollâh Khomeini. Somoza was replaced with the Sandinistas, clients of the Soviets and Cubans. There would be much grief to pay for this, as Carter himself was humiliated by the Iranian seizure of the American Embassy in Tehrân, and by the mortifying failure of the commando rescue team authorized by him. On the other hand, Carter had one great foreign achievement in his mediation of a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, though the problem of the Palestinians was just papered over, to fester and explode later on. Carter was conservative enough that he spared the country a lot of Leftist brainstorms to reform society, but he did set out to seriously move on one issue:  The "energy crisis." Unfortunately, the "energy crisis" all through the Seventies, with shortages, rationing, and lines at gas stations, was entirely an artifact of the price fixing instituted by Nixon. When Reagan became President, he immediately abolished oil price controls and the "energy crisis" disappeared as utterly as the morning dew. Carter, however, bought the conventional wisdom of the Seventies that oil was running out and decided that energy conservation was "the moral equivalent of war." Americans, however, were a little tired of war; and Carter's leadership style, despite his famous smile and his deliberate folksiness (rather forced, as when he insisted that he officially be called "Jimmy," rather than "James"), turned out to be sour, hectoring, and moralistic. When Americans didn't seem to respond much to his exhortations, Carter accused the country of suffering a "malaise" of spirit. This was Carter's political Waterloo. "Malaise" became the Republican title for Carter's entire Presidency, an effective one. In the 1980 Presidential debates, Reagan's own folksiness and humor threw Carter's personality into the worst light. With hostages in Tehrân and little to show domestically, Carter lost his reelection bid, the first time an elected incumbent President was defeated since Herbert Hoover. In retirement, Carter ennobled himself with work for Habitat for Humanity, a charitable organization dedicated to building low cost housing, mainly for the working poor. It was uncharitably suggested that building houses was more commensurate with Carter's abilities. However, what Carter's work there reveals is his own compromise between the Welfare State and the free market:  The fruit of Habitat for Humanity is infinitely superior to the squalor of public housing, but it also presupposes that there is a "market failure" in the private provision of low cost housing. The latter, however, is not true, since the availability of low cost housing has historically been suppressed by zoning, slow growth initiatives, and rent control, all violations of private property rights and the "takings" clause of the Fifth Amendment (but all still beloved of the Left). Nevertheless, Carter's compromise might have made for a more successful Presidency in somewhat easier times, and without the fiascoes of the "energy crisis" and Iran.

Jimmy Carter as president is like Truman Capote marrying Dolly Parton. The job is too big for him. -- Rich Little

If you're in the peanut business, you learn to think small. -- Eugene McCarthy

Ronald Reagan was one of the better Presidents of the Century. The hardest thing for the media elite, the political classes, and the intelligentsia to accept about this bitter truth is that Reagan often appeared ignorant and confused. When he later came down with Alzheimer's Disease, many figured that he had actually suffered from it for years. It was galling that some second rate, nitwit actor could outwit the Wise and the Anointed and get elected President twice. Of course, they also figured that it was all an act, though how Reagan could be a second rate actor in the movies and a first rate actor in politics was a little confusing. Indeed, Reagan was the same kind of politician as he had been an actor: Absolutely sincere, unaffected, humorous, and upright. Reagan's personality often still seems strangely hollow just because it was absolutely all on the surface. No one was left in any doubt about what Reagan believed or wanted. And much of what Reagan believed and wanted was wise beyond the reckoning of Ph.D.'s, lawyers, and the literati. It was, indeed, an illustration of F.A. Hayek's principle that some of the most important knowledge is implicit, and that this can be superior to any sophisticated book learning. But Reagan could also articulate the simple truths he believed, and a hostile press, mortified that he could speak right through their filter to the American people, grudgingly began to call him the "Great Communicator." What Reagan then communicated was just the old Jeffersonian principle that the government that governs best, governs least. Because modern government since the New Deal has tried to govern everything, it is obviously the problem. Unfortunately, reducing government was not a goal where Reagan was able to accomplish much. Part of it was that he tended to go along with Congressional spending, which ballooned during the Eighties. Unlike Clinton, Reagan did not play quite the kind of political hardball where he could veto the budget, shut down the government, and then get away with blaming Congress (of course, Clinton would veto a budget for spending too little). Reagan, oddly enough, may have been just too easy going. At the same time, he was determined to cut taxes, and with growing support from economists, he did. Like Andrew Mellon in the Twenties, and then Johnson in the Sixties, Reagan rolled back (again) the ever increasing bite of the income tax. The economy, which had experienced "stag-flation" through the 70's, and went into a deep recession Reagan's first couple of years, then took off into a seven year expansion that broke the bank at the Soviet Union, shook up American business as it had not been in decades, and, as Mellon had predicted in the Twenties and Laffer had described in the Seventies, produced more revenues from lower taxes (for which Congress spent $1.50 for every $1 that came in). The Democrats, who worship taxes like the Holy Grail, have absolutely never lived this down. They are in denial so deep that they still respond to the idea of tax cuts with rhetoric so stale ("tax cuts for the rich," "trickle down economics") that a dying goat would have no taste for it (though far too many Americans still fall for it). Despite tax hikes under Bush and Clinton, income tax rates are still nowhere near back up to where they were before Reagan (after Wilson and Roosevelt, perpetuated even by Eisenhower, the top marginal rate had been over 90%). The growth and shake-up in the economy in the Eighties (the "Decade of Greed"), where whole new industries (like personal computers and the video industry) lept into being, were the object of a torrent of ignorant vilification from the press, academia, and Hollywood. Business and finance were repeatedly smeared in movies, from the anti-anti-Communist Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987) to seemingly innocent fare like Pretty Woman (1990), which compared takeover buyouts to car theft. Breaking the Soviet Union was Reagan's other unforgivable accomplishment. When Reagan called the Soviet Union the "Evil Empire," the snickers among the intelligentsia were palpable. Had Reagan seen Star Wars too many times? How naive could this guy get? Didn't he know that the Russians loved and trusted their government, and that the Soviet economy was doing just great? Of course, Reagan didn't know anything of the sort, and nothing of the sort was true. The Soviet Union was a brutal dictatorship, which completely ignored Jimmy Carter's fantasy "human rights" Helsinki Accords, had built a huge navy, had steadily pushed its advantages through the Seventies, had plenty of credulous or treacherous "peace" activists in the West to try and disarm NATO, and was bankrolling wars from Angola to El Salvador, often fought with Cuban mercenaries. But Reagan went after them like a bulldog. He was no longer going to back down on anything, at one point walking out on Gorbachev at a summit in Iceland. He was going to out-build them and out-spend them; and, in fact, the Russian economy, devouring itself alive when wealth creation was prohibited by law, couldn't take it. Also, the Russians had made the strategic blunder (rare for them) of invading Afghanistan, where they had to take on a rebellion by some of the toughest people in the world, absolutely fearless Mujâhidin, fighters for Islâm in a Holy War. We will probably never know how many Russians died, often tortured and mutilated when captured -- the "Hanoi Hilton" may have been hell, but it is not clear how many captured Russians ever made it back home. Congress, which Democrats began to win back, soon lost stomach for the fight. But when anti-anti-Communist Democrats cut off funds to anti-government rebels in Nicaragua, the darling of the Left in the Eighties, people in the Reagan Administration worked out a deal with Israel to sell surplus weapons to Iran (which was drunkenly fighting off an Iraqi invasion in the "first" Gulf War) and then divert the profits to the Nicaraguan contras (i.e. the counter-revolutionaries). The press and the anointed pounced on this as the Great Scandal of the Reagan Administration -- the "Iran-Contra Affair." A special prosecutor eventually got some convictions, some of which were overturned (e.g. Oliver North), but most of the country refused to be particularly concerned or outraged. Reagan's enemies did not get their Watergate. The "Sandinistas," the Communists who ruled Nicaragua, got so self-confident and cocky that they actually decided to hold an honest election in 1990. Fidel Castro has never been so stupid. So, with international poll watchers on hand, the Sandinistas were voted out of office. The Contras had won. Meanwhile, Mikhail Gorbachev had decided to lift the dead hand of Soviet power a bit, and immediately governments began falling in Eastern Europe. The saying was that it took ten years for Communism to fall in Poland, ten months in Hungary, ten weeks in East Germany, ten days in Czechoslovakia, and ten hours in Romania, all in 1989, the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Reagan had challenged Gorbachev, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," at the Berlin Wall. In 1989, the Berlin Wall was torn down by a tide of individual Berliners. Ronald Reagan had defeated Communism, in the same year after he left office.

At the same time, Reagan's Presidency was flawed by some of the same kind of evils as Coolidge's Administration. Prohibition had now become the "War on Drugs," and Congress began to creatively think up one Police State measure after another to keep drugs out of the hands of the people who wanted them. The abuses of the Fourth Amendment, the outrageous and despicable evasions of the presumption of innocence, of due process (the Fifth and Fourteen Amendments), of excessive fines (the Eighth Amendment), and of simple justice and decency have grown and expanded ever since. The prison population has tripled since the early Eighties, and as many as half of Federal prisoners were involved in some breach of the (actually unconstitutional) drug laws. Alcohol Prohibition never involved so many shameless violations of the Bill of Rights. At the same time, the Reaganite "social" agenda of his conservative religious supporters, newly emerged as the politicized "Religious Right," received a lot of emotional and rhetorical support from Reagan; but when it was all over, they had precious little to show for it. The Supreme Court somewhat compromised Roe v. Wade but did not overturn it, even when packed with Reagan and Bush appointees; and prayer in school, evidently supported by a large majority of Americans, never got off the ground. Reagan was a Believer, but actually rather too easy going to accomplish the social agenda he supported. Indeed, Reagan was ironically the first President who had been divorced. Thus, the "Reagan Revolution" ended up accomplishing not quite all that its supporters wanted or that its enemies feared. It did not undo the Great Society or the New Deal. Indeed, the rot of those programs continued, as Leftist attacks on private property and freedom of association were folded conformably together with the police state measures of the War on Drugs. In those terms, Reaganism turned out to be nothing like an agenda to restore Constitutional government. So, despite the virtues and accomplishments of Coolidge, Truman, Eisenhower, and Reagan, Grover Cleveland remains the Last Good President.

The kind of government that is strong enough to give you everything you need is also strong enough to take away everything that you have. -- Ronald Reagan

You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or a right. There is only an up or down:  up to man's age-old dream -- the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course. -- Ronald Reagan, Republican National Convention, 1964

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! -- Ronald Reagan, 1987, in front of the Berlin Wall, torn down by the Berliners themselves in 1989

Bush was a poor successor to Ronald Reagan. A clueless, inarticulate Country Club Republican, Bush started off by calling for a "kinder, gentler America" (Nancy Reagan asked, "Kinder and gentler than what? Us?"), which meant he didn't want to be perceived as "mean" like the tax-cutting, welfare-cutting Reaganites. This made Bush a perfect dupe for the Democrats, who got Bush to break his only real campaign promise ("Read my lips, no new taxes") and sign off on tax increases, which helped put the economy into recession just as Bush was coming up for re-election. Then Bush signed more phony "civil rights" bills attacking property, business, and freedom, wanting to be liked. He wasn't. And so, even though it was a short and mild recession, even though Bush put together a Grand Alliance that freed Kuwait from Iraqi conquest in a lightning campaign, Bush ended up widely disliked, Ross Perot took 19% of the vote, and Slick Willy Clinton got into office with a 43% plurality. Bush, the first Vice-President since Martin van Buren to be elected to succeed his President, dropped the ball, with neither the same convictions nor abilities as his predecessor, and was defeated after one term. For the President under whose tenure Communism actually fell, Bush was totally devoid of ability to lead and articulate the aftermath. The Fall of Communism had little effect on the popular Marxist precepts that are still promoted in American politics, and it was the failure of George Bush that he did not attack and explode them when the iron was hot and the evidence obvious.

Read my lips:  no new taxes. -- George H.W. Bush , 18 August 1988

All hat and no cattle. -- John Connally

The Bushes

Only the second President in American history to be impeached by the House of Representatives and tried by the Senate, and now the first President to be found guilty of contempt of court and fined ($90,000+) by a federal judge (Susan Weber Wright):  A sickening, corrupt, unprincipled hypocrite, philanderer, and shameless, unrepentant liar, fresh from land and Savings and Loan swindles in Arkansas, Bill Clinton, like the Father of Lies, is gifted with savage and ruthless political instincts and a Satanic ability to ingratiate himself to voters and the "chattering classes." Thus, the only previously impeached President, Andrew Johnson, unpopular and bad but innocent of crime, was saved by the conscience of a single Senator, while Bill Clinton, guilty of certifiable felonies but popular, is saved by the shameless lack of conscience and the dereliction of duty of his Democrat lemmings and spineless "moderate" Republicans. Richard Nixon was condemned and recommended for disbarment by the American Bar Assocation (and resigned); but Clinton, found guilty of contempt of court for perjury, and recommended for disbarment by Arkansas authorities, was invited to deliver a keynote speech to the ABA. The hypocrisy and double-think of the Democrats and the ABA (a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party) certainly follows the paradigm of Clinton himself, who could manage to admit that he lied under oath in the Paula Jones case, and publicly to the American people, about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, while at the same time seeming to deny that he was lying or that he is culpable for perjuring himself (he just managed to give "a false impression") -- even as he previously finally admitted (also in the Paula Jones case) that he had had an affair with Geniffer Flowers while Governor of Arkansas, but denied that he had lied about it in 1992 when he said on Sixty Minutes to a national audience that he had not had an affair. In the Paula Jones case, Clinton and the Democrats are hoist on their own petard of the moralistic and totalitarian "sexual harassment" laws that have been cooked up over the last decade by feminists. If Clinton can claim that his perjured testimony in the Paula Jones case about his sexual activities was justifiable because it was all part of his "private life," and nobody else's business, then this would justify lying by any other defendant in a sexual harassment case also. It is unlikely that feminists and Democrats really want to allow that exception, for anyone else, in the perjury laws. But they do want to allow it for their guy. Instead of taking true responsibility by paying the penalty for his crimes, Clinton's constant strategy was to blame Kenneth Starr, the Special Prosecutor, and to send his supporters out to attack and vilify Starr, which is something that never occurred to Nixon or Reagan or Bush to do to the Special Prosecutors appointed to investigate them. Nixon fired a Special Prosecutor (Archibald Cox, in the famous "Saturday Night Massacre"), but he never launched an attack campaign against someone who, by law, cannot reveal the substance of his investigation. The only thing Clinton really seems to believe in is power, and he has done his best to extend the force of the Federal government into as many areas of American life as possible. This constant assault on the Bill of Rights is even acknowledged by Clinton defenders, like Alan Dershowitz. Although Clinton accomplished the extraordinary feat of losing both Houses of Congress to the Republicans for the first time in more than 40 years, he saved his own skin for reelection in 1996, and the Republicans, by choice, cowardice, and folly, have mostly gone along with the paternalistic and police state measures favored by him (as he cunningly went along with their "welfare reform") -- like a national identity card, with fingerprints, and Federal databases of all American workers and of the medical records of all Americans. Trying first to nationalize all of American medicine, and then at least to extend Medicare down to age 45, Clinton can still do no more that jerk to the socialist aspirations of his aging Sixties Radical friends (including the First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton), who have still not noticed that socialism failed. Although the Crown Jewels of the New Deal (Social Security) and the Great Society (Medicare) are both headed for bankruptcy, Clinton is a Pied Piper who is still able to lead most Americans down a path of further socialism and Federal power. With the Senate Democrats unwilling to convict one of their own, Clinton is free to do so for the pathetic remainder of his term. Clinton, the Democrats, and their accomplices in the Press and Academia have succeeded in deceiving a credulous electorate through a successful smear and belittlement of the investigation into his crimes. Thus, Clinton's lies are dismissed as (1) deceptive but not perjurious, or (2) perjurious but "only about sex," or (3) seriously perjurious but not "rising to the level of an impeachable offense," or (4) perhaps even impeachable but excusable anyway because his removal from office would hand a victory to the "vast right-wing conspiracy" of "mad dog" white supremacists and religious fundamentalists. The layers of sophistry in this defense betray the dishonesty and desperation of the Democratic Party, whose constant accusations of "partisanship" describe their own zombie-like chorus far better than the often confused, tentative, and undisciplined forces of the Republicans, whose party unity could not be maintained in either the House or the Senate, while dissent was all but unheard among the Democrats. Like Clinton himself, the Democrats ultimately value nothing but power -- just as they have succeeded in destroying the Constitution to allow unlimited power to the federal government. Thus, in Marx's expression, the New Deal has finally been replayed as farce, though a bitter and dangerous farce it is. Francis Fukuyama's "End of History," with the Fall of Communism, is now clearly nothing of the sort. The Left, as Talleyrand said of the Bourbons, have "learned nothing and forgotten nothing." About Clinton himself, however, the words of Samuel Adams may be the most fitting, that this man has become "a monument of infamy and derision." Anyone who would give this person the time of day is contemptible.

I have never seen...so slippery, so disguisting a candidate. -- Nat Hentoff (1992)

There is nothing this man won't do. He is immune to shame. Move past all the nice posturing and get really down there in him, you find absolutely nothing...nothing but an appetite. -- Jesse Jackson (1992)

I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. -- Bill Clinton, , 26 January 1988

I would be happy to give him a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs. -- Nina Burleigh (1998)

The president responded to plaintiff's questions by giving false, misleading, and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process. -- Federal Judge Susan Weber Wright in contempt of court citation (1999)

Bill Clinton -- that ol' hound dog, that gifted pol who truly loves politics, who always loved figuring out exactly where the people were and then going to exactly that spot and claiming it. -- Peggy Noonan, "What's Changed After Wisconsin," The Wall Street Journal, Saturday/Sunday, June 9-10, 2012, p.A13

The Clinton Scale

In 2004 American history was due for a big change -- if the same 72 year cycle held true, as from 1788 to 1860 or from 1860 to 1932. The terrorist attacks on 9/11/01 certainly signalled a change, but the institutional response to the crisis did not involve much in the way of basic changes and definitely nothing in the direction of the restoration of Constitutional government. The basis of the New Republic is the New Deal. This is nowhere near being directly challenged in mainstream American politics. George Bush is just as much a New Dealer as John Kerry. Indeed, when Bush defined his program as "Compassionate Conservativism," this made it sound like he was more of a New Dealer than the President who might have been thought of as not very "compassionate," i.e. Ronald Reagan. This seemed about on the level of the Mensheviks in political wisdom. Nevertheless, it seemed to work for Bush. On the other hand, the 2004 election did indeed signal a political trend:  The Republicans controlled the House of Representatives since 1995 and the Senate for most of that time. The Republicans had won seven Presidential elections since 1964, the Democrats only three. Population has been moving from centers of Democrat power, like New York, to new centers of Republican power, like Texas. Texas is now the second largest State in the Union, after California. California, indeed, became more dominated by the Democrats than for many years -- until the surprise election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor -- but this is just the problem:  The Democrats have nothing to offer politically except more socialism. The best recommendation for George Bush may be the fury of the Left against him. Hollywood threw all it had against Bush in 2004, from a summer blockbuster movie (The Day After Tomorrow, which explicity lampooned Bush and Vice-President Cheney) to the no-holds-barred "documentary" that was a tissue of lies, distortions, and half-truths (ruled thus by a British court), Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911. And then there was the money. The Democrats must hate to think of it, but the Republican Party got a larger number of small contributions, and a smaller number of large contributions, than the Democratic Party. No millionaire spent as much money on politics as George Soros, but it was all against Bush. The principal public complaint against Bush was the war in Iraq, which developed into a difficult campaign in urban warfare; but when the Democrats did not complain about Bill Clinton's war in Kosovo, and were happy to pass a resolution under Clinton that US policy would aim at the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, it begins to look like the use of the war as an issue is purely political, while the real objection to Bush is that he cannot be expected to push for the kind of socialism that the Democrats desire. Indeed, although Bush instituted a prescription drug benefit in Medicare (perhaps meaning bankruptcy faster than otherwise), and cooperated with Ted Kennedy on a fat (and unconstitutional) spending bill on education, the constant Democrat refrain was always "not enough." Like Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo, Democrat politics is always "more, more" -- unless, of course, with a Democrat President, when some limits have to be observed. But Bush also made noises about privatizing part of Social Security, and this was just enough of a threat, however modest, to the New Deal that the Democrats thought they could make a big issue out of it. It didn't work out that way. What the Democrats feared, and very properly, was a gradual drift of opinion away from the New Deal. When voters know that the Democrats will raise taxes, this doesn't help them either, whatever they say. We know them too well.

Or perhaps we don't. After winning Congress in 2006, perhaps because of weariness with the War in Iraq (as with Truman in 1952), the Democrats are back to their old tricks. Although the Republicans disillusioned their support with irresponsible spending, and the Democrats raged against such "corruption," we see them simply continuing in the same vein. The disgraceful "earmarks," which included infamous projects like the $398 million dollar "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska (i.e. to an island with only fifty people on it -- though it does include the heavily used Ketchikan Airport), the brain child of Republican Senator Ted Stevens, have simply been continued by the Democrats, with increasing levels of deception to try and conceal their existence, and who votes for them, from the public. But the public, who consistently rate Congress lower than the now unpopular George Bush, nevertheless seem prepared to vote more of the same.

In 2000 George W. Bush won the Presidency, in one of the closest elections in history. A minority of the popular vote, 48%, differing by decimals from Al Gore's 48%, translated into a majority of just one Electoral Vote. An election, in fact, much like 1960, where the Vice President of an apparently successful President loses by the thinnest of margins. Richard Nixon lost because of (1) a recession, (2) he looked bad on television (though, we now know, this was in part engineered by Kennedy sympathizers at the network who advised Nixon, badly, on his makeup), and (3) Mayor Richard Daley and Duval County Texas delivered the voting dead of Chicago and Texas to Kennedy. Al Gore did not have such problems. His burden was the shameful legacy of Bill Clinton, which, however, most Democrats stoutly denied was shameful at all. Indeed, the Democrats brazenly predicted that they would regain control of the House and Senate because of popular outrage that the great and glorious Bill Clinton was smeared and persecuted by nasty Republicans. There was certainly a Democratic base of voters who felt that way, but it was not enough to deliver a majority of the vote, and not a majority in enough States to win the Electoral College, or the House or the Senate (though the Senate ended up divided 50/50, where the Republicans, being chumps, allowed a 50/50 division of all committees and chairmanships, which they did not need to do with the VP, Dick Cheney, casting tie-breaking votes). Unlike Nixon, however, Gore never hesitated to challenge the result. On election night, the State of Florida was first declared to have gone for Gore (before all the polls were even closed in Florida, as it happened), and then, hours later, was declared to have gone for Bush, delivering the election to him. But in the wee hours of the morning Bush's margin of victory seemed to be eroding. It was already so small that a State-wide recount was required by law. Before that was even finished, Gore's strategy was already in operation. Frankly stated by a Democratic operative, it was to ask for recount after recount until the results came out "right." The recounts requested, of course, were in heavily Democratic counties, with mostly Democratic election officials. While the machine count of punchcard ballots was something without bias or ambiguity, designed to be so, hand recounts would turn on all sorts of ambiguities and imponderables. One Democratic election official baldly stated on television that a ballot with otherwise Democratic votes, but with only a "dimple" on the "chad" (the little piece of paper to be punched out) for Gore, should be counted as a Gore vote. Whether or not there actually was then a "dimple" was left to the judgment of the counters. The Democrats, who may have stolen the 1960 election with the traditional backroom techniques of their machine politics, thus found a way of trying to steal the 2000 election right out in the glare of the public spotlight. Even so, the clock was against them. The millions of ballots that helped promote the efficiency of machine counting now were a grave liability for hand counting, especially with Republican observers challenging the miraculous discovery of yet more Gore votes. The Florida Secretary of State, a Republican (a woman against whom Democratic partisans could freely direct misogynistic vitriol, without fear of reproach from feminists), was prepared to certify the election at the statutory deadline, long before the Democrats could have squeezed out enough Gore votes for a win. Thus, another tried and true Democrat strategy came into play:  Find friendly judges. The Florida Supreme Court, consisting entirely of Democatic nominees, simply voided the statutory deadline and gave the Democrats another week to recount. This ruling was later vacated by the United State Supreme Court, which asked for a clarification of the grounds on which it was made, but by then the point was moot. Other strategies were in operation. Hundreds of absentee ballots from members of the Armed Services were thrown out as not having the postmark required by Florida law. This may have been legally correct by State law, but it was contrary to the stated Gore principle of "count every vote," and may actually have violated Federal law. There was no doubt, however, that this was a plus for Gore, since the military vote ran heavily for Bush. Similarly, a lawsuit was filed, by a Democratic contributor, to throw out the entire absentee vote in some heavily Republican counties, because Republican workers had been allowed to fill in a voter ID number, mistakenly left off, on absentee ballot applications sent out by the county. A black woman judge, passed over for promotion by Jeb Bush (brother of George W. and Governor of Florida), was found to rule in this case -- and she refused to recuse herself. A case was also filed challenging the decision of some heavily Democratic counties not to do hand recounts. None of this came to fruition, however, before the second deadline passed and the Secretary of State certified the election. None of the recounts completed by that time had given Gore the advantage. This meant that Gore would henceforth not merely be asking for recounts but for the election actually to be overturned. No hesitation, however. But then things really began to go wrong. The black woman judge did not do what was expected (by anyone). She unheld the absentee ballots. Similarly, the other suits for more and more recounts were firmly and resoundingly denied. This was then appealed to the Florida Supreme Court again. With only a few days until the Electors were to be ceritified for the Electoral College, the Florida Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision with bitter dissents, ordered recounts all across the State. The Democrats were jubilant. The search for friendly judges, on the other hand, was a game at which two could play, and the Republicans immediately went to the United States Supreme Court, still heavy with 7 Republican nominees. Not only did the Court agree to hear the appeal, but 5-4 majority stayed the Florida Court ruling. That stopped the recounts, on a Friday, with the Court unprepared to hear the case until Monday. When the Court then did heard the arguments, a 5-4 majority again decisively reversed the Florida Court (on some points, the majority was even 7-2). The Democrats were busted. Losing at their own game was so galling that some Democrats and sympathizers went into rhetorical orbit. Jesse Jackson absurdly compared the case to the Dred Scott Decision. Winning, indeed, may be a mixed blessing for George W. Bush, the first President since John Quincy Adams to be the son of a previous President (and the only one to succeed the man who defeated his father). His Presidency was going to be tainted by the closeness of the vote and the questionable result, and it might have been better to have a discredited Gore than a discredited Bush -- and the next President, according to the Curse of Tecumseh, is due to die in office. However, power is power, the American people mostly don't seem to have noticed how Clinton was disgraced anyway, and it was high time to get the Democrats out of the White House, whatever Bush was able to do with it. The only consolation of a Gore win could have been that, with a Recession in view ahead, a Gore who could have positively plunged the country into a Depression really would have helped third parties, like the Libertarians, and perhaps discredited the Democrats for a long time.

The accusation of Democrats that the Republicans were trying to steal the election, and had stolen it, would be repeated ad nauseum for years, until some people believed it just because that is all they ever heard. The Democrats learned an important lesson from this. No lie was too outrageous or too obviously fraudulent not to be maintained and promoted with straight faces and moral outrage. This came in handy when they used the same recount strategy later to steal a Governor's race in Washington State, and the U.S. Senate race in Minnesota in 2008. Its ultimate expression, however, must be when Barney Frank, although shown video of he himself making statements about the solvency of mortgage disasters Fannie Mae and Freddied Mac, then simply denied that he had made any such statements! Bill O'Reilly called him a liar to his face. Yet Barney then got reelected in 2010, thanks to the voters of Massa-clue-less.

In one respect, George Bush had a charmed Presidency:  He beat the Curse of Tecumseh. Reagan had already beat it in one respect, since he didn't die in office; but there was a serious assassination attempt against Reagan, and he sustained a wound from which he might have died, like Garfield, in earlier days. But the closest that George Bush came to assassination, despite the hopeful reveries (including a movie) of the Left, was when an idiot Iraqi journalist threw shoes at him. Even those missed. We were never told if the journalist had thrown any shoes at Saddam Hussein. He was probably not that big of a fool.

Later, however, we learned that someone had actually thrown a hand grenade at Bush during an official visit to the Republic of Georgia. Since the hand grenade didn't go off, it was not understood until later what had happened.

The events of the 2000 election were soon overshadowed by the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Bush rose to the occasion with vigorous response and firm rhetoric, winning astronomical approval numbers in the public opinion polls. At the same time, Bush has shown himself to be a typical New Deal, Eisenhower Republican, not as much of a Country Club Republican as his father, and more of a real Texan (Clint Eastwood squint and all), even pushing through a kind of (largely symbolic) tax cut (although treated by the Democrats as the equivalent of burning money), but still perfectly willing to promote the destructive and unconstitutional role of the federal government in education, signing on with Ted Kennedy ("my friend") on another absurd federal education pork barrel bill, placing protective tariffs on steel imports, vasting expanding the farm subsidies which had previously been scheduled for elimination by a Republican Congress, and even promoting Bill Clinton's Hitler Youth "Americorps" program. Along with these indistinguishable-from-Democrat actions, the Bush Administration has come down like a ton of bricks on cancer patients who have been using marijuana for medical reasons, raiding one after another the buyers' clubs that had been legalized by State laws like California's Proposition 215. The drug warriors recruited for Bush's DEA are fanatics to an extent that raises questions about their sanity -- although in general federal drug policy, whether under Clinton or Bush, has not been something to remind anyone of any kind of sanity.

[voice from crowd:   We can't hear you!]  But I hear you, and the people who did this [waves around site of World Trade Center] will hear from us, soon. -- George Bush, 2001, before attacks in Afghanistan

George W. Bush has grown a foot since September 11. His ears no longer stick out, and he's become a brilliant orator. I'm not kidding. -- P.J. O'Rourke

Thus the allegedly "far right" current Bush administration has merely slowed the growth of government rather than reversed it. It wrangles over the size of new middle-class entitlements, not whether there should be such new entitlements. It nods to the Supreme Court and accedes to the principle of affirmative action and thus to the priority of group over individual rights. -- Adam Garfinkle, "Peace Movements and the Adversary Culture," Understanding Anti-Americanism, Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad [Ivan R. Dee, 2004], p.305

He is a man who distrusts rhetoric and who is obviously not a great public speaker. As a friend of mine once said, watching Bush give a speech is like watching a drunk man cross an icy street. You really want him to get to the other side, but it's clear he won't be able to make it without a lot of stumbling. -- Tucker Carlson, Cato's Letter, Volume 4, Number 2, "The Decline and Fall of the Republican Party" [Cato Institute, 2006], p.4

...one should never permit a disorder to persist in order to avoid a war, for war is not avoided thereby but merely deferred to one's own disadvantage. [Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Daniel Donno translation, Bantam Books, 1981, p. 20]

The Bushes

Barrack Obama won reelection in 2012 by running against the rich. Since "the rich" had nothing to do with any problem facing the Nation, this was a campaign strategy of complete fraud, dishonesty, demagoguery, and sophistry. That it was successful does not speak well for the American electorate nor bode well for the United States. Yet for all the commentary that this was the result of a new ethnic and racial electorate, which had become dependent on the Welfare State, this election was not so different, in form or danger, from that of 1936. Both Roosevelt and Obama could argue that, although the economy was bad, it was getting better and their policies were making it better. If a majority of Americans could buy that in 1936, when things were truly so much worse, it is not so surprising that they could buy it in 2012. Yet things should have been different. The Democrat playbook of tax and spend, and of demonizing wealth and Wall Street, should not still be working -- especially when the obvious Euro-socialist ideal of Obama and the Democrats is in visible decay and crisis, if not collapse, as the campaign and election were taking place. This may well be a case of be careful of what you wish for, because you might get it. Obama, like Jerry Brown in California, clearly has no intention of cutting spending or the size of government, regardless of the hopeless debt that is accumulating. The sorry example of Greece, where unemployment is 26%, so evident to anyone paying attention, is entirely lost on them; and they appear to really believe that raising taxes and spending and regulating more is the path to economic prosperity. There is no excuse in 2012 for such delusion -- however widespread it is among the "liberal" elite of press, academia, and the intelligentsia. But that is really just the problem. The Left is intellectually and morally bankrupt, ironically just at the moment when its influence and dominance may be the most complete -- with the clumsy and unintentional connivance of Republicans, whose political cluelessness reached new heights in 2012. Thus, the voices of reason and wisdom do not appear with sufficient exposure in public discourse. No major Republican politician has been articulate and cogent since Ronald Reagan; and the Press ignores anyone out of the mainsteam, unless they confirm "liberal" preconceptions of racist Rednecks, etc. So the Nation may need to learn its lesson in the School of Hard Knocks, and not just economically:  The Jihad is alive and well just when Democrats, the new Isolationists, stung by the academic narrative of American "Imperialism," wish to withdraw the power and influence of the United States from the world, a world that often seems to have gone mad in volatile and dangerous places. Some begin to wonder whether the prospect of damage to American power and influence is the whole idea, considering Obama's anti-American background.

Although the first Black President, Barack Obama's American background is Anglo-Hawaiian. His African background is directly from Africa, in the form of his Kenyan father. People derisively known as "birthers" believe that Obama was actually born in Kenya. Until 27 April 2011, an original, long-form Hawaiian birth certificate had never been publicly released. Regardless of the merits of the accusations about Obama's birthplace, what interested me was the question of who has standing in court to compel proof of natural American birth, a Constitutional requirement for the Presidency. Judges threw out lawsuits from "birther" citizens, including those from Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign, on the basis that they had no standing. Well then, who does? And why would not any American citizen have such standing to see that the Constitution is enforced? And whose job is it to verify that a candidate for the Presidency actually is qualified for that office? These questions should be addressed and clarified on their own merits. And what is so hard about producing an original birth certificate? This may have just been a strategy to provoke the impotent fury of the "birthers," but why did Obama's friendly judges (where were Hillary's judges?) act like there was something to hide? And why did Obama supporters react with derision and contempt rather than just laying the issue to rest by seeing that the certificate was produced? Is it somehow impossible and inconceivable that Obama's mother gave birth in Kenya, her husband's own country?

The new Governor of Hawaii, long time activist and socialist Neil Abercrombie, tried to put this issue to rest by fetching the original birth certificate from the State Archives. An official in 2008 reportedly affirmed that such a record existed, although he was unwilling to release it to the public at the time. Then Abercrombie said that he was unable to find the certificate; and it was reported that "former Hawaii elections clerk Tim Adams has now signed an affidavit swearing he was told by his supervisors in Hawaii that no long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate existed for Barack Obama Jr. in Hawaii and that neither Queens Medical Center nor Kapi'olani Medical Center in Honolulu had any record of Obama having been born in their medical facilities." Then all these assertions were contradicted. And finally Obama called a press conference to release the long-form certificate, complaining that he had more important things to do -- right before flying off to appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Certainly the conspiracy theorists will claim that all this time was necessary for a suitably credible forged certificate to be created. However, by Donald Trump playing up the issue, it looked like a significant percentage of voters were beginning to wonder. There was suddenly more political cost to teasing the "birthers" than just coming clean, and Trump reasonably claimed that his brief Presidential candidacy had succeeded in shaking loose the long-from certificate.

It is impossible for the citizen to know what claims or counter-claims on the Internet are credible. This is why the lesson from the "birther" issue should be that it is time for a Federal Court to acknowledge that someone has "standing" to require that proof be produced of the Constitutionally mandated qualifications of candidates for the Presidency. I have run for public office seven times, and I don't recall that the Los Angeles County Registrar ever asked me for so much as a driver's license, let alone more substantial proof of my citizenship. It is a sloppy business, just begging for abuse -- although of a piece with all the voting laws that appear to have been designed by Democrats in order to promote and protect voting fraud.

Besides growing up in Hawaii, Obama also spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, after his mother married an Indonesian second husband. There he was known as "Barry Soetoro" and apparently (?) was registered at school as a Muslim (another one of those claims). His mother then became disillusioned with her husband, who was a businessman and was not an anti-Capitalist as she thought a Third World person should be. Obama was sent back to Hawaii to the care of his grandparents. This raises other intriguing questions about the character and values of Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, who died in 1995 and about whom there has been precious little information in the press. Dunham, however, seems to have been a political radical, as was Obama's father -- the sort of African socialist who helped destroy the economies of multiple African countries after independence. Obama's book, Dreams From My Father, implies that such ideology inspired his own political thinking.

After this intriguing upbringing and a Mainland education, Obama settled down in Chicago and began making the social and political connections that would lead to his eventual election as President. Most of these Chicago connections are now an embarrassment, since they involved association with radical anti-Americans and former domestic terrorists, not to mention an unclear degree of involvement with the familiar corruption and machine politics of the Illinois Democrat Party. Obama's defenders decry "guilt by association" when these people are mentioned, and the voters seemed willing to give the benefit of the doubt and take him at his word. Since Obama's appeal was deliberately vague -- "hope" and "change we can believe in" -- it remains to be seen how the Administration will go, though so far the Democrats are fast out of the gate, using the recession as an excuse, with massive spending and borrowing, if not taxing, plans (with Michael Moore even announcing the "end of capitalism"). Again, far too many Republicans, including George Bush in his last days, went along with the idea that Federal spending will provide an economic "stimulus" (still ignoring Say's Law). Perhaps they are still thinking that, since the Democrats won the election, the best Republican strategy is to be more like Democrats. They may not have noticed that John McCain was the perfect "more like a Democrat" candidate -- a Republican, indeed, with not much patience for the Religious Right or Social Conservatives, that Democrats seemed to be saying they could vote for. But then they didn't vote for him, not even the disgruntled Hillary Clinton voters. So the New Deal Republicans are hoist on their own petard again, if they cannot argue that massive Federal borrowing, taxing, and spending sucks all the air (i.e. capital) out of the economy and retards recovery.

Even a new Depression, however, pales besides the damage that could be done with the equivalent of another Jimmy Carter Presidency in foreign policy. The brainless "Bush lied, people died" level of analysis implied, or asserted, that (1) Iraq and the world would be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power, (2) terrorists, who are not proteced by the Geneva Convention, actually are protected by the Geneva Convention (just "name, rank, and serial number," though terrorists don't have serial numbers, or much rank either, since they are not in a regular military establishment and, as terrorists, don't wear uniforms), and (3) terrorists, even when held abroad (e.g. Guantanamo Bay), can file habeas corpus in civilian American courts. This last remarkable assertion has even been upheld by the Supreme Court, although there are few things that the Bush Administration did that wartime Administrations, including those of Democrat icons Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, had not done, without Democrat objections, in their time. To hold an American citizen as an "enemy combatant" in the United States and try him before a "special military tribunal" under military law meant the End of the Constitution to Democrats and anti-war radicals:  Yet this is precisely something that was done by Franklin Roosevelt, without complaint. Most of the attacks on Bush's anti-terror policies were therefore naive to a dangerous degree, disingenuous, or just naked political opportunism. Since Obama has undertaken to increase American commitment in Afghanistan, and he began his Presidency by authorizing an attack on terrorists in Pakistan, the sincere anti-war radicals already have cause for complaint. They (e.g. Michael Moore) were certainly complaining when Obama authorized a SEAL team to go into Pakistan and kill Usama bin Laden. As long as they keep complaining, we may be safe.

President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. -- Clint Eastwood, The Carmel Pine Cone, September 7-13, 2012

Talks on the debt ceiling will no doubt continue, but there is an Obama problem there, and it's always gotten in the way. He really dislikes the other side, and can't fake it. This is peculiar in a politician, the not faking it. But he doesn't bother to show warmth and high regard. And so appeals to patriotism -- "Come on guys, we have to save this thing" -- ring hollow from him. In this he is the un-Clinton. Bill Clinton understood why conservatives think what they think because he was raised in the South. He was surrounded by them, and he wasn't by nature an ideologue...

Barack Obama is different, not a political practitioner, really, but something else, and not a warm-blooded animal but a cool, chill character, a fish who sits deep in the tank and stares, stilly, at the other fish. -- Peggy Noonan, "Obama and the Debt Crisis," The Wall Street Journal, 4-5 June 2011 [boldface added]

President Obama, in a radio interview at a ballpark, was asked if he, as a Chicagoan, preferred the Sox or the Cubs. He claimed he was a Sox fan, twice mispronounced the name of Comiskey Park, twice referred to the umpire as "the judge," and, asked for his favorite White Sox, past or present, could not come up with one name. Sigh. -- David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge, Sentinel, Penguin, 2011, p.217, note

Now, what we're doing, I want to be clear, we're not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that's fairly earned. I mean, I do think at a certain point you've made enough money. -- Barack Obama, Qunicy, Illinois, 29 April 2010

It is wonderful to be back in Oregon. Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii, I was not allowed to go to even though I really wanted to visit, but my staff would not justify it. -- Barack Obama, Beaverton, Oregon, 9 May 2008 [boldface added]; conspiracy theorists like to point out that the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), an international organisation with a permanent delegation to the United Nations, has 57 member states.

I am pleased with Obama. I think he’s brilliant. The Republican Party should get out of his way and stop trying to hurt him... it would be good... if [Obama] could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly. -- Woody Allen, in La Vanguardia, a Spanish newspaper [boldface added]

Hardly a month goes by without this administration coming up with a new anti-business policy -- whether directed against Boeing, banks or other private enterprises. Neither investors nor employers can know when the next one is coming or what it will be...

Such anti-business policies would just be business' problem, except that it is businesses that create jobs. -- Thomas Sowell, "Unknown unknowns of the economy," 12 July 2011

His view of business is that it should be a few major corporations which are totally unionized and working with the government, which should also be massive and reaching every level of American society. -- Harry C. Alford, President and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce [quoted in The Amateur, Barack Obama in the White House, by Edwar Klein, Regnery Publishing, 2012, p.189]

The truth of the matter is that, as I said, we've created 4.3 million jobs over the last 27 months, over 800,000 just this year alone. The private sector is doing fine. Where we're seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government. Oftentimes, cuts initiated by governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don't have the same kind of flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in.

And so, if Republicans want to be helpful, if they really want to move forward and put people back to work, what they should be thinking about is, how do we help state and local governments and how do we help the construction industry. -- Barack Obama, Press Conference, 8 June 2012, boldface added

If Obama had a city, it would look like Detroit -- parody of Barack Obama saying, "If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon [i.e. Trayvon Martin]."

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. -- Barack Obama, 13 July 2012, Roanoke, Virginia, bolface added

No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people:  If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what. -- Barack Obama , 15 June 2009

What we said was, you can keep it if it hasn't changed since the law passed. -- Barack Obama , 4 November 2013

From next year, insurers will be barred from charging people more because they are already ill. By itself, that rule would bankrupt insurance companies, but it is not alone. -- "Computer says no," The Economist, October 26th-November 1st 2013, Volume 409 Number 8859, p.34

Mr. Putin moved on Ukraine when Barack Obama was no longer a charismatic character but a known quantity with low polls, failing support, a weak economy. He'd taken Mr. Obama's measure during the Syria crisis and surely judged him not a shrewd international chess player but a secretly anxious professor who makes himself feel safe with the sound of his voice. -- Peggy Noonan, "Warning From the Ukraine Crisis," The Wall Street Journal, March 15-16, 2014, A13

[T]he truth of the matter is, is that the world has always been messy. In part, we're just noticing now [!] because of social media [!] and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through. The good news is that American leadership has never been more necessary, and there's really no competition out there for the ideas and the values that can create the sort of order that we need in this world.

I hear people sometimes saying, well, I don't know, China is advancing [placing an oil rig, protected by warships, in Vietnamese territorial waters; harassing American aircraft; hacking American computer networks]. But I tell you what, if you look at our cards and you looks at China's cards, I promise you you'd rather have ours. (Applause.) People say that, I don't know, Russia looks pretty aggressive right now [occupying parts of Georgia, invading and occupying parts of the Ukraine] -- but Russia's economy is going nowhere. Here's a quick test for you: Are there long lines of people trying to emigrate into Russia? (Laughter.) I don't think so.

Yes, the Middle East is challenging [with a Terrorist state established in Syria and Iraq and Terrorist dominance in Gaza, Somalia, and Libya], but the truth is it's been challenging for quite a while. -- President Obama, at a Democratic Party fundraiser in Purchase, N.Y., August 29, 2014, "Notable & Quotable," The Wall Street Journal, September 3, 2014, A13

We don’t have a strategy yet. --President Obama on the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, White House press conference, August 28, 2014

Right now, fortune for Mr. Putin comes, first, in the shape of Barack Obama. The Russian was bound to see the American president as the classic self-infatuated liberal, half as clever and twice as weak as he imagines himself to be. As a former KGB agent working in East Germany, Mr. Putin would have had training, and perhaps experience, in reducing these types to human rubble. -- Bret Stephens, "What Does Vladimir Putin Want?" The Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2014, A15

Actually the way the president increasingly comes across, and not only in this book [Leon Panetta's Worthy Fights], is as an eccentric -- a person drawn to political power who doesn't much like politics, or people, and who takes little joy from the wielding of power. Mr. Panetta suggests Mr. Obama isn't good at rah-rah. He's good at rah-rah for himself, just not for other causes. -- Peggy Noonan, "Is 'Worthy Fights' Worthy?" The Wall Street Journal, October 11-12, 2014, A13

So Paul Krugman, who once called on Alan Greenspan "to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble"; who, in a few months before the eurozone crisis erupted, praised Europe as "an economic success" that "shows that social democracy works"; who, as the U.S. fracking revolution was getting under way, opined that America was "just a bystander" in a global energy story defined by "peak oil"; and, who, in 2012, hailed Argentina's economy as a "remarkable sucess story" -- this guy now tells us, in Rolling Stone magazine, that Barack Obama has been a terrific president.

Which can onlly mean that the next two years are going to be exceptionally ugly. How to get through them? -- Bret Stephens, "Obama Survival Manual, Intl. Edition," The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, October 14, 2014, A13

The Age of Reagan, 1980-2008

George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney were all dignified, polite, kind, moderate men who always sought compromise, accommodation, and consensus with Democrats. Consequently, the Press and the Democrats beat them to a pulp, usually with distortions, lies, and smears. "Bush lied, people died." And they were too gentlemanly to fight back. Republicans found this frustrating. Not to worry. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Donald J. Trump. No criticism, no slight, no insult will go unanswered again. What's more, the obvious alliance between the mainstream press, starting with the New York Times, and the Democrats will now be constantly addressed. To the press, of course, this means that Trump is Adolf Hitler, and he is attacking the First Amendment itself. This is rich, especially when the Brain Trust of the Left at American colleges and universities openly despises, with obscenities, the First Amendment and harasses or openly attacks -- as in assault and riots -- speakers and faculty it doesn't like. The Hitler Youth on campuses play the victim, but a special word has been created for them:  "Cry-bullies," since their "victimhood," whining how "unsafe" they feel, is often at the head of screaming mobs. The Democrat Party now consists of cry-bullies.

Donald Trump was the first person elected President of the United States who had never held elective office or military command. Yet Trump has been a major businessman and public figure for years. Almost everyone seemed to know him; but people he might even have regarded as friends, like the Clintons, now only have vilification for him. However, sometimes the vilification dates back a way. An entire episode of the television series Designing Women [1986-1993] was devoted to attacking Trump. This series was created and produced by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, a friend of the Clintons from Arkansas -- evidently Trump had gotten under her skin. Yet at the time, Trump was a conventional Democrat.

Thus, Trump, born, raised, and based in New York City, had dealt with politics for a long time, and not always in the best way, since he enjoyed using condemnations of private property, by eminent domain, to benefit his casinos in Atlantic City. Perhaps detecting the decline of gambling there, Trump later got out of those properties -- and sued, unsuccessfully, to get his name taken off the hotels. Otherwise, Trump seemed, as noted, to be a conventional Democrat, endorsing abortion and other familiar Democrat issues. Running for President in 2012 and 2016 as a Republican, Trump switched to views favored by Rebublican constituencies, including on abortion, without, however, displaying much familiarity with what Pro-Life groups actually advocate. Although one might expect him to have known better, with his experience, Trump fell for the tactic of hostile reporters of asking leading questions, giving him the wrong impression (e.g. about Pro-Life groups), and then effectively putting words in his mouth when he would naively agree. This also worked when reporters asked if Trump would put "American First," knowing, as he may not have, that this was a slogan of Isolationists and Anti-Semites before World War II. Yet, as articulated in his Inaugural address, it is indeed the duty of the United States government to put first the interests of the American people. Whatever its use or associations in the past, "American First" is the right idea; and the truth about the Anti-American Left is that it wants American interests and the American people damaged and punished, and the enemies of America, whoever they are, triumphant -- this is the heritage of the Democrats protecting Soviet spies and then cheering for an American defeat in Vietnam. We see the same thing when Leftists reject the 10th Amendment, not ostensively because they hate limited government (as they do), but because it was invoked by Segregationists to protect themselves from the 14th Amendment, which was adverse to Segregation. When someone's best arguments are clumsy guilt-by-association, aiming to establish a totalitarian government by a smear, some suspicion is warranted about their motives and honesty.

Nevertheless, Trump's election happened and was the greatest shock to the Establishment, of both Democrats and Republicans, perhaps since Andrew Jackson, whom Trump admires. The Unwashed were not exactly swarming over the White House furniture, but the attitude of Washington to Trump's supporters was well expressed by Hillary Clinton calling them a "basket of deplorables," guilty of a litany of political crimes ("racism, sexism," etc.) that Democrats and "Progressives" now use to smear everyone, indiscriminately, who disagrees with them. Where the Left was similarly shocked in 1980 and 2000, they have meanwhile developed tactics, not only to challenge and steal elections, but to turn out in demonstrations and riots, led by people who actually seem to think that the Revolutionary overthrow of the government is just one loud march away. Suggestions were soon common to assassinate Trump, blow up the White House, or stage a military coup -- despite the actual military, hated by the Democrats, voting heavily Republican. When demonstrations often featured signs saying "America Was Never Great," or burning American flags, the average American gets the message that these people really hate America, and them.

Trump may be seen as the apotheosis of the Tea Party and of the backlash against the Ruling Class of Washington Elites, including Democrats, Republicans, and the whole self-interested bureaucratic class. This apotheosis actually ran over the accredited representatives of the Tea Party itself, i.e. Senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio, who all ran for President but fell by the wayside, with Cruz the last hope of the anti-Trump forces. At the same time, Trump is the first person elected President who was actually a millionaire living on Fifth Avenue in New York, like the Vanderbilts -- albeit in a skyscraper, "Trump Tower," rather than in anything like the previous Gilded Age mansions (of which only the Frick Museum remains for us to see what they were like). Trump got little support from his home town or home State, but his billionaire credentials did not stand in the way of "working class" Americans in the Midwest from voting for him. How this worked the way it did is the lesson of the campaign.

Under the slogan, "Make American Great Again," which obviously in itself annoys the Left, the key issues that Trump ran on were (1) Protectionism, with accusations that American jobs and manufacturing were being taken by Mexico, China, etc., (2) Terrorism, with promises that Muslim immigration would be stopped or curtailed until we could be sure that Terrorists were not infiltrating with immigrants and refugees, and (3) Illegal Aliens, whom he at first simply promised to all deport.

Singer Joy Villa (b.1991) at the 2017 Grammy Awards

Some mix of these issues got him elected, despite the polls and commentators sure that Hillary Clinton would win the election, perhaps even in Texas.

As it happened, to the astonishment of all on election night, Trump not only carried battleground States, like Florida and Ohio -- whose fate had decided the elections in 2000 and 2004 -- with some ease, but the battle tipped decisvely when he won Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, places that had not gone Republican in some time. Eventually he also won Michigan, but not New Hampshire, which used to be reliably Republican but has edged toward the socialist principles of neighboring Vermont, probably because of voters who had moved there from New York or Massachusetts but kept voting as they had in the course of damaging those places.

The Left couldn't believe it; and even Republicans had difficulties, with Peggy Noonan, often a voice of substantial enlightenment and insight, dismissing him, on the eve of his prospective defeat, as a "nut." As it happens, Trump is a bit of a nut, with a habit of uncontrollable statements and petty personal disputes. However, many people found this refreshing, after hearing for so long the studied, bland, safe, and predictable statements of Establishment politicians. Many said that the vote for Trump became a repudiation of political correctness, whose excesses and outrages were all too evident in the previous year or so, with open attacks on free speech and political opposition at American universities. If anything, the excesses and outrages have become worse since the election, with our now familiar Anarchists rioting, students entering therapy, and professors screaming hysterically. Some Democrats seem to be aware that this business, with accusations of racism, fascism, and "white supremacy" against all white people and Christians, if not all Americans, only feeds Trump's support. But they can't help themselves, since they have little else to offer, apart from abortion and socialism. Trump voters are not going to think better of their preferences in the face of vicious insult and smears, against a background of anti-American ideology. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich claimed that the Anarchists who rioted in Berkeley were Republicans in disguise, and since the police were ordered not to stop the rioters or arrest any of them, their identities conveniently could not be unmasked. However, over 200 Anarchist rioters were arrested in Washington, D.C. on Inauguration day, with their identities now on public record, and Reich apparently could not cite any of them as Republican agents provocateurs. So he is making up his own lies.

In line with their anti-American narrative of political crimes -- racism, sexism, homophobia, "trans"-phobia, and other evils that verge on comedy or incomprehensibility to most -- accusations against Trump and his voters are generally that Fascism is on the march and that Trump is already the moral and practical equivalent of Adolf Hitler. Two of his campaign issues fed into preexisting Leftist interpretations:  First, that anyone against aliens illegally in the country being tolerated are actually just against all immigrants, and this only for reasons of racism. This is followed with paeans to immigration and platitudes about how we are all immigrants -- both totally irrelevant to the complaint. Second, that anyone worried about the infiltration of Terrorists among Muslim immigrants and refugees, or worried about the cultural values of Muslims, which are adverse to women, homosexuals, Jews, and things like freedom of speech (since blasphemy against Islam deserves death), has these worries only because they are racists and "Islamophobes," who are intolerant of other religions and, of course, non-whites. Accusations may also be made of anti-Semitism, despite the Jews in Trump's own family, the anti-Semitism running riot at American universities, with Columbia University now identified as the most anti-Semitic in the country, and the Obama Administration setting a record as the most anti-Israel in history, with a last minute stab-in-the-back for Israel at the U.N., when the United States failed to veto a resolution that, among other things, classified the ancient Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem as illegally "occupied" Palestinian territory.

Along with vicious and incoherent things like that, the other accusations display a familiar dishonesty, tendentiousness, and mendacity that we have seen for a long time. Thus, no one has been able to complain about illegal aliens in the country without Democrats immediately taking this to mean opposition to all immigrants -- ignoring the fine distinction between those here legally and those illegally -- with the following step to taking most "immigrants" being Hisplanics, which means opposition is race hatred of Hispanics. Those who would simply like immigration law enforced -- the same law that the Democrats left in place despite absolutely controlling the Federal Government for two years (2009-2011) -- don't much appreciate their concern being answered by willful distortion, misrepresentation, and smears. Yet Democrats rarely display concern for insulting millions of taxpaying voters -- who then voted for Trump. Next we get comical quibbles, that illegal aliens are really just "undocumented immigrants," who accidentially happen to be lacking "papers," while no human being should be called "illegal," or "alien," because these are dehumanizing or racist terms. No one takes this seriously apart from true believers in whatever the Left is believing in this matter, which is a little obscure. We get bizarre statements such as borders are racist and "imperialist," despite no nation in history ever having no concern for its borders, and certainly not the nations always favored by the Left, like the Soviet Union, Cuba, or North Korea, whose borders have been well defended, not to keep out enemies, but to keep their own citizens within their prison states, often on pain of death. To summarize, when the first statement out of the mouths of Democrats is always a lie, that Republicans are against "immigrants," we know how dishonest and fraudulent their whole approach is going to be.

However, even better are accusations of racist "Islamophobia." The Left, which vilifies anyone against "gay marriage," or in favor of traditional gender roles for women, or who think that Christians in business should not be forced to provide services, like catering, for functions, like gay "weddings," that they regard as immoral, nevertheless pay no attention whatsoever to what are going to be similar sentiments among Muslims. Homosexuality is punishable by imprisonment or even death in countless Muslim countries, like Iran, yet you would never know this from Leftist discourse. Certainly the Press never asks conservative Muslims if they think that anatomical males (the "trans-gendered") should be allowed in the bathrooms of girls and women. The answer they would get is all too obvious -- when such Muslims do not even believe that women should show their hair to strange men. Women who marry against the wishes of their families have been murdered, to few consequences, in Pakistan and elsewhere. Teenage girls who posted a video of themselves dancing, in modest dress, were executed by their families in Pakistan. People accused of blasphemy in Pakistan, or sometimes just complaining about the blasphemy laws, have been murdered by mobs, before the Government could even try them. In 2017, the Pakistani High Court has just outlawed Valentine's Day, because it is un-Islamic. Again, one would never know this listening to Leftist discourse -- even as Pakistan seems to rate as the most anti-American country in the world -- which perhaps is why its practices are winked at by the Left -- the enemy of my enemy is my friend, after all. Similarly, Muslim refugees in Europe have been responsible for significant increases in crime, especially sexual assault. Mobs of men, mostly Syrian Arabs, attacked women on New Year's Eve of 2016 in Germany, but the police and the Government of Germany actually tried to suppress news and reports of this, to the outrage of most people. Muslim neighborhoods in France, Sweden, and Belgium are now often so hostile to outsiders that the unwary are beaten if they enter, and even the police have abandoned trying to control them. Because of these things, Europeans, up to 55% in a recent poll, have turned against Muslim immigration in a big way, and nativist political parties, often of the worse sort (i.e. actual neo-Nazis), are threatening everywhere.

Few Americans wish these evils to develop in the United States, yet examples are not hard to find. An Egyptian immigrant father in Texas murdereed his two teenage daughters in an "honor killing" because they were dating black men. He escaped to Egypt before being apprehended. I bet, the New York Times did not call him a racist or sexist. Domestic Terror attacks have occurred with the bombing of the Boston Marathon and the slaughter of people at an office party in San Bernardino and at a gay nightclub in Florida. All were carried out by Muslim immigrants or their children, with the Left, for instance, trying to blame the Florida massacre on Christian "homophobia" and not on the quite open anti-homosexual sentiments in Islam. The Boston bombing was by Chechen brothers who in one way seemed culturally assimilated in America, but where the elder brother had suspiciously returned to Chechnya, with an actual warning from Russian intelligence about him. Many Muslim immigrants, of course, come to America seeking to escape the political and cultural oppression of Islamic countries, but then, most disturbingly, it is often the next generation that feels the loss of religious purpose and is radicalized to violence and Terrorism.

To the Left, however, any complaint about Islamic culture or the existence of Terrorism in radical Islam is a political crime in itself, "Islamophobia," whose only motive is racism or intolerance. This is dishonest to a degree that raises questions about motive. In their hatred of America, capitalism, white people, Christianity, Jews, etc. the Left is eager to accept any allies, even those from a Mediaevalizing, reactionary religious cause whose principles are otherwise the opposite of everything the Left professes in terms of feminism, gay rights, religion, etc. Thus, the Left, whose basic smear of Donald Trump is that he represents the march of Fascism, are happy to be allies with the genuine Fascism of radical Islam. But anyone familiar with the history of Communism knows how this works. Communists were always accusing liberal democrats of being fascists, right up to the day that Josef Stalin became an ally of Adolf Hitler in 1939, with an agreement to divide Poland and Eastern Europe between them. Stalin's share of Europe, of course, remained in Soviet hands until the Fall of Communism in 1991.

After his campaign promises and the worries of Americans about Terrorism and refugees, Donald Trump signed an Executive Order suspending travel and immigration from seven countries that are hot-beds of Terrorism, either because they are in conditions of anarchy and civil war (Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, the Sudan) or because they are actual state sponsors of Terrorism (Iran). While Terrorists have often been nationals of other countries, such as Saudi Arabia or Egypt, those countries, as allies of the United States with their governments in control, are in a position to provide information about the background of travelers, immigrants, or refugees. Syria and Yemen are not in such a position, which means, when travel is allowed again, there must be a system of detention and interrogation in place to ascertain their purposes -- this was actually done even with refugrees from Communist Hungary in 1956. The order also anticipated screening people whose values militate against the assimilation to American society, with the potential for radicalization down the line. Thus, part of the order said:

The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law. In addition, the United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred (including "honor" killings, other forms of violence against women, or the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own) or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation.

One would think that good liberals would have no objection against such principles. However, Democrats and the Left went ballistic and immediatately begin looking for compliant judges. The found one in Federal Judge James Robart, in Washington State, who issued a stay of Trump's Executive Order on the grounds that it discriminated against Muslims and threatened harm to some institutions, like colleges, that relied on foreign nationals. All these points were irrelevant, since the Constitutional powers of the President and statutory law, unmentioned by Judge Robart, allow the President to exclude any class of people deemed a threat to national security. Foreign nationals are not covered by anti-discrimination law, or by protections of economic harm to someone relying on them; and, as it happens, the Executive Order exluded certains nationals, not Muslims, from hot-beds or sponsors of Terrorism. Robart's stay was subsequently upheld by a three judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Judges William C. Canby, Richard R. Clifton, and Michelle T. Friedland, who also ignored the statutes and Constitutional law specifiying the powers of the Presient -- powers that had actually been employed, without complaint, by Barack Obama.

While Trump was attacked, even by Republicans, for calling Robart a "so-called judge," the truth is that the decisions of all these judges make them guilty of treason. The Constitution says:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. [Article III, Section 3]

The judges have adhered to the Enemies of the United States, and given them Aid and Comfort, by offering them the chance to infiltrate combatants into the United States as fraudulent travellers, immigrants, or refugees, and by forstalling the power of the President to exclude or examine classes of aliens who may contain such infiltrators. Their rulings have no basis in relevant law or fact but are based on fictions that religion is excluded from "classes" that the President may sanction and that the Courts actually may second-guess the actions of the President in matters of national security.

Behind these rulings, and openly stated and advocated at American schools, is a deeply anti-American ideology, which sees Muslims in general and Terrorists in particular as victims and heroes, who should be given every chance to attack Americans and Jews and American and Jewish interests, which are the sources of evil in the contemporary world. Thus, the ideology, with these judges leading the way, thinks that Americans, especially white, Christian, or Jewish Americans, deserve to be killed or punished for the privilege, colonialism, and imperialism of America and Israel, against which they are simply fighting for liberation.

This has happened before. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the author of the infamous Dred Scott decision, began issuing rulings and opinions to prevent Abraham Lincoln from opposing the Secession of the Southern States in 1861. Lincoln ignored him and at one point even thought about arresting him, obviously as adhering to the Cause of the Rebellion. But since no one cared what Taney said, Lincoln decided to just ignore him altogether. Which he did.

Thus, President Trump should simply ignore the decisions of Judge Robart and the Ninth Circuit (often called "circus" for its bad decisions) Panel. At the least, a responsible Surpreme Court Justice should be solicited to issue a stay on these decisions, which would then remain in effect until considered by the whole Supreme Court, hopefully after Trump's nominee to the presently empty seat is confirmed. None of this has been done, and the Trump Administration acts like it must wait for a lengthy judicial process to play out. This is not the way to behave in the face of the threats of wartime. But to the Left, of course, a war against the United States is just and right, while anything the United States does to protect itself is a crime against humanity. But the cause of the Terrorists itself consists of crimes, not just against United States or even against humanity, but against all of civilization. Nor does the West owe any respect to the Mediaevalizing tendencies of radical or reactionary Islam, whose evils are on display every day, even among American allies, like Saudi Arabia, where only the practice of one religion, Islam, is tolerated. The Left, which mostly wishes to tolerate the practice of no religion, has put itself in the most curious and paradoxical, as well as thoroughly hypocritical, position in the matter.

The most troubling commitment of Donald Trump is not against illegal aliens or Terrorists. It is in favor of Protectionism, which means, contrary to the principles of Adam Smith, that the interest of consumers should be sacrificed to protect economic producers.

Donald Trump's head on the body of Rocky Balboa, displayed by pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong, 2019. Unfortunately, the Chinese police state has now crushed all dissent in Hong Kong, imprisoning democracy leaders.

Since "producers" means businesses, which contribute campaign money, and their workers, who value their jobs and vote their interests, Protectionism has a powerful political appeal -- analyzed by Public Choice economics. Labor unions in private industry, which have always supported Democrats, who support their power, have been far more Protectionist that the official Democratic Party. Trump has not won them over yet, but he offers them more than the Democrats have for a while. He has already won over the coal miners, whose industry was openly targeted for destruction by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But Protectionism (when it is not just reversing the Green and Leftist malevolence of the Obama years) is all a bad idea. Trump may well revive the economy by cutting taxes and removing regulatory barriers and harassment, but this will be in conflict with the diseconomies, the negative sum game, of Protectionism. It will be a race between mitigation and aggravation, with the outcome uncertain -- although the Trump Stock Market so far doesn't seem to be worrying much.

Since there is a actually a labor shortage in agriculture, and in other low wage parts of the economy, illegal aliens should be legalized as what in Europe are called "guest workers." Many migrants from Mexico and Central American, indeed, are more inclined to make money and go home rather than to become permanent U.S. residents. Their situation and usefullness should be accommodated. More importantly, it should be understood that, while increased labor supply can drive down wages, the measure of prosperity is not wages but production. This is the truth of Say's Law, whose importance is systematically ignored in politics and mainstream economics (the kind of economics we see published in the New York Times, which sets the tone for the "mainsteam" media). At the same time, employment is a function of wages, with unemployment only minimized by allowing wages to fall to a market clearing level. But politics gravitates towards driving wages up, not allowing them to drop. This is the problem, not illegal aliens.

In France, we keep saying that we have tried everything -- except what has worked elsewhere. Alain Juppé, former Prime Minister, 2016

Europe is struggling with the same problems. The economic stagnation of France, like its Muslim immigrant problem, should be a lesson to the whole world, and especially to the United States. But it isn't, not even in France, where socialist ideas, even in the stark face of their failure, and even with this persisting for decades, die very hard. Of all the problems of political economy and government, the continued temptations of socialism, protectionism, and command economics pose the greatest challenge to wisdom. Many politicians and economists simply are unable, or unwilling, to articulate the truth. The ones that do, like Thomas Sowell, although popular and familiar, nevertheless have relative little effect on policy, political discourse, or even popular culture. We are more likely to read that the poor growth and people leaving the work force during the Obama years were the result of a permanent trend, and not of policies hostile to business, finance, and capital, all of which are necessary for economic growth -- and Hillary Clinton, perhaps in one of her famous moments of confusion, did say that businesses do not create jobs. The truth is not that hard to articulate, but often an attempt is not even made. When a permanent, indexed raise in the minimum wage was put on the ballot in New Jersey, political ads against it only complained that the State Constitution should not be subject to such manipulation, not that such laws would put youth, especially minority youth, permanently out of work. The poor growth and exodus of business and citizens from New Jersey (and from New York and Connecticut), perhaps even citizens who voted for that minimum wage law, is never considered as evidence of the hostility of these States for economic growth. But in many of these terms, Donald Trump actually finds himself on the wrong side of the matter. We shall see.

Troubling to an equal or greater degree is the complacent or even benign attitude of Donald Trump towards Vladimir Putin, the first European ruler since Adolf Hitler to invade and conquer the territory of a neighbor -- a neighbor, the Ukraine, as it happens, whose borders were protected under a treaty signed by Russia, the United States, and Britain. Suddenly, the Democrats are alert to the dangers posed by Russia. That's rich, when the Obama Administration, apart for some economic sanctions, never did anything to provide relevant aid for self-defense to the Ukraine. Russian promoted "rebels" and Russian military infiltrators are currently fighting in the Eastern Ukraine, but former Secretary of State John Kerry gave us nothing but new lessons in the supine conduct of Appeasement. Putin must have gotten the impression that nothing serious would ever be done about his annexation of the Crimea. Obama himself was infamously caught on an open mike telling Dmitry Medvedev that he could be "more flexible" dealing with Russia after the 2012 election. He was. So the Democrats are in no position to complain about Trump being soft on Putin. In fact, Trump's new Secretary of State, and other officials, have not moderated the U.S. position on the Ukraine at all. This is, indeed, no improvement; but it is no worse that Obama.

The mysterious Ray Epps. On both January 5, 2021, and January 6, he was recorded urging Trump demonstrators, not just to demonstrate, but to invade the Capitol. At the time, spectators called out that he was a "Fed," i.e. an agent provocateur, directed by the FBI, or whoever, to promote unlawful activity. He does not seem to have invaded the Capitol himself, which is odd, if he thought this was so important. Instead, he disappeared. Briefly listed as wanted by the FBI, his name was soon dropped and he was never arrested. Later, he gave closed testimony to the House "January 6 Committee," whose content remains unknown, but for which he was warmly thanked by the Democrats and RINOs on the Committee. There have been denials that he was employed by the FBI as an agent provocateur, but he still has not been publicly questioned by Republican investigators. He role in January 6, and that of other, unidentifed persons, thus remains obscure; yet his immunity from prosecution is anomalous in relation to the treatment of others from that day, let alone anyone openly and verifiably advocating law-breaking.

At the same time, Trump is not continuing the complacency of the Obama Administration for China, Iran, North Korea, and other hostile powers. To this, the Democrats begin to fear a World War. But somehow it was the Obama Administration that allowed the Chinese to build a military base in the middle of international waters in the South China Sea. Nothing serious was done about that. Obama just went and played golf.

What Trump thinks he will accomplish by playing nice with Putin we will have to see. He has not quite betrayed the Ukrainians yet, the way Obama did. Slow measures are being taken to counter Russian threats against the Baltic States. Hopefully, Trump will further that and become more resolute everywhere than Obama ever was. But again, as with his domestic policies, we shall see.

For helping the Ukraine with military aid, Trump was, of course, impeached by the Democrat controlled House of Representatives, doing the bidding of their masters in Moscow, if not in Hell. But that is another story.

This was the president putting the Republican Party on the side of the nobodies of all colors as opposed to the somebodies... This is a realignment I have supported and a repositioning I have called for and I'd be lying if I said it didn't please me to see it represented so effectively, and I very much regret that the president is a bad man[!] and half mad[!] because if he weren't I'd be cheering. -- Peggy Noonan, "The Democrat's Unserious Week," The Wall Street Journal, February 8-9, 2020 -- Noonan, if she has previously detailed how Donald Trump is either bad or mad, I seem to have missed it. Biased and lying Democrat talking points, which Noonan seems to have swallowed, were not good enough.

Ukraine Updates, 2016-2020

Ukraine Update, 2020

Immediately on become President, Joe Biden revoked all the orders by which Donald Trump had secured the border. Immediately, people began flowing in, and Biden ordered that federal law be ignored and that all aliens apprehended should be treated with "catch and release," with a ticket for a court date years in advance to adjudicate asylum claims.

Thus, Biden's obvious policy has been to flood the country with illegal aliens, millions of them. He has never acknowledged that this was the goal, or explained why he would want to do that. Administration excuses have been that the flow is "seasonal," doesn't exist, or is the fault of the Republcians. None of it displays the slighted bit of honesty.

At the same time, instead of just allowing border crossers to enter the country, the Administration has been flying aliens in from foreign countries, positively enabling illegal entries, while dumping all the aliens on States and cities unprepared to deal with them. These are impeachable offenses. But the failure to give the American People an honest explanation is the worst. It is hard to imagine that anything like this has ever been done to this country before.

In 2020 the American people apparently elected a corrupt, senile, mendacious, career politician. We might think that any one of those would have disqualified him from becoming a President of the United States -- a perfect storm of legal, medical, and political reasons. He has trouble expressing coherent thoughts, and he wanders off into bizarre statements that are suppressed by the Media. He has trouble finishing sentences. He barely had a Presidental campaign and generated no evident enthusiasm. Sensible persons wonder what has been going on.

Biden said himself that he was not "threatening." However, his acts as President immediately began threatening almost everyone. After saying earlier that Executive Orders were "dictatorship," Biden immediately issued something like 50 Executive Orders, trying to undo everything that Donald Trump had done while President. One of the first Orders was to cancel the Keystone pipeline, which would bring oil from Canada down to refineries in Texas. This betrayed the Plumbers and Pipefitters Union, which had endorsed Biden, but hundreds or thousands of whose members were immediately put out of work. When Donald Trump decided to overrule one of Obama's orders suspending enforcement of immigration laws, his action was stayed by a federal judge, who said that the action was "arbitrary and capricious." Since seeing that the "laws are faithfully executed" is a principal duty of the President, this was a very odd ruling. And the cowardly or biased Supreme Court let the ruling stand. However, where cancelling the Keystone pipeline was certainly "arbitrary and capricious" (the companies involved, some Canadian, are suing), no one has been able to scare up any of the dozens of federal judges appointed by Donald Trump to stay such a ruling. It is all the cowardice and betrayal we expect from Republican appointees. Meanwhile, the oil gets moved anyway, by truck and train, which pose far greater environmental threats than pipelines.

At the same time, where Donald Trump's first phone calls to foreign leaders were leaked by disloyal bureaucrats intent on sabotaging his Presidency, Joe Biden's two hour phone call to Chairman and President Xi Jinping of Communist China was not leaked to the press by anyone. Loyal, equally corrupt, anti-American bureaucrats. This was a call, of course, where Biden began the process of selling out American interests to China, to the continuing profit of the Biden crime family, and providing cover for the Chinese oppression in Hong Kong and genocide against the Uighurs and Tibetans.

Meanwhile, having gotten rid of a President they called the equivalent of Adolf Hitler, the Democrats immediately began demanding censorship of all political opposition. What is now called "Big Tech," i.e. Amazon.com, Twitter, Facebook, and others, immediately began cooperating. Also, corporations and public authorities have begun firing people for their political views, demanding Leftist political "loyalty oaths" from the staff at schools, to corporations, to the military.

In other words, all the people who said they were fighting "Fascism" were revealed as the Fascists themselves. Anyone paying attention would have known this already, since Marxism-Leninism and Stalinism were aleady rampant at American Universities, and their totalitariansim had already broken out into society in general in the summer of 2020. Much of that was also evident in the daily riots by anarchists in Portland, which Democrat politicians and the Media endorsed.

The ideology now ascendent and now being enforced is the Marxist "Critical Race Theory," promoted by "Black Lives Matter" (BLM) and the anarchist "Antifa" group (who were revealed, not as anarchists, but as Fascists, in many ways, but especially when they attacked demonstrators in Los Angeles protesting vaccine mandates -- i.e. dictatorial policies of government). This is all founded on lies and deception. Black lives actually do not matter to BLM since the black victims of crime, many, many more than anyone dying in police shootings or in police custody, justified or nor, are completely ignored. Meanwhile, almost nothing but lies are promoted when the police are involved.

We all that thought that George Floyd was killed because officer Derek Chauvin was knealing on his neck. We saw it. However, it then turned out the Floyd had ingested a fatal dose of Fentanyl, which is why he was complaining that that he couldn't breath before the police even touched him.

Joe Biden as Beavis playing "The Great Cornholio," from Beavis and Butt-Head, 1993-1997

While riots were going on, this information was actually suppressed by the Attorney General of Minnesota, the anti-American Keith Ellison, who, like a lot of Democrats, was excused from the consequences of beating up his girlfriend and elected to his office anyway.

Officer Chauvin, who had previously been charged with criminal misconduct but was excused by Democrat Senator, Presidental Candicate, and then prosecutor Amy Klobuchar, obviously had no business being a policeman; but whether his actions caused or contributed to Floyd's death is a question that is apparently only going to be addressed at his trial -- although it wasn't, as Chauvin was convicted of first degree murder, despite the ambiguous evidence and the threats coming from mobs and politicians. In subsequent riots, it never mattered whether police shootings were justified or not.

Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-CO), with her "Let's Go Brandon" anti-Biden dress, in immitation of a dress worn by a Communist Congresswoman (known as "AOC," i.e. "aliens over citizens") that had said, "Tax the Rich." "Let's Go Brandon" became popular when an NBC reporter said that a crowd at a NASCAR race was chanting it, instead of the "F*ck Joe Biden" chant they were actually using.

Because of the "defund the police" movement and other idiocy, crime and especially murders have spiked in many cities. Black residents tell reporters that they were more police in their communities. However, black voters then seem to turn around and vote for Democrats, who apparently are indifferent to crime and black deaths from crime. Indeed, the ideology is that criminals are victims, and that white victims deserve it. However, most victims of street crime are not white. Recently, many victims have been Asians. There was a demonstration in New York on the weekend of February 20-21, 2021, promoting the claim that crimes against Asians were because of "white supremacy," ignoring the fact that all the perpetrators in recent cases were black -- also ignoring the blatant discrimination against Asians by elite institutions like Harvard, Yale, etc., who so far have gotten dishonest judges, and now the Biden Administration, to allow it.

Thus, many of the American people seem to have voted for crime and tyranny, and that is what all of us are rapidly getting. And when Joe Biden's mind decays enough that he cannot be trusted with any public statements, whoever is running this business will get rid of him, replaced by the unprincipled, absurd, and pliable Vice President, Kamala Harris.

In August 2021, that day may be approaching. The American withdrawl from Afghanistan, long planned by Trump, has been totally botched by Biden. With wishful thinking about the Afghan military, most American forces were abruptly removed, often to the surprise of the Afghanis, without evacuating American or NATO civilians, without evacuating friendly Afghans who had helped American forces, who might be targeted by the Ṭâlibân, and without removing or destroying American equipment and facilities.

When the Ṭâlibân essentialy invaded the country from their tolerated Pakistani bases, the Afghan government collapsed and all the major cities fell -- the Prime Minister of Pakistan congratulated them, exposing the duplicitous role Pakistan had been playing. The Afghan military seemed to evaporate. This left everyone, who should have been evacuated, stranded. And all the American equipment was taken, with much of it quickly moved out to Pakistan and Iran. Biden didn't seem to understand what had happened, and he could only repeat lies and confabulations. How bad this will get, at the moment remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, with literally millions of illegal migrants, many of them criminals, often Covid infected, being allowed across the border (now dominating by drug cartels), with murder and crime exploding in the cities, with school children smothered under ineffective masks, and with a 1970's-like inflation affecting all consumer products, Biden voters are certainly getting what they voted for -- whether they thought that's what they wanted or not.

On September 1, 2022, Biden's "Triumph of the Will" moment, when he denounced Republicans as fascists, "white supremacists," etc., who are a "threat to democracy." One might think that the "threat to democracy" would be the one sending the Gestapo to raid the home of a former President, or arrest his lawyers and seize lawyer-privileged material. But, oh, that's what Biden does. Oddly, the pro-Democrat TV networks did not carry the speech live, which is unheard of with a Democrat President. They realized that this was not going to look, or sound, good. Meanwhile, of course, the speech ignored every single issue that worries Americans, like the price of gasoline, the general inflation, crime, out of control illegal aliens pouring into the country, the mutilation of children, etc. But one thing Biden does know: He does not want to "Make American Great Again." Instead, he continues with the program to destroy the country and the lives of its citizens. Meanwhile, Biden has spent 40% of his time in office on "vacation" in Delaware.

After a debate with Donald Trump in which Biden's senility was well on display, including long vacant stares on his face, a coup led by Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Shumer, and Barack Obama pushed Biden out of the 2024 Presidential race, in favor of empty-suit Vice-President Kamala Harris. His farewell speech to the Democratic National Convention on August 19th was pushed back well pass Prime Time in the East, part of what has been termed the "losers' day" at the Convention, with speeches by Hillary Clinton and others. Characterized as "bitter, angry, shouting," Biden was his current demented self. The Democrats, who had lied about Biden's mental disabilities for months, if not years, suddenly have no use for him, and Harris wants to run from his record, while advocating all the same kinds of policies, and more, that have produced the disasters of his Administration. The conceit is that inflation, an open border, and crime were already problems under Trump, not created by Biden Administration policies. Some people may fall for that. Others may not care and just want free stuff.

מְנֵא מְנֵא תְּקֵל וּפַרְסִין׃
Daniel 5:25

You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war. -- Winston Churchill, to Neville Chamberlain, 29 September 1939, on the Munich agreement -- applicable now to Biden's actions in Afghanistan, allowing the country to return to the Ṭâlibân, encouraging the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.

Afghanistan

"People of the Philippines, I have returned," General Douglas MacArthur, October 20, 1944

A curious feature of recent popular culture is what happens in the movie or video game industries -- where, to my surprise, video games are a bigger business than movies -- when movies or games do not do well. While the motto of business used to be, "The customer is always right," what we have often been seeing is that those associated with the production of certain movies or video games immediately, or sometimes even in advance of release, begin insulting and attacking their own customers, i.e. the fans of movie or game franchises.

The irrationality of this is stunning. A business wants to attract customers, not drive them away. So there must be something in particular going on. Indeed, what the content of the insults and attacks are is the accusation of political crimes.

Peanut the Squirrel, kidnapped and murdered by a full SWAT Team of anonymous thugs from New York State government. Seen by Trump voters as a symbolic instance of the blind and irresponsible malevolence of government bureaucrats, whether in New York or Washington.

Movies or video games fail in the market because of "toxic masculinity," "racism," "sexism," "homophobia," "transphobia," "lookism," and any other of the litany of political crimes that the modern Academy, mostly, has thought up.

This is obviously not a strategy to improve sales. Indeed, what accompanies the attacks is usually the claim that the racists, etc., are really only a loud "minority," whose existence, of course, should not damage sales all that much, as the majority enlightened audience should keep buying. Since this doesn't make any sense in light of poor sales, we then get the claim that this loud minority is somehow persuading the majority not to buy. Since the majority of the press and professional reviewers are politically reliable, it is a little perplexing how their influence can be overwhelmed by this minority. Nevertheless, this picture makes the insults and attacks a little more sensible, since the strategy is to inform the supposed majority of the evil of the loud minority.

Unfortunately, if movies or video games fail, it is because a majority doesn't like them. The loud critics of the products are reflecting the public, not manipulating it. The regime functionaries are the ones trying to manipulate the public. There is also a great deal of "gaslighting" and lying that goes on. For instance, the public doesn't like ugly women in video games. The response is often that they aren't ugly, or that women can't be made good looking in video games. All nonsense.

Instead, what is obviously the case is that good looking women, especially sexually appealing ones, violate feminist objections to the "male gaze," consistent with the anhedonic and anaesthetic principles of establishment feminism. In other words, good looking women are a political crime. Furthermore, we also get masculinized women and feminized men to satisfy the "trans-gaze," which denatures sexuality into indefinite, androgenous "genders."

Since the fight over movies and video games is essentially political, it is not surprising to see it writ large in actual politics. Thus, instead of trying to attract conservative or Trump voters towards Democrat candidates, Democrats insult, smear, and attack them. President Obama famously began this with remarks about "bitter clingers," i.e. that conservatives cling to their "guns and religion" and are hostile to "immigrants." Since conservatives generally are only hostile to illegal aliens being tolerated in the country, a distinction that Democrats never make or acknowledge, dismissing such hostiity as racism, there is nothing to persuade conservatives that there is anything wrong with their views -- while suspicion is aroused that someone like Obama is actually hostile to guns, religion, and legal immigration.

Vice-Presidential Candidate and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz wished to demonstrate his gun-loving masculinity by arranging a photo op pheasant hunt with shotguns. Unfortunately, he seemed unfamiliar with his expensive Italian shotgun and had trouble figuring out how to load it -- reminding us of Elmer Fudd. Hunters, and men, were not impressed. Walz got called "Tampon Tim" for ordering that feminine hygene products be stocked in boys bathrooms in Minnesota schools, just in case "trans-men," i.e. girls, ever used the bathrooms.

In 2016 Hillary Clinton famously continued Obama's approach by dismissing many, or most, of Trump voters as a "basket of deplorables," associating all the usual smears with them. Again, the irrationality of this betrays nothing but contempt for the traditional American, or religious, values that conservative voters understand are anathema to the modern Democrat Party.

In the final days of the Kamala Harris Presidential campaign in 2024, President Joe Biden helpfully added that Trump voters, apparently all of them, are "garbage." Almost every Democrat immediately began fumbling all over themselves trying to walk this back, including the editing of the White House transcript of his remarks to try and make it look, with some punctuation, less offensive. It was hopeless. Most Americans may have gotten the drift by now that Democrats and the elite culture of the Ruling Class is basically anti-American.

For a long time, many Democrat politicians have given off the vibe that their charge is to represent the interests of foreigners, not Americans. Anyone disagreeing with them, anyone who thinks that the job of American political representatives is to represent the interests of Americans, is dismissed as "xenophobic," "fascist," or, of course, "racist." Democrats have also gotten the idea that Hispanic voters want the country flooded with Hispanic illegal aliens. However, Trump carried the majority of the male Hispanic vote; and Starr County, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, which is over 90% Hispanic, went Republican for the first time since 1898. Someone has been seriously out of their reckoning.

In the post-mortem of the election, Democrat operatives and Leftist commentators continued to smear Trump voters, for instance that Trump wants to deport, not illegal alien criminals, but all "people of color," regardless of immigration status or even citizenship. This simultaneously ignores objections against Biden opening the borders to all and sundry, voiding immigration law altogether (for which he could have been impeached), and continues simple accusations of racism. Again, this will win no voters whose motives are innocent and reasonable. But the self-regard and self-flattery of the elite overwhelms all rationality.

Bernie Sanders deviated from orthodoxy by pointing out that the Democrats and blown off and lost the "working class," i.e. anyone who is not among the comfortable Bi-Coastal elites who regard the people of the American "heartland" as ignorant yahoos. Indeed, the Democrats discounting the blue collar vote goes back to 2008, when the Obama team decided that the white "working class" was a lost cause. Since then, the Democrat Party has acted like the loyalty of labor unions was all they needed. But the leadership of labor unions, protected by labor law from being repudiated by their membership, and often corrupt and comfortable among the cultural elite, does not really represent their membership. It was a bad enough sign this time around that some unions, like the Teamsters, did not endorse Harris, or anyone, despite their membership expressing overwhelming support for Trump. Thus, by his own lights, Bernie Sanders was absolutely on target -- and totally misunderstood by establishment Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, who, from her San Fransico perch, would rather smear blue collar workers.

A constant theme of the Biden Presidency was that Trump voters, or all conservatives, are "semi-Fascists" or "Fascists," while Trump himself is a "threat to democracy" and the full equivalent of Adolf Hitler. Yet it is Democrats and the Left who have been practicing censorship, often from threats by government, disparaging Free Speech or even openly attacking the First Amendment. In recent memory, John Kerry complained about the First Amendment protecting climate "disinformation." This was to the James Bond Super-Villains at the Davos "World Economic Forum." Then Hillary Clinton attacked the First Amendment. Finally, we got the Democrat Vice-Presidental Candidate Tim Walz saying that the First Amendment does not protect "Hate Speech" or "Disinformation."

All this makes the Left and the Democrats the real Fascists. Fascists are the ones who don't like Free Speech and engage in censorship. Fascists are the ones who want to arrest the political oppositon. Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe has warned that Trump will arrest his political opposition. This is pure confabulation. When he was President, Trump never did that, even against Hillary Clinton, who had clearly violated Federal law.

But the Democrats have been prosecuting Republicans for years, including Trump himself, even during Trump's own Administration. Trump supporter Roger Stone was arrested in a pre-dawn raid for "lying to Congress." He was bankrupted, convicted, and even sent to jail. But the whole prosecution was bogus, and Trump had to pardon him. But Democrats have been lying to Congress for years. John Brennan and James Clapper, leaders of the 51 "spies who lied," who called the Hunter Biden laptop, which had already been authenticated by the FBI, apparent "Russian disinformation," lied to Congress many times. Nothing has been done about them. Biden's head of "Homeland Security," Alejandro Mayorkas, was actually impeached for lying to Congress and other crimes; but Chuck Schumer has refused to go to the required Senate trial of him. Other Democrats have been cited for Contempt of Congress, but a Democrat dominated and corrupted Department of Justice has never done anything about them. Yet the Democrats have put Steve Bannon in jail for the same thing, even though he had a pending appeal on the grounds of Execute Privilege. In Democrat jurisprudence, the punishment comes before the verdict, as in their beloved Soviet Union.

So the American people should know who the Fascists are. And a Kamala Harris who replaced Joe Biden in a backroom deal, without running in a single election primary, represents no recognizable form of democracy. At the same time, when the Democrats say "disinformation," they mean anything that contradicts government propaganda, by which they intend to silence all political opposition. Fascism again. And "Hate Speech," of course, means anything that violates Leftist political correctness. As I have noted elsewhere, an autistic British girl was arrested for calling a police officer a Lesbian, even though it just meant she was reminded of a Lesbian relative. This is now "Hate Speech," and we know that Democrats want to arrest all Christians, but probably not Muslims, who regard homosexuality as immoral. They have been harrassing a Colorado baker for years, with lawsuits, for refusing to bake cakes that violate the principles of his religion, even though one of their cases has already gone to the Surpreme Court, where they lost. Hasn't stopped them. Fortunately, the baker has been represented pro bono, so the Democrat strategy of bankrupting their victims hasn't worked. That is, of course, much of their strategy, to destroy the lives of victims before any trial ("the process is the punishment"), or coerce plea deals out of them, or try them in Washington, D.C., before a jury of Deep State Democrat bureaucrats, who know their marching orders and have no conscience or principles.