Is any wonder America handed the Dimocrats an historic…
…yesterday?!?
Consider this from WaPo columnist Catherine Rampell:
“Democrats appear to be heading toward painful losses on Tuesday, in one if not both houses of Congress. What went wrong will be debated for months, perhaps years. Much of the problem can be summed up in one word: denial.“
Agreed, yet only a few paragraphs further on, Rampell displays an identical disregard of reality:
“They’ve downplayed voters’ concerns on crime, violent protests, school closures and rising recession risks. These are vulnerabilities that Republicans have exploited during the campaign (while offering no solutions of their own, of course).“
“No solutions”, Ms. Rampell…really?!? What about more police, rescinding Progressive bond policies, prosecuting and incarcerating criminals, breaking up violent protests and arresting, convicting and jailing the protesters, keeping schools open and giving parents control over their children’s curriculums, eliminating union-created supply chain bottlenecks, and drilling, drilling, drilling? Aren’t those solutions to the Progressive-produced problems you catalogued?!?
While we’re at it, are not closing the border, deporting illegal aliens, keeping biologic men out of women’s sports and locker/bathrooms, ending green energy subsidies and bans on internal combustion vehicles, eliminating wokeness from our Military and rebuilding/reining in a politicized, weaponized federal bureaucracy to be considered solutions as well?
Not when even someone who correctly identifies a large part of the Progressives’ problem plays the role of Cleopatra.
Now, here’s pre-election result installment of The Gouge, though we have to note one would have to be an utter and complete idiot to cast a ballot for John Fetterman!
First up, in a must-read analysis which deserves inclusion in full, NRO‘s Rich Lowry records…
“It’s been “on” for a while, but Donald Trump fired the first shot in his 2024 competition with Ron DeSantis by calling him “Ron DeSanctimonious” at a Pennsylvania rally over the weekend.
Rumored to be contemplating an announcement as soon as next week, Trump is obviously the front-runner for the nomination. Depending on his general-election opponent and the circumstances, he’d probably have something like a 50/50 shot to win the presidency again.
So it’s time to think seriously about what this would look like.
There are huge pitfalls to Trump 3.0 that would be easily and nearly completely avoided by nominating and electing DeSantis, or any other Republican alternative. (I don’t take it as an absolute certainty, by the way, that DeSantis will run, or that if he does, it will come down at the end to the Trump–DeSantis contest everyone expects.)
The difference between nominating Trump and DeSantis — the delta in terms of Republican prospects and governing potential — is hard to exaggerate.
If Trump wins the presidency again, it will be mayhem.(Caused in large part by The Donald himself!) The reaction of the other side will make what happened after the 2016 election seem mild in comparison. You don’t ever want to give the opposition a veto, but how the opposition reacts affects how a president can govern. Democrats would certainly find a reason to deny the legitimacy of a President DeSantis, but his cabinet secretaries probably wouldn’t have to have bomb-sniffing dogs checking their cars every morning. That would matter, and it would be better than the alternative of the Left trying to convince itself, in a paroxysm of anti-Trump rage, that it needs to try to forge some sort of American color revolution.
Then there’s the question of age. Trump seems youthful and vital compared with President Biden. He’s still 76 years old, though. In the unlikely event that Biden runs again, a Trump–Biden race will be aged-on-aged violence that will be a great victory, one way or the other, for the American gerontocracy. A DeSantis–Biden race, on the other hand, would set up a simple future-vs.-past contest like Clinton vs. Dole in 1996 or Obama vs. McCain in 2008.
Although Trump looks as if he could be doing campaign rallies until he’s 90, time comes for us all. There’s no guarantee that Trump won’t start encountering Biden-like aging problems, either during a general election or in a prospective second term. Why risk it, when there are palatable, new-generation alternatives?
Trump is tethered to the past in a more important way than his age. If he’s the nominee, every Republican in the country would either have to endorse his delusions about the 2020 election or find a way to dodge them. And Trump would be paying attention. He’d presumably be happy to take shots at anyone in the party not showing sufficient loyalty to “stop the steal,” no matter how destructive. DeSantis or anyone else would spare other Republicans the political pain of getting pressured this way.
Relatedly, Trump is not a party-builder. Yes, he’s a movement-builder, but he imagines that the movement is all about himself. As he demonstrated in Georgia in 2020, he’s happy to exercise the “Samson option” when crossed — differing only from Samson by bringing the temple crashing down only on his party, not himself. There’s no reason to believe that DeSantis (or the other alternatives) would be anything other than a responsible leader of the national party genuinely vested in its growth and welfare.
With regard to governing prospects, there’s also a big swing. Trump did a number of truly consequential and creative things policy-wise while in office, but his erratic nature also limited his ability to deliver. A vendetta tour against all his real and perceived enemies would now be layered on top of this. Assuming that Mitch McConnell is still the GOP leader in the Senate, do Republicans really want a newly elected president and a Senate majority leader who don’t speak to each other and, worse, a president who has insulted that majority leader in crude and personal terms?
Trump has much more of a policy apparatus and government-in-waiting than in 2016, but he’ll still have trouble hiring for top positions, and a miasma of legal controversies will continue to trail him everywhere. Again, why choose that when there are other alternatives who’d start with a clean slate and be able and willing to work with everyone in the party?
Lastly, Trump has already shown once before that he can take a winnable national race and lose it, in part because he couldn’t conceal his personal flaws — he didn’t even try — and made himself repellent to too many voters for no good reason. (It’s one thing to be hated for fighting courageous fights; it’s another to be hated for idiotic tweets and pointless outrages.)
Politics at the presidential level exposes everyone. The job is so demanding and the stage so big that no one is completely suited to them. Whatever weaknesses that DeSantis — or again, other alternatives — has will be revealed in due course. Yet the Florida governor has never put himself in the position of getting defeated in a race that easily could have been won, and of denying his loss out of personal embarrassment. Trump likes to divide the world into winners and losers, and DeSantis for now is emphatically the former.That, too, should count for a lot.
We can’t know how a 2024 fight will play out. We do know that the stakes will be enormous.“
A lot can still happen between now and 2024, and DeSantis wouldn’t be the first candidate whose closeted skeletons inconveniently came to light and derailed their run, but all things being equal, when it comes to taking Trump over a completely-qualified candidate with all of his limited assets and none of his numerous liabilities, we’re with Remo:
“I don’t know if he is running. I think if he runs, he could hurt himself very badly. I really believe he could hurt himself badly. I think he would be making a mistake, I think the base would not like it — I don’t think it would be good for the party. Any of that stuff is not good — you have other people that possibly will run, I guess. I don’t know if he runs. If he runs, he runs.”
“I would tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering — I know more about him than anybody — other than, perhaps, his wife.“
Here’s the juice: There’s no way we’ll ever support this complete a*sclown…except against any possible Dimocratic nominee for the presidency!
Here’s a second shot of the juice: The politician The Donald would have us believe could hurt himself badly by running against him in 2024 just carried Miami-Dade County, a feat no Republican has pulled off in the last 20 years.
“The men and women of the FBI devote themselves to protecting the American people from terrorism, violent crime, cyber threats and other dangers. Put quite simply: we follow the facts without regard for politics. While outside opinions and criticism often come with the job, we will continue to follow the facts wherever they lead, do things by the book, and speak through our work.“
“Believe it or not, someone on the internet is now claiming that violent crime in America fell last year. Unfortunately, that “someone” happens to be the FBI—brandishing a new crime-count methodology, and telling the public, in effect, to ignore the evidence of its own senses.
As more or less everyone in the United States today knows, crime is a hot button issue this election cycle—and for a reason. Next week a “red wave” stands to punish Democratic candidates across the country, not least because so many voters blame the Democrats for a nationwide decline in public safety since Team Blue took the White House and the Congress in 2020.
Yet you would have no inkling of this—neither the problem itself, nor the public’s anxiety, much less the coming electoral backlash—from perusing Washington’s new official numbers on national crime trends. These data were released last month by the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) under their new “National Incident Based Reporting System” (NIBRS), which formally displaced their previous “Summary Reporting System” (SRS) at the beginning of 2021. According to these numbers, America did not suffer a crime wave in 2021. Quite the contrary: the FBI maintains that violent crime actually fell last year.
True: the FBI’s NIBRS does acknowledge that murders rose in 2021—some 4 percent above 2020 levels, it says. Nevertheless, according to the purportedly improved methodology about which Justice Department officials boast, the US enjoyed a 1 percent overall decline in violent crime between 2020 and 2021.
How did the Feds manage to get their crime assessment for America—even the direction of the arrow—so laugh-out-loud wrong? A closer look reveals some of the awkward details…”
In a related item we covered preciously, courtesy of Front Page Magazine, Lloyd Billingsley reminds us how…
“The FBI is defying a court order to hand over information from the laptop of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer murdered in July of 2016. As The Epoch Times reports, the bureau wants the court to reverse the 53-page ruling of federal judge Amos Mazzant, an Obama appointee. If the court declines, the FBI wants to delay release of the data for 66 years.
That would put the release in 2088, when FBI boss Christopher Wray would be 121 years old, so the 66-year figure is code for “never.”As journalist Jim Hoft explains, “people with nothing to hide don’t try to hide nothing,” so the people have a right to wonder what is going on…”
Just as with all of Paul Pelose’s various adventures, which, had they involved an average American, would have been subject to full and complete disclosure.
Which brings us to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from Speed…
…the lovely Shannon…
…and Balls Cotton:
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with yet another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, and this head-scratcher of a tale from the Volunteer State, as a…
“…Katie Quackenbush was ordered on Thursday to serve 11 months and 29 days probation for the Aug. 26, 2017, shooting death of Gerald Melton, 54, on Nashville’s famed Music Row, police and FOX 17 Nashville reported.Quackenbush had originally been charged with attempted murder for the early morning shooting, but was instead found guilty of misdemeanor reckless endangerment, the outlet reported.
…Melton was initially critically wounded, but survived his injuries…”
“Shooting death”…”survived his injuries”: somewhere there’s an editor as unworthy of their title as the current occupant of the Oval Office.
Magoo
Video of the Day
At the time this is published we won’t have known the results of the election. But if it’s a red wave, Jesse Watters explains why.
Tales of The Darkside
Brit Hume weighs in on what’s next for America’s premier prevaricating gaffe machine.
On the Lighter Side
Will Cain puts Oprah’s endorsement of the manifestly incapable John Fetterman into proper perspective.
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