Category Archives: 2020 Election

Another “What if” pondering

In my “what if” pondering in the past week or so, it seems very odd that Susan Rice, former President Obama’s scandal-prone national security advisor, should emerge as a top-tier Biden pick as his running mate.  The Biden delays in announcing a running mate and the top names (Karen Bass, Kamala Harris, Susan Rice) may fit the BLM moment, but they don’t fit the real power player battles within the Democratic Party.  Last night, Twitter was abuzz that Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, had visited Biden for a VP meeting too.  What if there’s an Obama camp power struggle and a Clinton camp power struggle going on behind the scenes.  It just seems inconceivable that Hillary Clinton, who has spent her life believing her destiny, is to become the first female POTUS and who has spent the past almost four years refusing to accept that she lost the 2016 election to Trump, would just sit back and gracefully accept Susan Rice lunging to the top of the Biden VP stakes.  There’s no love lost between Rice and Hillary Clinton.  Rice wrote in her 2019 memoir:

“Days after the tragedy, Rice was asked to do a round of Sunday TV interviews addressing the incident because Clinton was unavailable.

In her book she writes that her mother Lois Dickson Rice advised her to refuse, saying: ‘Why do you have to go on the shows? Where is Hillary?’

Rice told her mother that Clinton was ‘wiped out after a brutal week’ and that the Obama White House asked her to step up in the place.

‘I smell a rat. This is not a good idea. Can’t you get out of it?’ her mother said.

Rice told her: ‘Mom, don’t be ridiculous. I’ve done the shows. It will be fine.’

It was far from it and Rice committed what would become the defining error of her career.”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7550115/Susan-Rice-says-mom-smelled-rat-went-TV-Hillary-Clinton-Benghazi.html

Bill Clinton continually pressured President Obama and other Obama officials (see Loretta Lynch tarmac meeting) in 2016, trying to force Obama to end the FBI Clinton email investigation and I’ve been wondering if the the Clintons want Hillary to be in position to finally step into the presidency, as Biden becomes unable to handle the duties.  In light of Biden’s obvious cognitive decline, that Hillary would sit back and meekly accept Susan Rice as Biden’s running mate just seems so completely unfathomable, after decades of watching Hillary fight and claw her way to attain power.  Would Hillary not try to push herself into that favorable “one-step-away-from-the presidency” position or would she gracefully cheer on some other woman (especially Susan Rice) stepping into that position.

While, it certainly seems Susan Rice is the Biden top choice, whom Obama would gladly embrace, the dark horse no one mentions at all is Hillary Clinton.

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Filed under 2020 Election, General Interest, Politics

Left’s culture war planners mobilized to win

When the BLM protests broke out at the end of May, at first Dems, the media and most Republicans bought into the George Floyd narrative that BLM, Al Sharpton and the media were selling.  It’s become apparent that some details were left out of there “totally peaceful arrest” and the effort to spin George Floyd as an upstanding citizen.  Geroge Floys had a lengthy criminal record and the story of Floyd offering no resistance during his arrest, likewise appears to be untrue. While these details still don’t justify the police officer holding Floyd down with a knee to Floyd’s neck for over 8 minutes, those details assuredly might weigh into the charges the police officers are facing.  Andrew McCarthy at National Review explained:

“Defense lawyers will certainly note that the new theory may have led to some sleight-of-hand by Ellison in drafting the charges. In the original complaint, prosecutors more forthrightly acknowledged that Floyd, while he did not threaten the cops, was uncooperative. For example, the original complaint states, “Mr. Floyd actively resisted being handcuffed”; in the amended complaint, that allegation has mysteriously vanished — we are now told simply that “Officer Lane handcuffed Mr. Floyd.”

Why the change? Because Ellison has changed the direction of the prosecution since taking it over. Originally, prosecutors were not concerned about accurately describing Floyd’s resistance, since their theory was that, no matter what Floyd may have done, the recklessly excessive manner in which he was restrained — with his ability to breathe impeded — established depraved indifference. But now, Ellison is alleging that the arrest and accompanying restraint of Floyd was felony assault from the start. To pull that off, he realized he needs to soft-pedal Floyd’s resistance. Otherwise, physical restraint by the cops may appear to have been reasonable, at least at the start; Ellison wants it to look unreasonable through and through, to the point of assault.

New Floyd Murder Charges Will Be Tough to Prove and May Imperil Good Cops

Living in a world where our media and political culture, totally corrupted and committed to running scorched earth spin information warfare 24/7,  makes finding reliable, vetted information time-consuming, frustrating and often like trying find the proverbial needle in a haystack… or to use some JK wisdom, learning to be a crow;

“There’s a somewhat useful methodology label analysts occasionally admit to using. The Crow Method. Don’t know you ever spent much time in barnyards/feedlots. … Next time you find yourself where bovines and crows are gathered, pick one crow and keep eyes on that one crow. If you’ve chosen a smart crow, the crow’ll be following a big bull and every time the bull drops a load, the crow’ll swoop down and swirl around the bovine waste looking for the few nuggets of undigested golden corn kernels. The crow will take the corn leaving the remainder of the bullshit for the worms.”

“Better to be a Crow. Dirty work but not so dirty as being a worm. Worms’ll swallow anything.”

I still fall for some spin narratives, only to realize later that I got sucked into them (see my totally buying into the Schiff spin narrative about Marie Yovanovitch).   Taking a deep breath and waiting to see what other information comes out before reacting tests my patience, but that’s my goal when it comes to information – don’t trust any first reports from the media and all political news should be treated as “potential spin propaganda, until more information is available to lend credibility to the reports.

In the midst of the media/political spin outrage over George Floyd’s death, we were led along and lulled into letting down our guard.  We placed our trust in spin narratives sold by BLM activists and race hustler, Al Shaprton.

Many Republicans jumped right on board the “police reform” bandwagon, being peddled by the left, except rapidly many Dems and far-left radical activists quickly pivoted from “police reform to “defund the police” to “reimagine (disband) the police” and the protests spread globally, while the social justice causes grew into a massive shog(fecal fog).  The real objective the BLM movement centers on completely is changing our economic and political systems in America into some, as yet vaguely defined, neo-Marxist Utopia.  Their goal most certainly isn’t “police reform.”

What seemed to get lost in the massive fog of spin war was the BLM movement sounds very much like the violent Black Power radicals from the 1960s, even though BLM mouthpieces insist their movement doesn’t endorse violence.  Instead, this movement led by radical black female activists working with their allies (predominantly radical feminists) intend to con Americans into buying into their revisionist history projects and other “reimagining” our political and economic systems, all based on massive spin operations, extreme emotional blackmail and public shaming spin operations and by stealthily encouraging their more violent “allies,” like Antifa to engage in street theater vandalism, statue-toppling, looting, arson and physical assaults.  BLM organizers will keep their hands clean and stay distanced from the violence, all while politically benefiting from the mayhem.

All of this radical leftist chaos seemed so familiar, so it was no surprise to find out Bill Ayers and other 60s radicals have been advising and offering their expertise to BLM organizers.

What’s even more disturbing about the media, pundit class and political class and their instant jumping on board the BLM/Sharpton outrage train is Republicans, like Nikki Haley, Mitt Romney and many others, jumped on board, trying to be noticed and seeking praise from the liberal media with their virtue-signaling.  They completely bought into the entire BLM/Sharpton spin narrative the mainstream media presented as 100% vetted information.

Even if these Republicans did not remember the 1960s-early 1970s radical protests and Black Power movement or recognize the political messaging, you would think they’d remember back a few years when the BLM movement began and gained national attention.

The collective amnesia about past events happens in days now with these rapidly churning spin cycles, so perhaps Republicans rushing to virtue-signal their racial sensitivity and fawning all over the Marxist-tinged radical BLM movement shouldn’t surprise me, but it did disgust me.

The radical left has stuck to their culture war since the 1960s, relentlessly.  They took over American colleges and universities, by becoming the tenured professors and administrators.  They tirelessly work to control K-12 education in America.  They control the media, except for a few news outlets and some successful talk radio programs.  And they developed, advanced and controlled spin information warfare, until Trump came along and learned how to spin. Trump’s clunky one-man spin show has begun to inflict more damage to Trump in the past year than it does on Dems and his media targets, so it’s hard to tell if he will be able to hold onto the presidency in November.

And here’s the thing that bothers me about conservatives and Republicans – those who cling to Trump as the only person who can “save America” from the far-left onslaught, that’s assuredly coming if Biden wins, have not a single other plan other than to place all their energy and trust in Trump, a fraud, who pretends to be a Republican and who keeps the right divided and engaged in constant in-fighting.  The Left has remained committed to their culture war since the 1960s and worked to advance their political goals through all of America’s institutions (including American churches, where many Protestant churches are more bastions of leftist political dogma than Christian theology.) Republicans placed all of their energy in hysteria over the Supreme Court and who sits in the White House.  That’s the right’s entire plan to defeat the Left’s aggressive culture war.

I’ve been spending time brushing up understanding the 1960s protest history, ideology and organization of radical groups.  My reading list also includes reading more about the French Revolution and Mao’s Cultural Revolution.  I’ve read a good deal about Soviet history, but I might start brushing up on that too.

I just finished rereading Robert H. Bork’s, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline.

I’ve started reading Roger Kimball’s, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America.  and also, Alexis de Tocqueville’s, The Old Regime and the French Revolution.

My list also includes Amity Schlaes, Great Society, Jonah Goldberg’s, Liberal Fascism, and Kevin Williamson’s, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking In The Age of Mob Politics, Mao’s, The Red Book on Guerrilla Warfare.

Republicans trusting in Trump to “save America,” by winning the election in November, should realize that Trump has offered no coherent plan on anything during his first term, only chaos, more Twitter fights than most of us can even count, chaotic program roll-outs, endless palace intrigue battles among his staff inside the White House, non-stop leaking from his White House, and endless whining about his victimhood.  None of that will change if he is reelected.

Yes, he nominated a lot of judges, so that has been a positive, but does that outweigh the negatives?

In googling, I came across a 2014 Mark Steyn essay on our culture war and he wondered about America in 28 years, but eerily, we’re already almost to his nightmarish vision:

“If the culture’s liberal, if the schools are liberal, if the churches are liberal, if the hip, groovy business elite is liberal, if the guys who make the movies and the pop songs are liberal, then electing a guy with an “R” after his name isn’t going to make a lot of difference.

Nor should it. In free societies, politics is the art of the possible. In the 729 days between elections, the left is very good at making its causes so possible that in American politics almost anything of consequence is now impossible, from enforcing immigration law to controlling spending.

What will we be playing catch-up to in another 28 years? Not so long ago, I might have suggested transsexual rights. But, barely pausing to celebrate their victory on gay marriage, the identity-group enforcers have gone full steam ahead on transgender issues. Once upon a time there were but two sexes. Now Facebook offers its 1.2 billion patrons the opportunity to select their preference from dozens of “genders”: “male” and “female” are still on the drop-down menu, just about, but lost amid fifty shades of gay — “androgynous,” “bi-gender,” “intersex,” “cisfemale,” “trans*man,” “gender fluid” . . .

Oh, you can laugh. But none of the people who matter in American culture are laughing. They take it all perfectly seriously.

Supreme Intergalactic Arbiter Anthony Kennedy wields more power over Americans than George III did, but in a year or three he’ll be playing catch-up and striking down laws because of their “improper animus” and wish to “demean” and “humiliate” persons of gender fluidity.

Having done an impressive job of demolishing the basic societal building block of the family, the ambitious liberal is now moving on to demolishing the basic biological building block of the sexes.

Indeed, taken in tandem with the ever greater dominance of women at America’s least worst colleges and, at the other end of the social scale, the bleak, dispiriting permanence of the “he-cession,” in 28 years’ time we may be fairly well advanced toward the de facto abolition of man, at least in the manly sense.”

https://nypost.com/2014/10/19/real-battle-for-america-is-over-culture-not-elections/

The Left’s determined culture war will rage on, unchecked by any organized, coherent plan on the right to fight against the radical Left’s final charge to victory.  The energy within  far-left activism now seems to gravitate from radical feminists, like the BLM movement and MeToo movement.  Here’s a feminist activist explaining their big picture goal:

No one on the right has any plans, only lamenting about how bad these far-left radicals and their agenda are.  Trying to get more Americans moving toward the center and working together might counter some of the extremism of the left.  And as the far-left extremism spirals further out of control, their extremism may begin to alarm and alienate more Americans, who don’t want everything in their lives politicized.

The motivation, organization and planning of the Left’s activists speak to activists, who have spent years (some since the 1960s) working tirelessly to wage their culture war.  The far-left culture warriors have now fully-mobilized to finally win their culture war, while the right’s asleep at the wheel.

Mobilization among the right relies on trying to energize millions of Americans to chant “Trump, Trump, Trump!” at sideshow rallies, where Trump rambles on, hurls insults, engages in juvenile name-calling, then gets on Air Force One and tweets crap about the “crowd size” at his rally.  There’s a seriousness to the Left’s culture war, that is entirely missing on the right.  No one on the right has any plans other than, “In Trump We Trust!’

This lack of any plans to counter this latest, very aggressive far-left culture war assault worries me a great deal.

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Trump’s political graveyard

President Trump announced plans for a National Garden of Heroes during a speech Friday evening at Mount Rushmore.  Many of Trump’s spin commandos on Twitter went into raptures and cheered this announcement as another sign of Trump’s brilliance at owning the libs.  My reaction was this is a totally idiotic idea. It completely demonstrated that he and his administration have no clue what the hell is really going on with the far-left’s efforts to dismantle our American system, but most of all that Trump highlighted once again that he is a clueless reactionary, who does not think ahead.  He always reacts to whatever the mainstream media is buzzing about on TV and often the things the mainstream media create spin hysteria about are just spin diversions.

The statue-toppling  street theater looks like a deliberate tactic to stoke fear and anger among conservatives, but this street theater is mostly a diversion.  The real efforts to dismantle our American system are happening with the political class, the radical lawyers and being advanced in the mainstream media and on social media.  Radical Dem politicians and the activist organizers can call off the statue-toppling street theater in a heartbeat, if they choose to (see CHAZ/CHOP).

With Trump and the right going into hysterics about the statues, prolonging the street theater keeps Trump and the right chasing after “protecting statues.”  Trump being Trump took the bait and came up with the most spectacular waste of time – a sideshow gimmick to replace his 2016 “build the wall” effort.  His proposed National Garden of Heroes has about as much chance of materializing as his Great Wall of Trump.

It should go without saying, that vandals tearing down statues and destroying public property should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.  That does matter, but trying to make “statues” the centerpiece of Trump’s reelection campaign is a huge mistake.

Common sense, after watching how any construction of national monuments goes in America, should clue anyone with a few functioning brain cells, that national monument projects are always fraught with controversies, red tape, financing battles, and endless delays.  Beyond that, any project Trump proposes assuredly will galvanize the Left to protest and the liberal media to write a zillion pieces about either wasting taxpayer money or corruption with private financing.

Trump just gave his adversaries a huge new front to attack his administration’s focus, while offering his supporters a “garden of statues” to rally around…  The vast majority of Americans, Trump included, know very little about American history or have any real interest in a “garden of statues.”  With Trump’s “great wall,” he could constantly churn up anti-immigrant sentiment and fuel fear that America was being overrun by M-13.  Trying to win an election over “statues” just doesn’t seem like it’s going to gain much traction as a kitchen table issue most Americans will care about, especially with so many Americans facing worries about surviving day-to-day due to COVID-19 fall-out.

At some point, hopefully the Trump administration realizes that this latest Leftist uprising melds the MeToo radical feminist movement and BLM’s radical black power movement into a new push to destroy the “male patriarchy.”  Unfortunately, all women in America, regardless of politics are stewed in radical feminist ideology growing up and for decades it’s considered a heresy for women to speak out against any radical feminist dogma and it’s even more unspeakable heresy to speak out against black feminists.  Trump will end up having to campaign more against whoever Biden picks as VP than he will against Biden and that could be a very dangerous political minefield for even the most clever politician.  Trump runs the risk of alienating even more suburban white women, if he attacks a black female VP’s looks, intellect, qualifications and just about anything. Hillary had high negatives and had earned her reputation, making it much easier to attack her

And here we are in July, with Trump still searching for a central reelection theme. His “garden of statues” idea sure seems more like he’s designing his own political graveyard than constructing a winning campaign theme.

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