Miscellaneous

 

You should have listened to your mother, Jeb!

Bush 3’s not stupid.  He sees what’s going on.  He’s being rejected.  He’s not connecting.  And he really doesn’t understand why.  What’s he supposed to do?  He’s being himself, he can’t change who he is.  He’s nothing if not dutiful, and will soldier on.  But if he gets his ass handed to him in Iowa and New Hampshire, he’s got to win South Carolina or it’s over.  I doubt he’d subject himself to sustained humiliation.

He’ll soon be bringing in big brother, it seems.  This is clearly desperation.  Apparently people with short memories are  telling pollsters they now like Bush 2.  But when they’re reminded of his failures  — and they will be  — he’ll wind up being a major negative.  Setting aside what he did to the country, his time in the White House was an absolute disaster for the Republican Party.  And while Bush 2 was a dope, but he had that swagger and confidence that little brother so obviously lacks.  Bush 3 doesn’t come off well in comparison.  And when he starts criticizing his brother’s administration, he looks disloyal.  He’s just screwed.

And now for some idle speculation.  I like having the three media candidates in the race right now, and I like having Bush 3 as well.  They all keeps things in flux.  As long as the race is fluid, a candidate polling in fifth place in New Hampshire, like Kasich, is still perceived to be in the hunt.  The fact that those ahead of him are the media candidates and Bush 3 means he’s still in good shape there.

I continue to assume Bush 3 doesn’t win the nomination, leaving either Kasich, Rubio and Cruz as the conceivable nominee.  Rubio is enjoying a boomlet, but I think the timing is off, and he knows it.  A year ago Bush 3 was the consensus favorite.  Then came Walker’s moment in the sun.  If it’s now Rubio’s turn, he’ll be scrutinized and criticized as never before in his political career.  The media will happily spread any dirt an opposing campaign can come up with, and the Bushes can play dirty.  Bush 2 gutted McCain in South Carolina fifteen years ago.  The same slimy tactics used to reelect Thad Cochran in Mississippi can be applied to Rubio.  I’d be surprised if the Bushes didn’t play dirty.

I don’t think they can take Don Juan out, but they can hurt him.  Cruz is unlikely to benefit.  Rubio’s voters choose him over the Parson for a reason.  He’s Don Juan.  Cruz is the Parson.  Cruz makes it to the final round if he picks up votes when the media candidates drop out, which he should do.  He’s the Trump tribe’s second choice.  For Kasich to get into the title fight with Cruz, Bush 3 must fade, and Rubio must be seen as unacceptable.  For Kasich, the ideal scenario has always involved watching Rubio and Bush 3 go to war.  It was supposed to happen in Florida, leading up to the March 15 primary.    The way things are shaping up, I wouldn’t be surprised if Bush 3’s Super-pac runs some negative ads against Rubio in New Hampshire.  Somebody’s got to be the one to fire the first salvo of attack ads.  It may as well be the guy with the most money.

I saw pictures of the candidates when they were kids.  Cruz’s freaked me out, it was so phony.  He’s about twenty, and it’s a picture you’d send a casting agent in Hollywood.  Cruz was into acting at the time, so maybe that’s what it was.  He’s trying to look like Don Juan.  All he needs is a Zorro outfit.  He’s trying to look sultry, with hooded, or veiled, eyes.

He may, in fact, be vain.  I haven’t picked up on that before, so maybe it was a stage he went through.  If not, it’s deadly.  Nobody likes vain men.  It’s something to keep an eye out for.

According to everything we’ve heard, the gridlock in the South Carolina Senate that has blocked us was a fight between Sen. Leatherman, who wanted a tax increase for roads, and another faction, which wants an ethics bill.  This hurricane broke the logjam.   The damage to the roads will require emergency appropriations of such a size that they’ll have to take a tax hike.   Leatherman wins.  We don’t think he’s got anything against us.  It was just, if he didn’t get new taxes for roads, nobody got anything.  Hugh Leatherman is 85, I believe.  I hope I’m kicking ass like he is when I get there.

My previous post, Trump for Ambassador, was going to be submitted to AT, but I hit the Publish command instead of the Save Draft command, so it’s out on the internet and AT won’t use anything but original stuff.  It’s just as well.  I wrote it four days ago and it’s a little dated.  There’s an article up in today’s AT by Fay Voshell that’s far better.  Here’s the link.  I have no expertise in foreign affairs, and shouldn’t pretend that I do.

Voshell seems very well informed.  If you’re interested in what’s really going on in Russia right now, I’d read it.  Vladimir is pronounced like “redeemer”, and Vladimir the Great brought Christianity to Russia.  The enormous statue of him going up near the Kremlin will be one of the dominating icons of the city.  Putin is a self conscious Christian, and believes that Russia will revive when her ancient Christian spirit is revived.

This is a man that can be dealt with.

The Donald applauds Putin’s entry into the Middle East, and the geniuses who invaded Iraq and helped create this whole mess are horrified.  What can he be thinking?  Putin is not a nice person, and it’s our job to oppose Russia in the Middle East and everywhere else.  Because they’re Russians, and that’s what we do.  And there’s all that oil that Iran and the Arabs have.  If Putin’s the strong horse, he’ll have a say in what happens to it.

The whiz kids who have directed our foreign policy live in a bygone era, when Russia was an aggressive Soviet Union bent on world domination, and we needed Mideast oil.  But Russia is once again a Christian nation, a great if diminished power, and we don’t need anybody’s oil.  If Putin wants to ensure the survival of his ally in Syria, that’s his business.

The legitimacy of Russia’s great power status needs to be recognized and acknowledged.  Accommodation is not appeasement.  Realpolitik isn’t weakness.  The five legitimate world powers haven’t changed since the Second World War.  They are the U.S., Western Europe, Russia, China and Japan.  America competes, but will not fight, with its geopolitical rivals.  We want trade and good relations with all of them.  Conflicts arise, but are peaceably resolved by statesmen.

We won the Cold War because, after the Sino-Soviet split, it was three to one, with China on the sidelines.  But that was when there was a Soviet Union out to control the world.  Russia doesn’t want to rule the world.  Nobody does, except Islamic fanatics, and suicide bombers can’t conquer anything.  China has never been all that interested in the outside world.  Japan isn’t going to cause anybody any trouble.  Western Europe?  Please.

Trump understands that Putin is just a Russian nationalist, seeking to regain the influence the Soviet Union had in its legitimate spheres of influence, which includes Eastern Europe.  Putin can’t recreate the Warsaw Pact.  He doesn’t need to, because NATO is a dead letter, and he knows it.  It was a pledge by America to fight a European land war against the Soviets, and was grudgingly accepted by the American people.  The Soviets are no more, and neither is the American will to fight.  Putin knows that.  We pretend it isn’t true.  But make believe thinking is very dangerous, and American war hawks need to accept reality.  We will not fight the Russians for the Germans, the Poles, the Estonians or anyone else.  It’s a European problem, and we’re happy to help.  But no boots on the ground.  Europe isn’t worth the life of one Nebraska paratrooper.

Andrew McCarthy in National Review Online gets it.  Other than a secure Israel, our only interest in the Middle East is killing terrorists.  Obama doesn’t have the stomach for it.  The next Republican President will inherit a mess.  Right now, it’s impossible to say that a police action in the Middle East might not be justified, so long as it was quick, and limited in scope.  Nation building is a joke, we’ve learned that much.  Get in, kill as many of them as possible, and get out.  Repeat, if necessary.  If the Russians are still in Syria we might even work in conjunction with them.  If not, we could go in with Anglosphere  and other allies if they want to come.  Forget the U.N.

Trump may be fading a bit, and if his numbers really start to drop he might get out.  If so, he can hold his head high, for he will have performed a valuable service.  He speaks for the Middle American Radical,  as aptly described by John Judis in National Journal.  He singlehandedly forced illegal immigration into the center of the national debate, and he speaks for the great American middle in rejecting reflexive hostility to competing world powers.

We don’t want to be overrun by illegals.  And we don’t want to send our sons and daughters into senseless conflict.  You don’t make America great again by getting into wars.

Good on Trump.

Thanks to the guys at AT for putting my article on the “A” list, with attribution.  Here’s the link.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/10/the_center_holds.html  The full article is below.

I’m getting annoyed with the commenters who accuse me of being a GOPe (rhymes with dope.  ha ha).  I was working for Barry Goldwater before a lot of them were born.  He was the last candidate I supported without reservation.   I liked Reagan, but he wasn’t a hard ass like Barry.   I have my criticism of Reagan, but it’s quibbling.  You don’t always get what you want.  You take what you can get.

It’s realpolitik.  It’s an unsentimental analysis of political reality, divorced from wishful thinking.  We’ve got a once in a century chance at a realignment election, one which could form the basis of a new center right coalition of interests that would endure.  This is an election we simply can’t lose.  And if we win we have to take full advantage of the opportunity.  Cruz and Rubio have their attractions.  They’re talented and smart.  But we don’t need inspiration.  We shouldn’t put a man in the saddle who’s at his first rodeo.  I have only a limited understanding of the amount of work that needs to get done.  But I know it would be overwhelming if you’re doing it for the first time.

The center holds

That’s my prediction for 2016 in a nutshell.  We have two extremes in our politics today.  On the right are furious populists, on the left socialist misfits.  Neither represent a majority.  As always, the center is the key.

Kasich and Rubio are mainstream conservatives.  Kasich’s record and Rubio’s rhetoric line up quite nicely.  Either of them will have natural appeal to the center, where elections are won.  Pundits worry that the Trump appeal to nativism will tarnish the Republican  brand.  Nonsense.  The winning candidate will be the brand.

While the Republicans will not nominate an extremist, the Democrats will.  Like Wilson before him, Obama has taken his party far to the left, too far.  The political pendulum is just starting to swing to the right, but Obama will insist that the Democrat candidate run for his third term.  Hillary, Biden and Sanders will comply with his wishes, or lose the essential black vote.  This is a recipe for disaster.

Centrist voters will have a clear choice.  A center-right conservative vs. a hard core leftist.

And hard core the Democrat will be, we are assured of that.  All the whack jobs on the left are becoming more shrill and militant.  The D’s have embraced Black Lives Matter, and there’s a great chance that could blow up in their face.  They kowtow to the earth-worshiping eco-nazis, who are wildly out of touch with the American people.  They cater to pro-abortion extremism, cheerfully celebrate the war on men, and sympathize with the mentally ill who complain of micro-aggressions.  Gay marriage is the tip of the iceberg of the homosexual agenda.  They will always want more.  They want their lifestyle openly celebrated, and the D’s will gladly comply.  The war on coal is just the start of a campaign to seize control of the energy industry.  They want to eliminate fossil fuels, and to hell with the consequences.  The war on white and Asian men that masquerades under the euphemisms of affirmative action and disparate impact widens in scope.  HUD plans to disrupt residential areas it deems too “homogeneous”, as in affluent white.  The smothering regulatory state marches inexorably on, laying waste to private industry.  I could go on, but this gets depressing after a while.

The point is that the Democrat is going to have a hell of a time appealing to the center, which Kasich or Rubio can do effortlessly.

On a website supposedly devoted to the promotion of Article V, I talk a lot about the Presidential race.  That’s because I’m not convinced we’ll get to 34 this year.  If Maryland rescinds, which I expect, we’d need Virginia, which is going to be a very tough nut to crack.  So I expect we have to wait until after the 2016 elections.  As Thomas Edsall pointed out in the NYT, straight ticket voting is on the rise.  And no Party has won the White House while it lost a majority in the Senate since 1860.  We need a Republican Senate, and a Republican President will virtually guarantee it.   We also need more targets.  We want  the Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota and Washington legislatures under complete Republican control.  Recently a party’s performance in a Presidential contest closely tracks its success in state legislative races.  This is new.  If I’ve got this election figured out correctly, Kasich or Rubio will win in a landslide and we get at least a couple new targets, giving us everything we need to get to 34 in 2017.

The pendulum swings, the tide surges, and we get our turn in the saddle.  It won’t last forever.  You shouldn’t plan on more than eight years.  What matters is what you do with the opportunity.  Make changes that are permanent and fundamental.  Like a supply side BBA, for openers, with other Article V reforms to follow.   Harding and the Republicans turned this country around after the 1920 landslide, but it was a temporary victory, entirely washed away by the New Deal.  We want our win in 2016 to be a watershed.

That’s what Article V is all about.

When I think about the February 9th do or die primary I remember John McCain eight years ago.  After a shiny start, the bloom faded and he was carrying his bags on commercial flights.  Probably flying coach.  I wasn’t there, but it always seemed to me that his performance in those town meetings was his saving grace.  And that’s because he’s a regular guy.

I approached Sen. Fred Thompson at the ’96 Convention.  He looked at me like I was a turd.  Earlier that year, in Anchorage, I was at a Republican event where McCain was going to speak on behalf of his Presidential candidate, Phil Gramm.  I walked up and sat next to him, and welcomed him to Alaska.  He was very pleasant, like a regular guy.  We had a little talk.

He’s that kind of guy.  And I think that kind of guy will do well in New Hampshire.  I don’t think Bush 3 is that kind of guy.  Bush 2 had a little of that in him, but not little brother.

I guess I was wrong about his ad buy.  It’s already started, and may account for a poll bump in New Hampshire.  I assume they’re good ads, he should get a bump.  But I can’t see TV advertising being the critical factor.  They all cancel each other out.  You have to be in the game, but that’s not where it’s won or lost.  I think that decision is made in those town meetings.  And how well you do has a lot to do with what kind of guy you are.

JR Dunn, my AT editor, was off yesterday, so my piece will be up tomorrow.  I’ve got another one ready to go the following day.  There just happened to be some things I wanted to write about.  There’s a lot going on.  Six months from now things will be a lot simpler. Not that they’re that complex now.  There are just a lot of distractions.

I never met JFK, but I shook his hand.  In the fall of 1960 I read in the paper that he’d be traveling on a whistle stop campaign in Northern California, and that there’d be a stop in Pittsburgh.  I was in Pleasant Hill, about fifteen miles away, so I got a ride over there and figured out where the train was going to stop, and where I would need to be in order to be standing directly under the platform at the back of the rear car.  I had it figured right, and when the train stopped I was in the front row, and center.  I didn’t like Kennedy.  I was a Republican.  But I came to look him over.  He bent down, and shook my hand, and looked me in the eye.  For a second or two our eyes met.  I was staring at him pretty hard, and he grinned a little bit.  He had a real friendly expression on his face, and his eyes were bright blue.

He was just a cool guy.

Don Juan of Florida is to be congratulated for having predicted the Soviet incursion into Syria.  He did it in front of 23  million people at the second debate.  Impressive.  But I don’t recall him telling us what to do next.

If I’m right, and it boils down to Kasich, Rubio and Cruz, there could be a Republican divide on foreign policy.  The Young Guns are hard core, and want to kick ass.  They seem like they’re itching to take on the Iranians, ISIS and Assad, and are upset with the Russians for butting in.  If you want to be cynical you could say they’re competing in the Adelson primary.  I’m fairly confident Kasich will take a less bellicose line, but we’ll have to see.

I think they’re wrong on the substance and wrong on the politics.  The Donald may be a bit of a buffoon, but he’s seen a quarter century of life that the youngsters haven’t.   As have I, and has Kasich, for that matter.  Don Juan and the Parson were teenagers when the Cold War ended.  Not having lived through this period of history, they don’t fully appreciate it.  Russia remains a great power, and a nuclear one.  When Putin insists that we do not live in a unipolar world he’s telling us the truth.  So I did a piece on this subject for American Thinker which I’ll probably submit tomorrow.  Maybe a day later, since editor JR Dunn tells me my previously submitted and modified article should be out tomorrow.

Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations is a wonderful book, but it is not a book about geopolitics.  In that world, Islam is not important, because no Islamic country is a great power, and none will be.  If you think globally, you think of the balance of power between the most important countries in the world: the U.S., Russia, China, Germany and Japan, with Germany a proxy for western Europe.  Even if Iran goes nuclear it will not be a great power.  Exhibits A and B: India and Pakistan.

Since no power on earth is presently a threat to our national security, we have no reason to go to war with any of the other four great powers. It would be madness.  None of the great powers seeks global hegemony.  Everyone understands we live in the 21st Century. We will fight to maintain the freedom of the sea, and the air, and space.  We are Americans, and we will not tolerate being cooped up in the Western Hemisphere.

But we will not fight for commerce.  The only reason we would join the Germans against the Russians, or the Japanese against the Chinese, is commercial.  We will not see American kids get killed to protect a country that refuses to protect itself.

As Americans, we’re spoiled.  We can drive from sea to shining sea, and see nothing but fellow Americans along the way.  Canadians are just Americans Lite, and we’ve gotten along with Mexico ever since we grabbed half their country.  We’ve never had anything to worry about.  Russia, and the other powers have had a different historical experience. We need to understand and respect their point of view.

So foreign policy may be a bit of a wild card in the nomination fight.  But it’s very difficult for me to see how it helps the Democrats.  Unless the Republican is so hawkish that it unnerves a public very reluctant for war.  I guess that could happen.  That would really be dumb.

Babbie put a gun to my head and we saw The Intern with Robert DeNiro, a geezer chick flick.  Its a gender role reversal movie, where this wonder woman, an internet retail innovator, has this weakling for a husband who stays home and acts as mommy to their three year old daughter.  I think it’s got to be a parody.  They can’t be serious.  And then she makes a move on him in bed, and he turns away and says he’s had a rough day, and I laugh out loud.  This is hilarious.  But nobody else is laughing.  I’m wrong.  It’s not a parody.  They’re sympathizing with this sorry son of a bitch.  The whole movie was an advertisement for role reversal.  Stay at home dads are special, just like moms are.

They want us to think this is the new normal.  We’re not that dumb.