Miscellaneous

Bob Clarke was a political consultant from Chicago that Alaska Governor Jay Hammond hired in 1978 to work on his reelection campaign.   Bob came up, looked at Hammond’s approval ratings, and asked him “What have you been doing to the people of this state?”  It looked grim, but Bob got to work.  In truth, he was  a political hit man.

If you’re going to take a politician down, you have to have the goods on him.  With Hammond’s opponent, former Governor and former Interior Secretary Walter F. Hickel, that was the easy part.  He was a top filer, and in Alaska, not that long ago, if you filed a claim on top of another man’s, you were liable to get shot.

Bob became Hammond’s closest friend in politics, the editor of his autobiography, “Tales of Alaska’s Bush Rat Governor”, his director of communications and his body man.  Bob would have taken a bullet for Hammond.

I was a volunteer on that campaign, and helped Bob out on one of the hits he did on Hickel.  Nobody else had the balls to do it, and it made me one of Bob’s best friends.

In 1982, when I was elected to the State Senate, it didn’t make sense for me to move my young family to Juneau for the legislative session.  These things lasted four or five months, but I was trying to save as much money as I could.  Bob offered me a spare room in his house rent free, and that’s where I stayed almost the whole eight years I spent in the legislature.

Bob was divorced, and liked his whiskey.  I drank a lot of beer, and we eventually got pretty tight with each other.  Bob told me the secrets of his trade, and these were lessons I’ve used for my entire political career.  We began working as a real team in 1986, doing a second hit job on Hickel, and we did some really awesome hits together.

When I say you need to have the goods on your opponent, I’m talking about:

1. Stupidity.  Sometimes your opponent is a moron.
2. Corruption.  There are dirty politicians, believe it or not.
3. Ignorance.  Candidates for public office are required to know at least a few things.  Some don’t.
4. Falsehoods.  It’s true.  Politicians lie.
5. Immorality.  Sexual deviants are more common than you think.

To perform a political hit is to use this information to take down your opponent.  This is where you have to use your imagination. Bob taught me all the various techniques.  This is the sort of tactic we’d use:

1.  Full page newspaper ad
2.   A broadsheet, spelling out the attack in detail, and mailed to voters.
3. Press Conference
4. Press Release
5. Debate question

I may very well do a hit as long as I’m in Montana.  I’d like to pass my skills along to my sons, and they’ll both have a ringside seat.  I’ve got the goods on this guy, that’s no problem.  What do I do with it?

Maybe social media.  My son’s company spends all of its very limited advertising budget on social media, so maybe that’s the new thing.  Old foxes sometimes have to learn new tricks.

This guy may go down on his own, and I wouldn’t be needed.  But if he’s a serious threat to win, he’ll have to be taken out.

By the way, this is not dirty politics.  Bob and I always told the truth, and we obeyed every law.

Dirty politics is described in the title to this article in Breitbart Tech, “Google search manipulation can swing nearly 80 percent of Undecided Voters”.  

What Google is doing is dirty politics.  Somebody needs to do a hit on them.  I’m going to think about that.

 

I was in high school when I realized that complete ignorance is no bar to strongly held opinion.

With broken ribs, I have to be careful what I watch on TV.  Case in point  —  I saw a commentator talk about Trump’s agenda being stalled if Democrats retake the House.  I started laughing so hard I almost fell out of my chair.  It’s not stalled now, with Ryan as Speaker?

If Trump or another Republican wants to win in 2020, the very best outcome is the return of nitwit Nancy as House Speaker.  Victory would be virtually guaranteed.

Running against the prospect of this addled old leftist back in power doesn’t really work.  Memories are short.  But put her and her Congressional Black Caucus buddies in actual positions of power,  and we’ll all get to see examples of new left thinking in action.  Political winners like reparations and Black Lives Matter, open borders, climate hysteria, the radical LGBT agenda, the anguish of the snowflakes, and absurd Russian conspiracies will be front and center.

This is how you win elections.  The Democratic presidential candidate will be tarred by association with these loons.  Even more so because the nominee will surely be the first avowedly socialist presidential candidate of a major party in American history.

Dat brier-patch look pretty good to this old rabbit.

 

April 24, 1184 B. C. is the traditional date of the fall of Troy to the Greeks.  Troy was one of the great cities of the Hittite Empire, and its fall brought that empire to an end.  True Greek freedom, and the beginnings of western civilization, were now free to develop.

Hittites were Indo-European invaders of modern Turkey, and when they went to war with the Greeks their king had become a despot.  The kingship had become hereditary, and the ruler was called My Sun by the people.  He was a full blown dictator, with the power of military command, judge, and high priest embodied in one ruler.  As long as Troy and the Hittites kept their power, the ancient Greeks were confined to the Aegean Sea.  That ended some 3200 years ago.

650 years later, in 512 B. C., the Persian king Darius I invaded Greece, and resumed the war between Asia and the despotic east against the freedom of Europe and the west.  Like the Hittite kings, the rule of Darius was absolute, and he believed he had the divine right to rule the world.  This war of civilizations finally concluded with the triumph of Alexander the Great at Granicus in 334 B.C.,  not far from ancient Troy.

So today is a day to celebrate our western heritage, as Presidents Trump and Macron, of France, did this morning in a moving ceremony at the White House.  France is indeed our oldest alliance, and our relationship with them has always been special.

Today is also a day to celebrate the return of the black America I knew as a young man, growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Back then, the black family was alive and well, and so was black American society.  I actually knew more about blacks than most white boys, because I respected them as fellow Americans, and I wasn’t afraid of them.   Their culture was black American culture, with its own distinct flavor.   Back then, we all loved their music, and their magnificent athletes, and their own flavor of Christianity.

The new black renaissance is led by a black woman named Candace Owens, now capably supported by Kanye West.  One of its leading exemplars is the hero of the Waffle House shooting, James Shaw Jr.  At the White House ceremony I saw young black Americans in uniform, proudly representing their country.   They’re part of it, too.  And there were black school children there as well, excited by the pomp and circumstance of American patriotism.

As long as we’re celebrating the fall of Troy, let’s raise a glass to the imminent demise of the evil Google Empire, with its arrogance, tax avoidance and censorship of political speech.  Its business model is the invasion of privacy, and we have finally got their number.  They have claimed that don’t be evil is a core value, but they really don’t even know what evil is, or who they are.

They are some of the finest engineering minds of our time, but that’s all they are  — engineers.  They don’t even know what words mean.  When they read, “In the beginning was the Word….”  they are as clueless as a small child.  Their fall will be celebrated by humanists across the globe.

On a personal note, today I at last begin to try and resolve a family tragedy that has haunted us for years.  On this special day, when Troy fell.

 

There’s always been something a little “off” about author and talk show host Mark Levin.  He wrote “The Liberty Amendments”, which promote Article V, but he’s never lifted a finger to help the Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force.  This is the group which has for years been pushing the BBA, the only serious Article V political effort in the country.  Instead he supports Mark Meckler, a political huckster pushing the hopeless “Convention of States” approach.

I’d listen to his show occasionally, because I think he’s better informed than people like Limbaugh and Hannity.  But he’s perpetually pissed off, and it soon gets old.  So what gives with this guy?

Mark Steyn explains it all in this revealing, and damning, article.  Steyn is flat out brilliant, and I hope he talks about all this on Tucker Carlson’s show tonight.  All conservative activists should tune in.