Reflections on American Politics
False dichotomy.— Is the American left using the January 6 Capitol riot as an opportunity to smear all “conservatives” (i.e., non-leftists) as domestic terrorists or insurrectionists? Yes. Does this mean the January 6 Capitol riot never happened, was no big deal, was a false flag operation, or was just a patriotic protest misrepresented by the media? No.
By analogy, a black man who murders a white man, or vice versa, may be cited by dishonorable people as evidence against the murderer’s entire race. This is false and reprehensible — but it does nothing to change the core fact that the man whose act is being cynically exploited through misinterpretation is a murderer.
On January 6th, 2021, a very large crowd of angry protesters descended on the U.S. Capitol. Some were there with violent intentions; some were not. But all were there for one essential reason, one defining cause: They were absolutely certain that the 2020 election had been the grandest political fraud in U.S. history, and that Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, had been the true winner, and was therefore the true president. Why did they believe this? For one reason only, namely that Donald Trump had told them so, incessantly and unequivocally, every day since 2:00am Eastern Time on election night. And why did Trump believe it? He didn’t. Or, to be generous, we might say he almost believed it, or was desperate to believe it, because it falls outside the inner fantasy life of that pathetically unmanly megalomaniac to accept even the possibility that he might have lost, i.e., that a majority of the electorate might really have rejected him.
He told them he, and therefore they, had been defrauded, so they believed it. They approached the Capitol as though participating in their very own Bastille Day. When the more enthusiastic of the crowd stormed the barricades and marched into the seat of government, many of them were shouting “Hang Mike Pence!” directly revealing the essence of this event: It was all about stopping Pence from doing his constitutional duty. Why? Because Trump had told them, repeatedly, that Pence had both the authority and the obligation to do what Pence had neither the authority nor the obligation to do, and further that Pence was to be condemned as a coward and a traitor if he refused to overturn the official election results on Trump’s thoroughly unjustified command. And throughout the event itself, Trump had hours to stem the tide with just a few properly chosen words. Instead, he was, shall we say, actively passive in doing nothing, or expressing sympathy with the rioters in a manner that implied support for their actions.
Does that mean all conservatives, or even all Republicans, are guilty of seeking to overturn election results or “undermine democracy” without evidence or logic? No. But it does mean that many of Trump’s supporters are indeed guilty of that, some of them in the most direct and criminal ways. And, given the reason for these people’s twisted belief and behavior, it is most fair to say that Trump above all is guilty of attacking the rule of law in the most direct and morally culpable way.
Beer Guts.– Is there a more ridiculous, laughable character in Washington today than Senator Ted Cruz? Every so often, he pops up with another pathetic soundbite moment, berating someone at a senate hearing or attempting to be witty on Twitter. Since his ignominious fall from his political zenith as the man Donald Trump dubbed “Lyin’ Ted,” and whose wife’s face Trump publicly ridiculed (early in 2016), to the man who pitched a tent (a little later in 2016) to be first in line to interview for a job as Trump’s most submissive shoeshine boy, Cruz has grown ever more embarrassing in his attempts to ingratiate himself to someone else’s personality cult.
A devoted beer drinker through and through: uncontrollably fat, uncontrollably needy, uncontrollably desperate to find drinking friends, no matter how far he has to lower himself or how many rounds he has to buy to stay connected to the group upon which he depends to shield himself from knowing eyes.
Advice to Ted Cruz: The first step is admitting you have a problem.
Death by Dumbness.— In 2000, America elected a president whose own supporters even had to admit, albeit affectionately, was linguistically and intellectually challenged. “He’s a basically decent man,” they said, as a means of persuading themselves that somehow it was acceptable to have such a weak and silly mind in the Oval Office. And in the aftermath of the two-term culture-destroying mess of the Clinton presidency, the “decent man” argument for George W. Bush actually carried some weight.
In 2008, America elected a graduate school Marxist of the most banal and self-serving kind, a man of no significant accomplishments whose only “writings” of note were his two autobiographies, a man who had been propped up and protected by Chicago communists and Republican establishmentarians alike for years, a man who spoke publicly of “the Navy Corpse-men” as though he were not even aware of the word “corps,” although he was commander-in-chief of the U.S. military at the time.
In 2016, America elected one of the most infamously stupid, vain, and laughable pop celebrities in their nation’s history, a man whose every word and deed screams “Fraud” and “Ignoramus” at equal decibel levels, and a man who, by means of arguably the most ridiculous personality cult the world has ever seen, almost singlehandedly ushered in the period of extreme tribalism, revolutionary leftism, and radical populism that is disintegrating the final remnants of civil order as we speak. (And remember that Trump actually lost the popular vote in 2016 — to arguably the most unqualified, hateful, hated, and shamelessly dishonest candidate in U.S. presidential history.)
In 2020, as though to correct all those sins by reducing their sinfulness through parody, the American people elected a man who already spoke at forty as though he had dementia (not to mention Hillary Clinton’s sense of the truth), but who is now literally, clearly, in the throes of senility approaching eighty, and whose words and signatures are all but physically manipulated into place by competing bands of Marxists and global corporatists.
Could a once-great republic do any more to prove that it has faded into moral and intellectual oblivion? From decent but dumb, to conniving but dumb, to indecent, conniving, and dumb, to a ventriloquist’s dummy, in just twenty breathtakingly self-destructive years.
