GUNS ( Part 6: Defund the Police and Defend Yourself )

Mixed Messages in the Era of Gun Control

But let’s take this one step further.  We have established that the cops have a 6.5% hit rate in armed encounters.  If we are seeking to defund the police and effectively reduce their presence, one can logically assume that crime will increase. Nature abhors a vacuum.  Without law enforcement, the citizenry will have to rely on themselves for security.  And nobody drives that point home better than a democrat administration in the White House, whose anti-police and anti-gun rhetoric has driven gun sales through the roof.  Ironically fueled by government stimulus checks, the FBI broke its record for background checks for gun sales, and concealed carry permits in March. According to Forbes, “background checks for gun purchases and other firearms related actions totaled 15.96 million in the first four months of 2021”. And since the start of the pandemic “more than 8.4 million Americans have purchased guns for the first time”.  Gun manufacturer Sturm Ruger reported a “50% spike in quarterly sales and more than doubled its profit.” So Mr. Biden, America is listening and responding appropriately to secure their safety.   So here’s the dilemma: if more Americans are forced to rely on firearms for there own security while the government reduces our police presence, how does that mesh with the government simultaneously seeking to restrict the citizen’s access to a firearm? And here’s where the statistics become very inconvenient.  If law enforcement, trained professionals are scoring only a 6.5% hit rate on assailants, how exactly will the relatively untrained citizen score in a similar situation? The Biden Administration seeks to impose a ban on “assault weapons”, an ill-defined construct that lumps the AR-15 sporting rifle into that category, a rifle that accounted for 61% of all civilian rifle sales in 2016 according to CNN. There are more than 15 million AR-15 rifles in the hands of American citizens today. So how is such a popular firearm that even CNN states was “designed for close, confusing combat”, an apt description for say, a home invasion, deemed unfit for civilian use? Without launching into that argument, we all know why. It has been the weapon of choice in certain high profile mass shootings and serves as the most effective poster child for the narrative of not allowing a “military style weapon designed to kill people “ in the hands of the public.  It’s modular, it’s ugly, it looks evil, it’s black and that’s probably racist. It also serves as the “camel’s nose under the tent”, the observation that in other countries that have instituted all-encompassing gun bans, they started by demonizing one type of firearm, banning it in the name of public safety, only to incrementally expand their definition of what is “allowed” until they were all eliminated.  And the party of science is choosing to ignore the data.  The Clinton era assault weapon ban, misleadingly titled The Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, was a 10-year prohibition on the manufacture of certain semi-automatic firearms, ill-defined as “assault weapons”, as well as large capacity magazines greater than 10 rounds.  Despite notorious ant-gun Senator Diane Feinstein crowing that the 1994 ban was “effective at reducing crime”, the data is clear that the legislation resulted in no statistical change in criminal activity, or firearm homicides. In actuality, the homicide rate with firearms was less in the three years preceding the ban. Christopher Koper, a professor at George Mason University concluded “the ban did not appear to effect gun violence during the time it was in effect”.  Of course, good liberal that he is, he suggested, “it may have modestly reduced shootings had it been in effect for a longer period”.  May have.  Possibly. Just give it time.  Uh-huh.  But back to the premise at hand:  The government, who we have established is forcing us to fend for ourselves, is intent on eliminating the most popular rifle in America, popular due to it’s ease of use, customizable features, effective caliber, handling, manageable recoil and magazine capacity?  Which gun do the pros use, you know when the SWAT team shows up to clear the building?  I want that one. Why do I want a Kitchen-Aid mixer in my kitchen?  Because that’s the one the Cake Boss uses.  And yet, the government expects the citizen to be restricted in his choice of equipment, restricted in the number of rounds in his magazine and yet still have the skill to stop the threat, even when our professionals, armed with the best equipment, training and unlimited magazine capacity have shown that they only score a hit on their intended target 6.5% of the time.  So we are expected to perform better than the professionals, with less training and less rounds in the magazine.  You have to be kidding.  And the ten round magazine restriction, law already in most blue states, is creeping its way through Congress as we speak.  Going back to Sheriff Ken Campbell: “If armed with a firearm containing 16 rounds (15 round magazine plus one in the chamber)” statistically  “12-13 rounds will may miss the target entirely.  Of the 3-4 rounds that [score hits on] the attacker, none may be effective in immediately stopping the attack. If restricted to a 10-round magazine it’s likely that all 10 rounds may miss the target and the citizen will be “unable to stop the attack”.  Comments by liberal author Stephen King who said in 2013 “If you can’t kill a home invader with ten shots, then you need to go back to your local shooting range”, are totally out of touch with the reality of armed engagement.  But Sheriff Campbell astutely points out, “it’s not about hunting”.  Andy Cuomo infamously bellowed in his grating downstate accent: “No one needs 10 bullets to kill a deer”, while promoting banning magazines greater than 10 rounds for New York State’s preposterous SAFE Act.  Similarly Joe Biden latched on to the ridiculously unrelated hunting theme with this patronizing nonsense: “talk to responsible gun owners-they’ll tell you there’s no possible justification for having hundreds of rounds in a weapon.  What do you think the deer are wearing, Kevlar vests?”  No, Joe I don’t. But it’s unlikely that deer are going to break into my house. Besides, dummy, most high-powered rifle rounds will penetrate Kevlar…… providing you are able to hit it. Of course, the preposterous notion behind this whole magazine restriction nonsense is the assumption that the attacker, specifically those engaged in a mass shooting incident, can be stopped when they pause to reload. More hooey. Not only is it unlikely that the criminal will choose to adhere to your magazine restrictions, but Sheriff Boone showed in a live fire exercise that, even with a relatively unpracticed shooter, the difference between emptying two 15-round pistol magazines into a target and five 6-round magazines was somewhere on the order of four seconds.  With a seasoned shooter, this was reduced to less than two seconds. He placed a runner 25 feet from the shooter and had them speed towards the shooter when they perceived the shooter was engaged in a reload.  In none of the exercises was the runner able to reach the shooter before the reload was complete. You could argue that a potential hero could be closer or could surprise the shooter from cover, but that would require a lot of luck and a huge set of….intestinal fortitude.  Statistically, experts recommend running for the nearest exit, specifically advising, in order of preference, evacuation, barricade yourself, prepare for attack if cornered, distract the attacker, and lastly swarming the suspect with improvised weapons.  Doesn’t that sound appetizing? Unfortunately, there have been few instances where such a disarming has occurred, most notably the Tucson shooting incident where a 61 year-old woman managed to wrestle a magazine away from the shooter.  But in another high profile supermarket shooting, it appeared that two potential heroes lost their lives in an attempt to disarm the attacker.  It may actually be more dependent on assessing the skill of the attacker. And frankly, the government and the media shouldn’t be promoting this nonsense. Wait until he attempts to reload, then rush the attacker.  Seriously? But none of this would apply to a home invasion where we are right back to the statistics game.  If confronted with an attacker or, worse yet, multiple attackers in your home, with no means of egress, with the likelihood of you scoring less than 6.5% hits on your attacker, how many rounds do you want to have in your magazine?  And you have to assume that if the attacker is armed as well, it is unlikely that he is concerned about adhering to your state’s magazine capacity restriction laws.  Sheriff Campbell summed up his study best; “Proposed magazine bans are absurd.”   

No Free Lunch

If it were not for a violation of parliamentary procedure that voided its inclusion, we would be adding a new dimension to that old axiom, “there is no such thing as a free lunch.”

Hidden within the $1.9 Trillion Covid Relief Bill passed by the House resided yet another preposterous Democrat proposal to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.  Interesting in that a body of elected officials, the majority of whom have never worked in the private sector let alone ever run a business, are essentially telling business owners how to run their businesses.  Absurd. You should know if this indecent proposal was acted upon what the ramification would have been, who would be most adversely affected? The service industry, particularly restaurants that are currently reeling under the yoke of pandemic related shutdowns.  It would be,Welcome America, to the era of the 50-dollar sandwich.

 The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and has been the standard since 2009.  In the restaurant industry tipped workers, such as waitstaff and bartenders, may be paid a sub-minimum wage as low as $2.13 an hour.  

Appalling, shrieked the liberals! But little known is that if the employee fails to reach minimum wage with tip subsidy, the employer is required by law to make up the difference.  Granted, this can create a roller coaster of income troughs and valleys but servers fare well under this system. 

Mr. Swift’s college age nieces are known to bring home $800 a night on busy weekend shifts at more upscale establishments, and gentleman waiters at his white tablecloth haunts in the city have retired well to their lavish homes in seaside communities. And how much of this cash reward is actually reported on income tax returns or is subject to creative accounting?  Who wouldn’t enjoy a tax-free revenue stream? Not a bad deal.

The restaurant industry is not for the faint of heart, and proprietors operate on a slim profit margin.  Rent, insurance, licensing, equipment, food spoilage, and staff salaries all take a huge bite out of the bottom line. Throw in horrific hours of operation, dealing with a fickle public, and managing a staff of mostly twenty-something malcontents, and the risk often outweighs the benefit.  Once a restaurant gets past it’s first year in business, the failure rate tends to drop, but still, according to Cornell University, 26.15% will close their doors before their first anniversary.  The median lifespan of a restaurant startup with fewer than 5 employees based on US Bureau of Labor Statistics is 3.75 years.  According to Forbes, the larger the restaurant, the greater the chance of success, yet the failure rate overall in a CNBC study “seemed to settle at around 60%.”  Yet, here we are in the midst of a pandemic where 1 in 5 restaurants have closed their doors, many forever, average revenue for those that remain open is down as much as 20%, and our government is seeking to increase their overhead.  Genius. 

As the owner of Joe’s Diner in Phoenix observed in a Wall Street Journal article: “Dang if they don’t kick us when we are down.”

The WSJ reports that the wage increase would have the effect of increasing direct labor costs by $5 to $10 an hour. 

Consequences of such an increase in operating costs would result in more restaurant closures, or at the minimum, cost cutting measures that strike at the largest operating cost, and terminate workers.  Again, in that same WSJ article, the CBO reports that raising the federal minimum wage could deliver raises for up to 27 million workers, lifting 900,000 of them above the poverty threshold but at the cost of 1.4 million jobs. And what about other effects downstream?  Will restaurant patrons respond to higher prices on the menu by lowering the traditional tip scale? And armed with the knowledge that the full time waitstaff is being paid at a rate that equals $30000 a year, will diners feel less inclined to fork over an additional 18% in gratuity, especially after being gouged for that 8 ounce sirloin? So add it up: increased cost of items on the menu, and a tip inflated by that increased tab will result in a reduced tip or, here’s a novel idea: let’s stay in.  Reduced traffic, reduced revenue, closed business. And what about the quality of service? With a guaranteed income, and potentially facing a public less likely to reward you for merely doing your job, will the quality of service decline proportionately now that the server isn’t required to grovel for tips? And how about the other long term workers on your payroll that have been loyal and worked their way up to a higher salary? How is it fair that a new worker will start at $15 an hour when the old battle-axe, who has been toiling in the trenches for years working her way up to $10 an hour, will receive the same $15 an hour as the new recruits? She’s going to want more and she has a valid argument in her favor.  Ka-ching!  Did you hear that?  That’s the sound of your profit margin getting squeezed.

We can see what the result would be, like all the other socialist proposals coming out of Washington: we will become Europe, where dining out is a rare event, the dominion of the wealthy, and an expensive proposition at that. The statistics will worsen, where larger restaurants will stay afloat, but the smaller mom-and-pop eateries, the places that are affordable, unique in offering what is often adventurous ethnic cuisine, the places that give a neighborhood charm, will become few and far between.  And ironically, who owns these smaller start-ups? Immigrants and people of diverse backgrounds, precisely the folks that Democrats claim to protect.  NPR interviewed an Hispanic restaurant owner in Boston yesterday, unable to make ends meet in this era of pandemic- forced shutdowns and reduced in-person dining capacity, and now expected to face a $15 minimum wage: “I can’t charge $50 for a sandwich”. We came close to that litany becoming a reality! 

The Point

So what are we to make of all this, my previous six posts: David Frum, a Republican, espousing his views on dismantling the Republic. Arguing to install mob rule as the new order, lamenting the fact that if we had only abolished those inconvenient impediments to majority rule like the Senate, the judicial branch and the Electoral College, we could have installed the right choice, America’s choice to the presidency. And that would have been Hillary. You can’t be serious. And Joe Walsh, the conservative, afflicted by all accounts with Trump derangement syndrome, reversing his course mid-career to pare his conservativism down to a “fiscal-only” status, while supporting the Democrat party line on social issues, including support for Joe Biden. How would losing those three Supreme Court appointments have satisfied the Republican base or supported conservative values moving forward? Is there any true conservative that would trade those three seats for four years of Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office, which, by all accounts, would have been Obama 3.0 much like what we are seeing now from the Biden Administration? The short answer is no.  David Frum is no more a Republican than Joe Walsh is a conservative. And by identifying as such, they are merely providing the leftist media with trained seals to roll out and perform on command as an example of what they would like all Republicans to be: progressives. So we should take this media exercise for what it is: yet another example of an attack from the left with a new tactic, a new spin.  This time it’s a trusted voice whispering in your ear, one of your own leading you basket of deplorables to the promised land and enlightenment. A brief review of Mr. Frum’s writings would lead anyone to conclude he is certainly not a Republican.  At best he’s a RINO and he barely qualifies for that. And regarding Joe Walsh, bitter over the lack of Republican Party support, enraged that over 50% of registered Republicans would support Trump as a third party candidate, is no more than an opportunist in seeing a social liberal stance as a way to advance his career in the media in a progressive market. He will certainly not endear himself to conservatives with his vehement anti-Trump rants and violent swerve to the left on social issues. We see you for what you are.  

 

 

A Message For Messrs Frum and Walsh

 Hopefully you have read my previous posts: A message to David Frum and Joe Walsh of which I spoke: Democrats vote en bloc, they stick to their talking points and they never, ever criticize other Democrats.  And when was the last time you witnessed the democrats engaging in educating rather than riling up their base while engaging in respectful debate with conservatives? Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and that cast of political savages treating their conservative colleagues with respect? By respectful, I have to assume you mean like the way Democrats respectfully treated Brett Kavanaugh? Talk about an alternate reality.  So exactly how did this go down, Fred, Joe?  Did The Atlantic and TIME magazines offer you blood money to sucker punch Rush on his deathbed while giving you an opportunity to plug your respective magazine and talk show? Sure looks like it.

 

A David Frum Ache

As you have no doubt gathered by now Mr Frum of The Atlantic fame had struck a nerve with me. My diatribe continues: Although he concedes that the American system of government has evolved, and by evolved he means it has been diluted to his satisfaction, Mr. Frum levels the accusation that it remains anti-majoritarian, distrusting the “unpropertied” majority. Sticking in his craw was a rant by Utah Senator Mike Lee who last year tweeted out “We’re not a democracy…Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish.  Rank democracy can thwart that”. Mr. Frum belittles Mr. Lee for reducing Madisonian theory into “so few characters”, not that Twitter allows more, but the fact that we are indeed a Constitutional Republic with safeguards to preserve us from mob rule tends to enrage the left when it becomes inconvenient.  Say, when Trump was elected after Hillary captured the popular vote. Yet the fear of mob rule, or tyranny of the masses, has been an essential tenet in American government and is not strictly an American born concern, nor the exclusive property of the framers.  Alexis de Toqueville, a French aristocrat and political scientist, studied the American experiment and concluded “a decision which bases its claim to rule upon numbers, not a rightness of excellence” is indeed an “abandonment of rationality”.  Similar arguments by Herbert Spencer in 1851 concluded that “there is evidently a limit to the power of the majority” and John Stuart Mill in 1859 who stated that there “is an inherent weakness to majority rule in which the majority of an electorate pursues exclusively its own objectives at the expense of minority factions”. Even Abraham Lincoln, recently hijacked by the left, reacted to incidents of mob mentality: “Having ever regarded government as their deadliest bane, they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation”.  He went on: “when the “mobocratic spirit” takes root among good men, government may then be effectually broken down and destroyed”. Never violate the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others”.  The “Penman of the Constitution”, statesman Gouverneur Morris said “I see with fear and trembling that we may be under the worst of all possible dominions….the dominion of a riotous mob”. Black Lives matter protesters and Pennsylvania board of elections, take note. So in essence, our founders were “threading the needle between liberty and order” based on their learned observations of history in Europe where governments began as monarchies or dictatorships which, in cases where they evolved into democracies, were subject to the fluctuations and vagaries of mob rule which ultimately devolved into governments run by monarchs and dictators in an attempt to restore order.  Madison himself warned in the Federalist No. 51 of the inherent dangers of “tyranny of the majority”.  And in a quote perhaps attributed to Ben Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner”. “But it takes Mr. Frum three pages before the point of this exercise rears its ugly head: Donald Trump.  Mr. Frum is consumed by Trump.  He rails against the fact that Trump was elected with only 46.1 percent of the national vote stating he “was elected not by the preferences of the American people but by the anti-majoritarian mechanics of the Electoral College”that “installed a flimflam man in the Oval Office”.   There you have it. A Flimflam man.  Really? He goes on to use everything from the insurrection on the Capitol to the repeal of Obama’s DACA executive order and rescinding of Obama’s joining the Paris Accord, which imposed crippling green regulations on American industry, as evidence of our poorly crafted government that allows the Senate to be controlled by a minority that represents 41 million less people than the majority.  This flawed government is what he claims forced Obama to resort to the pen to save us. And “control” is perhaps a misrepresentation.  The Senate minority has the ability to block legislation but that is certainly not putting them in control. The system is in place to foster bipartisanship, compromise and to prevent the majority from ramming through blatantly one-sided legislation laden with pork.  But you know that, Mr. Frum, the Democrats do the same damned thing when they are in the minority.  It’s apparently only inconvenient when the other side does it.  And glossing over these topics you use as evidence, which are themselves fodder for a hundred posts, is insulting to your audience. Or more likely, just preaching to the choir. Where is DACA supported by a majority of Americans? 

Mr. Frum

 I'm back at Mr. Frum. Under the title, “The Founders were Wrong About Democracy” he states his case: “the authors of the Constitution feared mass participation would unsettle the government, but it’s the privileged minority that has proved destabilizing.”  There you have it, the buzzword of today: Privilege.  Noteworthy only in the fact that he didn’t tack “white” onto it, although that is the implication. He opens his article and peppers it repeatedly with quotes from the Founding Fathers to make his case, the first from Madison: the mass of people would be susceptible to fickleness and passion, who labour under all the hardships of life and would secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings such that the major interest might under sudden impulses be tempted to commit injustice on the majority”.  His conclusion, obvious from the start and tainted through the prism of today’s equality politics, is that wealth and property is concentrated in an elite minority and the Founding Fathers saw to it that it would stay there, rather than being equitably distributed to the masses, by rigging our constitutional form of government.  Taking it one step further, he accuses the framers of erecting governmental obstacles, a “necessary fence against impetuous councils”.  What are those barriers? The Senate, “an elite few serving longer terms”, the federal judiciary, “confirmed by the Senate and serving for life” and of course the Electoral College, an “indirect election of the president”.  Well, if you put it that way, let’s just tear it all down. Right! And I'm still not quite through with Mr Frum; bear with me, more to follow.

Conservatives

 It has been a difficult few week for we conservatives.  Aside from having to endure the media continuing to fawn over Joe Biden, not to mention a couple of days of hearing them gush about Joe and Jill’s special romance in their endless effort to cast him as erudite and compassionate. While conservatives lost Rush Limbaugh, pioneer of conservative talk radio and by all accounts a humble and philanthropic man. Running contrary to the bluster of his radio personality, Mr. Limbaugh gave generously to charity yet preferred to remain anonymous in his giving rather than accept accolades.. But from TIME magazine to the reprehensible cast of sociopaths on The View, the leftist media wasted no time in savaging his legacy, unable to take him on in life, choosing instead to demean him in death.  Not nice. Rest in peace Rush, knowing you have spawned an entire medium for conservative expression and have given a generation light in the darkness of a progressive assault on our constitutional values. You will be sorely missed 

Other affonts we had to endured, an interesting tactic has emerged in the media.  In the past week two attacks on conservative values came to my attention: Not for the attacks themselves, as reprehensible as they may be, but from whence the attacks came.  They came from authors who both identify as Republicans or Conservatives. The first by The Atlantic where David Frum, a former speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration has produced a steady stream of anti-Trump vitriol, this one entitled “The Founders Were Wrong About Democracy”.  The second article appeared in TIME magazine on February 17, tastelessly published on the day of Rush Limbaugh’s death, entitled Rush Limbaugh Leaves Behind a Conservative Movement No Longer Interested in Truth. That Alarms Me as a Conservative.”  This one was written by former Republican congressman, Presidential candidate and radio talk show host Joe Walsh.  As you can see, I’m beyond just being alarmed! And know I'm not through with our Mr. Frum and his treacherous “ Conservatives,” stay tuned.

Jencompetent

 I will apologize in advance.  I have been watching the impeachment circus and I am particularly ornery.  Gird your loins.  

My, my, aren’t we living in a world of delicious contrasts?  I was watching yet another dull performance by the entirely lackluster Biden press secretary, Jen Psaki, when it suddenly occurred to me that she was reading her responses to questions from the press.  So much for spontaneity.

But for starters, who exactly is Jen Psaki? Well, of course, if you read the Biden Administration propaganda, she would be “leading the first all-female senior White House communications team in US history.”  First this, first that……so what.  You do recall that Trump had in his senior advisory staff more women, and women with children, than any previous administration.  No?  Well, that doesn’t surprise me.  So Biden had to resort to the one-upmanship game and have an “all female” team.  Bravo.  I wouldn’t expect a democrat administration to actually tout their qualifications.  And at the risk of wading into the most obvious of one-liners: perhaps they just had to pass the Biden sniff test.  Sorry.  So back to Jen: After graduating from the College of William and Mary she joined John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign as deputy press secretary.  She then served a short time as spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee before joining the 2008 Obama-Biden campaign as traveling press secretary, riding that horse through the 2012 reelection.  She served as deputy press secretary, then deputy communications director under Obama.  That’s more deputies than a season of Bonanza.  Google it, kids.  In 2011 she was senior vice-president and managing director at a Washington PR firm before returning to the Obama team.  She then served as spokesperson for the State Department under John Kerry then returned to the Obama White House as communications director for his final two years in office.  During those unfortunate years when Trump was in the White House actually accomplishing something, Jen made the predictable democrat leap to CNN as a political commentator and was vice-president for communications and strategy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace before leaving for the Biden –Harris transition team.  Deputy this, spokesperson that, vice-president of this, that and the other propaganda machine.  It’s all so fascinating.  Basically a whole lot of propagandizing at a podium, speaking policy for somebody else with little in the way of substance or education.  And about that turn at the podium, where it certainly appears to me that she is reading her responses to questions from the press.  Turns out: she is.  Apparently the Biden White House Press Office has, according to the New York Post, “come under fire for reaching out to Capitol reporters to quiz them about the questions they’ll ask during scheduled briefings.”  Now that would explain things.  It is glaringly obvious that after fielding a question, the appallingly unspontaneous redhead looks down at the podium and appears to be reading her response.  And she is not paraphrasing, nor is she consulting notes……Jen is actually reading the answer verbatim.  Didn’t Obama try this trick with the teleprompter?  Not cool.  After four long years of being subjected to the likes of Jim Accosta and “gotcha” journalism, we are now going to allow a democrat White House to tilt the playing field?  Of course we will, it’s a democrat in the White House. And when left to her own devices Jen, like her boss, has made it a habit of sticking her foot in her mouth.  She famously tweeted a reference to then Judiciary Committee chairman, Lindsay Graham as “LadyG”, an obvious homophobic slur, and disparagingly made reference to Trump’s Space Force, in levels of snark that a Republican spokesperson would never survive.  Her demeanor is haughty, dismissive, and largely unimpressive and her press conferences are for the most part uninformative as the fawning press serves her up softballs in the in this honeymoon period after the inauguration, a honeymoon Trump never experienced.  She also attacked “conservative Twitter”, as if there is such a thing, for pointing out the obvious fact that she repeatedly fails to answer reporter’s questions.  Townhall.com astutely pointed out that she repeatedly makes claims that she intends to “circle back” and eventually answer the question.  In one of the most convoluted attempts to explain incompetence ever, she stated: “I often note I’m going to circle back.  I hate to disappoint conservative Twitter, but I’m going to circle back on a number of things, as we often do directly.” Huh? A brief perusal of her press conference video, offered up by the Internet in this young Administration, yielded over 16 “circle back” references and, of course, she never does.   In Jenspeak this may simply be code for “I have absolutely no idea,” something McEnany and Huckabee would never have been allowed to get away with. 

Now back to my contrasts.  You do recall Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s press secretary?  The accomplished woman who the leftie lunatics are trying to cancel, trying to assure that she cannot find employment.  Ever.  Because she did her job and did it well. She faced the most aggressive, partisan, hostile reporters in the history of the White House Press Corps.  McEnany attended the Academy of the Holy Names, a college prep school for girls in Tampa, Florida.  She graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and studied abroad at Oxford.  She spent three years as a producer on the Mike Huckabee Show before matriculating into the University of Miami School of Law.  She then transferred to, and earned her law degree at Harvard Law School.  She interned for a few politicians, most notably George W. Bush in his 2004 campaign.   She also appeared on CNN where she was initially critical of Trump as being an “inauthentic” Republican before changing her opinion, a change the left leaning news outlets attributed to her seeing an opportunity to advance her career.  Regardless, the woman is accomplished.  In her position as press secretary, she was glib, poised, she parried attacks, and if she didn’t know the answer, she sifted through her notes and found it.  She never “circled back”.  Yet Yahoo News correspondent (I know, I laughed when I typed it) Brittany Shepherd called Jen Psaki “a refreshing change of pace” likening McEnany to “having a really bad ex-boyfriend”.  “We were getting essentially abused by Kayleigh for so long…. calling us fake news and inciting her followers and followers of the president to not only harass us online but obviously go to deadly ends from some people with that threat.”  Obviously? Deadly? Oh, boo-hoo.  So when a Trump administration representative stands up to your partisan attacks you claim you are being abused?  Suck it up.  You might be more concerned with your phenomenal lack of self-awareness in not recognizing the absurd double standard.  Simultaneously, while fending off the “deadly” name calling from the Trump White House, the press was busy lobbing the hard questions at then candidate Biden like: “What flavor milkshake did you get?” Conservative columnist Gavin Wax, meanwhile, was lambasted as being sexist when he compared McEnany to Psaki side-by-side stating: Stunning and smart press secretary Kayleigh vs. ugly to the bone Jen Psaki.  Kayleigh was TV ready every morning.  Psaki can’t bother to prep or do her makeup”.  Unfortunately the “ugly” comment overshadowed the fact that Psaki indeed does seem either unprepared or is clearly not smart enough to handle the position. Even the Daily Dot, as anti-Trump as any of these no-name leftist “news” outlets, called Psaki’s briefings “a rather staid affair”.  Staid, now that’s being kind.  

But why should Jen Psaki be forced to think on her feet, try to be captivating, or even to have a command of the subject matter when they’re gaming the system? The Biden Administration checked the box, and appearance is all that really matters, qualifications be damned.  And so the charade continues, this bizarre dance the democrats do with their complicit press, all the while pretending the game isn’t rigged in their favor, when in actuality the fix is in.  But what you should be most concerned with, is not that the game is fixed, but their arrogance in thinking we don’t know it’s fixed. 

First Amendment

 I surmise we all are reasonably familiar with our Constitution’s First Amendment-, the free speech amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. As, I’m sure some of us are, although less familiar with the Fourth Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. My point, if you are aware of these rights, and you should be, how sensitive are you to the fact they are being violated by our government on a regular basis. Attempted censorship of its citizens and unfavored media; it’s journalist, by a number of threatening actions including law suits and imprisonment. And, we have NSA unfettered and unbeknownst to us, having access to all our electronic communications. Don’t you find that scary, I do! Yes, I know these actions of theirs are masked in confusing, manipulative political subterfuge, but know they are censoring and invading our privacy-, counting on our seeing it for other than what it is. Are we really all that naïve, twisting in the wind of complacency in not knowing where all this is going? Our founding forefathers did! I can only hope in my impotence history will look back on this time and upon those who opposed this government tyranny and ushered in a renewal of our founding principles, as just another crises we Americans surmounted to preserve the integrity of our precious Democracy. Hope springs eternal.

Biden's Wealth

 Joe Biden, once the self-proclaimed poorest member of Congress. Middle Class Joe, a 47-year public servant who averaged no more than $100000 a year in his career in politics.  A man whose humble beginnings and hardscrabble life on the mean streets of Scranton, not to mention his face-off with Cornpop, is the stuff of legend.  In 2009, while serving as vice-president, CBS described Biden as “the least wealthy administrative figure” with an estimated net worth of only $27012.  But what attracted Mr. Swift to today’s topic was an article in the Bloomberg Report that praised Mr. Biden for his selection of……wristwatches, particularly the Rolex Datejust he wore at the inauguration.  The article glowingly goes on to state, “Biden has been known for wearing larger-sized steel sports watches.  He’s been seen, most famously, in his blue-dial Omega Seamaster Professional 300m with its distinctive bracelet.  He’s also worn a Seiko 7T32-6M90 Chronograph on the campaign trail as well as a 42mm Omega Speedmaster Professional “Moonwatch”.   Even GQ magazine, perhaps the most liberal leaning waste of trees imaginable, praised Biden as “an adroit watch collector”, praising his choice of the inexpensive Seiko as well as the pricier Omegas and a vintage Vulcain Cricket in his collection.  Yes, the Seiko is indeed inexpensive and despite its high bling quotient it is merely an affordable wristwatch that can be had for just over $100, perhaps purposely used on the campaign trail to further the Middle Class Joe narrative.  But wait a minute.  That Rolex he wore at the inauguration retails for $6300, and the Omega selections check in at $3600 for the Seamaster and $5400 for the Speedy.  Even the Vulcain, a vintage timepiece, costs $2400.  So good old Joe, the man of the people, has a watch collection that prices out in the range of $18000, and those are the timepieces we know of, hardly a collection affordable for the masses he claims to represent.  But let’s be clear, I don’t begrudge Mr. Biden his indulgence in haute horologie.  On the contrary, I praise him for his investment and interest in classic timepieces.  Where I’m going to ding him, however, is the hypocrisy in sporting such indulgence, and being praised for it in the media, when we just spent four years attacking Donald Trump for his wealth and extravagancies, seeking to dissect every component of his empire and attempting to release and scrutinize his tax returns.  Even on their way out the door, the media took a parting shot at Melania Trump for her selection of a pricey designer handbag. 

So in the interest of fairness let’s dive a little deeper into Joe’s empire.  Eric Trump infamously tweeted out “The salary of US Senator is $174000 per year.  This is Joe Biden’s house….seems legit (eye roll emoji).  This was accompanied by a photograph of the 10000 square foot DuPont mansion, an estate purchase by Biden in the mid-1970s supposedly for $185000.  Biden reportedly used the home as a base of operations for his 1988 presidential campaign referring to it as “The Station”.  But the media, particularly USA Today leapt to his defense claiming the home was scheduled for demolition and Biden purchased it and renovated it, and besides, he no longer owns it.  Some defense.  So this was indeed when Biden was still a Senator, scratching out a meager existence on his public servant salary and yet he was able to purchase what appears to be quite the extravagant property for only $185000 and he still had the funds to be able to renovate it.  Uh-huh.  Mr. Biden must be particularly handy.  If that 10000 square foot monstrosity was in such a state that it was scheduled for demolition and sold for a mere $185000, to anyone who has ever engaged in a home improvement project, I ask you how exactly was he able to afford that renovation?  I smell a rat. And as far as the defense that he doesn’t own the property anymore, that is indeed the case.  After living in the home for some 20 years, he sold it for $1.2 Million to none other than John Cochran III, the vice-chairman of MBNA, the largest employer in Delaware.  You know MBNA, the credit card company that retained then 21-year old Hunter Biden as a consultant for an undisclosed sum during the same period of time that Senator Joe Biden supported legislation promoted by the credit card industry and opposed by consumer groups, according to CBS News. Yeah, that MBNA.  And as reported by BPR Business and Politics, shortly after the home sale MBNA executives “contributed generously to Biden’s campaign in a series of coordinated donations that sidestepped the contribution limits by the company’s PAC.”   MBNA employees “poured more than $200000 into Biden’s senate campaigns over two decades making the credit card company Biden’s largest source of campaign money.”  Further defense by USA Today’s fact checkers went on to declare that the Internet attacks on Mr. Biden, stating that he owns four properties, are not true.  As you may recall, Trump repeated the accusation in the presidential debates.  But, according to USA Today, he only owns two.  And what two properties are those? According to the Daily Times, his primary estate in “pricey Greenville and his 6-bedroom vacation house near Cape Henlopen State Park”.  Well that seems reasonable doesn’t it?  But let’s be more specific.  The four-acre lakefront Greenville property outside of Wilmington, was reportedly purchased in 1996 for an “estimated” $350000.  Biden then built a 6500 square foot residence now estimated to be worth $3 million. Once again, don’t let the media blur the timeline.  Biden purchased this property and built a luxurious residence on it in 1996 when he was still a Senator making $133600 per year.  And the beach house, with “ocean views and multiple outdoor decks, that backs up to Henlopen State Park,” coincidentally land that Joe Biden helped return to federal status, was acquired in 2017 and was purchased for $2.75 million, although USA Today defends the accusations of the pricey land acquisition as now only estimated to be worth $1.9 million. Only. Additionally, Joe also rented a $5 million 12000 square foot home in the upscale neighborhood of McLean, Virginia after his vice-presidency for $20000 per month. Disturbingly, this tony neighborhood is called home by many of our elected officials.  Allow me to digress but how exactly does that work on their $174000 a year salaries?  McLean obviously must have low-income housing. But USA Today and multiple mainstream media outlets go on to rationalize this extravagant lifestyle by stating that Joe no longer earns a Senator’s salary and in fact hasn’t since assuming the office of the Vice-president in 2009 when his salary jumped to $10 million from speaking engagements and book deals, leaving him with a current net worth estimated to be $9 million.  That’s correct.  Joe Biden, who can barely string a sentence together, was reportedly paid $10 million for speaking. 

So aside from the mathematically impaired and those prone to believe the nonsense spewed out by the mainstream media, this all sounds just a tad sketchy.  And what dated house basement was Joe sitting in for his presidential campaign that was repeatedly described by the media as a “modest A-frame? How exactly did Joe Biden purchase and renovate a 10000 square foot mansion in the 1970s on his meager Senator’s salary? And how was he worth an estimated $27012 in 2009 and yet in 1996 he was able to purchase 4 acres of lakefront property and build a residence worth an estimated $3 million? And let’s not forget the swarmy MBNA dealings when Hunter was paid as a consultant while Senator Joe was supporting legislation to prevent consumers from declaring bankruptcy when crippled with credit card debt.  That legislation, with the support of Obama, eventually passed.  According to Politico, in 2006, the day the Bidens took over Paradigm Global Investors, Hunter and Joe’s younger brother James, “laid out [their] vision for the fund’s future”: “Don’t worry about investors….we’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden. At the time, the senator was just months away from both assuming the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launching his second presidential bid.  James Biden made it clear he viewed the fund as a way to take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money to his older brother or his campaign account.  We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company”.  Does any of this pay to play scheme sound at all familiar?  And the timeline seems particularly interesting in that it coincides with Joe Biden’s sudden increase in net worth.  So with all the focus on Trump’s finances and tax returns, it would appear that the hypocritical media needs to take a closer look at the Biden Family empire and their business dealings in both real estate and finance.  Recall the adage: trust a man who made a fortune, then went into politics more than a man who went into politics to make a fortune. 

Inauguration No Show

 So where were they?  Where were the hoards of White supremacists, Neo-Nazis and armed militias that were set to storm the capitol and disrupt the inauguration?  And not just the Capitol.  Wasn’t there “credible” Internet chatter that signaled a coordinated attack was to take place not just in Washington, DC, but in state capitals across the country? Where were the Proud Boys, whose messages suggest, according to the Wall Street Journal, that “the far-right group interpreted the President’s words as a call to action”?  So let me get this straight: they interpreted the president’s words? And what words were those?  Mr. Trump tweeted, prior to his January 6 rally: “be there, will be wild”.  And in the first presidential debate, when Trump debated both Mr. Biden and the moderator Chris Wallace, when he was asked repeatedly to denounce White Supremacists, part of his response was to tell the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”  After his speech at the January 6 rally, Mr. Trump said “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”.  Apparently those were interpreted as “cryptic” calls to action. Interpreted by whom?  Georgia Wells, Rebecca Balhaus and Keach Hagey, three writers for the WSJ, and some disgruntled Parler users posting on breaks from playing Call of Duty on their Playstations?  Seriously? Even the leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, was, according to text messages to the Journal, not even present at the rally and “said he ordered his members not to storm the Capitol and would denounce any who did”. Apparently Mr. Tarrio needs to reassess his leadership role in the organization.  And about that organization, again quoting the WSJ article: “estimates from researchers vary…from a few hundred to up to 10000 men.” Uh-huh. So are these members engaging in Internet machismo, or are they assembling regularly to train with weapons and tactics?  I suspect the former.  So essentially we turned Washington DC over to martial law, a Beirut look-alike based on the internet chatter from a bunch of knuckleheads who interpreted “fight like hell”, be there, will be wild” and stand back and stand by” as a call to arms?  How embarrassing.  And all the posturing in the fawning media by our elected officials, feigning bravery in their “41 minutes of Terror”, and convincing a gullible public that our sacred democracy was under attack.  Even going so far as to suggest that our own National Guard, brought in to protect their sorry backsides, had to be vetted due to their predominantly male and Caucasian makeup.  Disgusting.

Yet here we are in the new dawn of the Biden-Harris debacle-to-come, when the only assault that took place yesterday was on the Democrat Party Headquarters in Portland, Oregon by none other than Antifa protesters.  Hilarious. You just can’t make this stuff up. Apparently 150 antifa protesters vandalized the Democrat office before moving on to attack an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement facility (ICE) just hours after Biden was inaugurated.  You just can’t make these people happy. The buildings were vandalized and the “activists” sprayed graffiti on the ICE building. The protesters reportedly marched to the democrat Headquarters chanting “F*** Joe Biden” brandishing “pepper ball guns, shields, rocks, batons, irritant spray, knives, crowbars and Molotov cocktails” according to Newsweek.  Really.  Peaceful protesters, no doubt.  But definitely not seditionists or insurrectionists. I wonder if the FBI will mount an investigation and employ facial recognition and Internet scouring to hunt down these far-left extremists? Sure they will.

But this was a win-win tactic by the Democrats all along.  They got away with painting Republicans with a broad brush, labeling us all as insurrectionists intent on disrupting our democratic process.  They used it to harass Senators Cruz and Hawley and continue relentless attacks on Trump.  All plainly obvious tactics to eliminate opposition to their leftist agenda.  Prevent Trump from ever running for office again and remove the threat of those that would take his place, the up and coming Republican stars. If the predicted attacks had actually occurred, then we would have been branded permanently as domestic terrorists. But the fact that no attacks occurred will be trumpeted as a win for democracy and our preparedness in thwarting the evils of White Supremacy and Racism.  Successful mostly because we already arrested all the White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis after the Capitol riot: all eight of them.  It’s all a stretch of course, but so far with the support of the propaganda arm of the democrat party, the mainstream media, they have been able to connect the dots.  So let the fawning resume, as Biden assumes the office of the Presidency and lets loose with a flurry of executive orders to undo the Trump policies that gave us unparalleled economic growth.  Biden’s economy will initially benefit from pent up demand as we emerge from under coronavirus lockdowns, and will benefit from the vaccine as it becomes more widely and effectively distributed.  But soon gone will be energy independence and, as we re-enter the Paris Climate Accord and rejoin the WHO, as we add $1.9 trillion to the $900 billion last month to the $2.9 trillion from the spring to our national debt, as we dole out unemployment benefits that will cause half of unemployed Americans to stay on the sidelines, as we increase the minimum wage, as we “equitably” distribute small business loans based on race, as we open our borders to waves of immigrant caravans, we are destined for economic disaster.  China and Russia are poised to eat our lunch.  We can only hope the Senate has an epiphany and holds the line against what is essentially a massive redistribution of wealth, an abdication of our position as leaders of the free world and an end to America as we know it.

Militias and Gun Control

Finally, after seeking to dissolve the NRA for “misappropriation of funds”, NY Attorney General Letitia James has successfully driven the NRA to file for bankruptcy protection.  The gun rights group, originally registered in NY, will flee to Texas where they will incorporate and restructure to exit from what it described as “a corrupt political and regulatory environment”.  President-elect Joe Biden has also signaled that he intends to repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, that effectively shields gun manufacturers and dealers from being held responsible when their products are misused in a crime, or results in injury, much as any manufacturer of consumer products is protected.  This of course would open the door to frivolous class action lawsuits that will attempt to drive the firearms industry out of business. Simultaneously, and not without coincidence, we are seeing a coordinated attack develop on the Second Amendment where the FBI, having distinguished themselves as partisan manipulators of evidence under James Comey, is seeking to link the Capitol riot to white supremacists and neo-Nazis,who in turn are members of organized militias.  Thus by the transitive property of partisanship: if you were at the protest, then you are an insurrectionist, which makes you a white supremacist, which links you to militias…….who have guns. That makes you a threat to democracy, which means you have to be disarmed.  Kiss the Second Amendment good-bye.  Game over.  Isn’t this the first step in the tyrannical playbook: Disarm the people?  It was the first thing that both Hitler and Stalin did when they came to power, and look how well it worked for them.  Even Bill Maher, hardly a moderate, warned not to equate 5000 protesters with the 75 million people who voted for Donald Trump.  And in another astonishing example of being mathematically impaired, NPR ran a scathing piece declaring far right extremist groups such as The Three Percenters, The Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and the Texas Freedom Force had members in the crowd who were urging protesters to organize and were seen in videos “giving directions by voice” and flashing hand signals associated with white supremacy”.  One such organizer was seen “wearing a black short-sleeved t-shirt with yellow, consistent with the Proud Boys logo, the FBI said”.  Better purge your wardrobe of those black and yellow t-shirts.  And the truly frightening fact is the shear number of participants from these highly organized extremist groups: “at least eight”.  That’s right, eight. And this coming after untold hours of detective work, facial recognition scanning and Internet research by our highly trained government employees.   Of course, this nugget comes after the Washington Post declared last week that, after their exhaustive research efforts, they discovered a whole half-dozen white supremacists and Neo-Nazis in the crowd.  That would be six.  I’m not sure whether I should be more embarrassed by the laughable participation of these fearsome white supremacist militias, or the media’s apparent ignorance of the significance of single digits.

 

So absurd as it may be, I get the distinct impression that we are witnessing a coordinated effort, not by these white supremacist organizations spewing vitriol on the internet and posing for selfies in their camouflage coordinates, but by our own government, which is incrementally seeking to gut the Constitution and strip us of our rights.  Chuck Schumer has proposed putting the protesters on the “no fly” list”.  Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, has had his line of pillows and bedding yanked from the shelves of Bed, Bath & Beyond, Amazon and Wayfair for expressing support for Trump and questioning the election results.  Senator Hawley had his book deal canceled by Simon & Shusterafter he raised objections to Electoral College Results (something the Democrats have done every time, incidentally).  Tucker Carlson pointed out that Representative Steven Cohen from Tennessee questioned the integrity of the National Guard, tasked with protecting the Capitol, based on their racial makeup being overwhelmingly white and male, making them “more conservative”.  Nancy Pelosi has referred to the rioters as “domestic terrorists” a tag parroted by Joe Biden.  Elizabeth Neumann, a former member of the Department of Homeland Security in an interview with NPR stated: “We have to go after the people doing the incitement….with the same intensity that we did with Al Qaeda”.  The same article goes on to criticize the fact that “the threat of Islamic radicalism commands a far greater share of government resources” with Heidi Beirich of the leftist Southern Policy Law Center calling the disparity “a sign of the great hypocrisy”.  Hypocrisy.  Really.  After months of “peaceful protests” in the name of racial equality, largely ignored by our elected officials and praised by the media, protests that burned and looted our cities, resulted in police officers injured and property destroyed, we are choosing to label this protest an “insurrection” with comparisons in the media ranging from Pearl Harbor to the Holocaust and now Al Qaeda?  This is insanity.  Have we finally reached the tipping point?  With immigrant asylum seekers queued up at our border and more caravans on the way, with DC poised to become a state, with an attack on fossil fuel, amidst a raging pandemic, with Big Tech yielding greater power over public discourse, with our election integrity in disarray, and with 75 million Americans labeled domestic terrorists and under assault by our cancel culture, can we possibly save our Republic from crumbling, or has Obama’s wish finally come true: to fundamentally change America?

Riots

 Rule Number 8: “Keep the pressure on.  Never let up”

Rule Number 9:  “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself”

-Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

And the rhetoric keeps ratcheting up.  Where once we had inciting “a riot”, it has morphed into “a siege on the Capitol”, an “insurrection”, and “sedition”.  Democrat leaders of the House issued a statement: “We have grave concerns about ongoing and violent threats to our democracy. It is clear that more must be done to pre-empt, penetrate, and prevent deadly and seditious assaults by domestic violent extremists in the days ahead”.  Wow.  After nine months of riots where our cities were occupied and burned supposedly in the name of racial equality, all we got from them was the ceremonial taking a knee in the Capitol rotunda.  Seriously, if what happened on January 6 was an insurrection, it certainly was the most lame, disorganized, comic book version of one in history.  All Americans should be embarrassed. I saw video of old folks, children, and let’s not forget the idiot with the horned headdress and face paint, all milling about like they were on a museum tour, taking selfies and picking up souvenirs.  Sure, there were some bad actors that looked alarmingly familiar in their appearance and actions (reference Portland, Minneapolis, Kenosha, and NYC), but they appeared to be in the minority.   In particular it should be noted that I didn’t see anyone brandishing weapons, I saw nothing on fire, no spray painted slogans, nor is it clear if the “pipe bombs” were meant to harm or distract, seeing as they were planted some distance away.  The perpetrator of said explosive devices, incidentally, was found to be a 70-year old Alabama malcontent who was living in his pick-up truck amidst a collection that included 11 Molotov cocktails (translation: 11 beer bottles and some gasoline), a handgun, a rifle, a shotgun, a crossbow and “hundreds of rounds of ammunition”.  Sounds more like the contents of your average redneck coat closet than an arsenal.  Another description from law enforcement found a man to be in possession of a 9mm handgun and 500 rounds of ammunition.  In total, perhaps 5-7 firearms were reportedly recovered, but recall nobody was shot or even threatened with a firearm, at least not by a protester. With all due respect to those of you who are firearms-impaired, if this was indeed an insurrection, this miscellaneous collection of knick-knacks is like bringing a water pistol to a gunfight.  It is remarkable that the left, so inclined to sport uber-trendy Che Guevara T-Shirts, doesn’t know what revolution actually looks like.  This isn’t it. Even NPR opined that we should be aware that “these people have guns” and to take these militias seriously because they are not just playing dress-up.  What militias?   Militias are paramilitary organizations that tend to be…well, er…..organized and military.  Cue the fatigues and the assault weapons.  And now we have our state capitols preparing for an armed march by seditionists on inauguration day.  Really?  Based on the internet spewing of vitriol from some unknown assailant?  And which side of the aisle is this “terrorists de mots” from?  Is he indeed a threat or is he a worse kind of threat, a leftist fanning the flames of Democrat imagination gone wild?  Even the FBI’s Steven D’Antuono, according to the WSJ, in a moment of clarity issued a statement that was remarkably insightful: “We have to separate the aspirational from the intentional and determine which of the individuals saying despicable things on the internet are just practicing keyboard bravado, or if they actually have the intent to do harm”.  Exactly.  Recall the BLM occupations where armed groups extorted local businesses and residents.  Recall the tattooed snowboarder who executed a conservative counter-protester in the street.   When the left points a finger in accusation, they do so with no apparent long-term memory of what preceded this moment or worse, what precipitated it.

So to coin a phrase, it appears that most of this was “peaceful protest” with a small minority of testosterone-fueled miscreants.  Despite a blistering narrative of insurrection by the press, the ongoing persecution of the President, an investigation that has turned up little in the way of an organized siege, this still has all the trappings of a protest gone off the rails, pushed to trespass by a small minority of idiots.  Recall he of the horned headdress:  once anointed by the press as cleverly playing the fool while actually being a QAnon ringleader. We come to find out he has a history of mental illness, has no affiliation with QAnon and is currently on a hunger strike because his jailers won’t provide him with organic meals.  Another rocket scientist. The Washington Post, in promoting their racial agenda, trumpeted that facial recognition technology had identified White Supremacists and neo-Nazis in the crowd.  All “half-dozen” of them.  They may need to be reminded that a half-dozen means six.  

But the Democrats will do what they do best.  They will run with the narrative that this was a threat to our democracy, all instigated by the evil Orange Man in the White House and his army of racist seditionists. That armed militias will again lay siege to our capitol, with the intention of taking members of Congress hostage and “lynching” them.  They will promote a crackdown on free speech, in violation of the First Amendment.  They will then wage war on the protector of the First Amendment by eliminating the Second in the name of keeping guns out of the hands of those imaginary militias that are a threat to America. Keep the pressure on.  Never let up.  Make the threat more terrifying than the thing itself.  Keep repeating your narrative until it is accepted as truth.  Saul Alinsky would be proud.

The Second Dose Gamble by the Party of Science

So last weekend Joe Biden, our dementia-addled President-elect and de facto leader of the “party of science”, wants to release all the vaccine stores being held in reserve for the second booster dose for those who already received the first dose, in stark contrast to the Trump administration’s plan.  That way we can “get more shots into American’s arms now” said Biden’s spokesman, relying on the manufacturers to increase production so hopefully the second doses will be available when needed. Of course this is against the recommendations of the FDA and the drug manufacturers whose clinical research has indicated that roughly 28 days after the first dose, the recipient will only have approximately 50% immunity, thus requiring the second dose to reach its full potential of 95% effectiveness.  A delay in receiving the second dose would be detrimental to achieving full immunity potential and goes against the protocols established in the clinical trials. Bloomberg called it a “second dose gamble” and even NPR reported that the “second shot carries many of the logistical challenges as the first one, plus the added challenge of ensuring that the second dose is actually available”.  So under the Biden proposal, potentially more people will be vaccinated but with reduced effectiveness.  Genius.  Perhaps he is being advised on medical policy by Dr. Jill Biden.  
But hold on:  not more than 5 days later, after criticizing the Biden plan, the Trump administration abruptly reversed course and indicated that they will release the additional doses.  Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar now believes that the “manufacturing is predictable enough that we can ensure second doses are available to people from ongoing production”.  Federal officials, according to the WSJ, said “there is enough supply to ensure booster shots will be available and that they won’t extend the current recommended dosing schedules”.  Uh-huh.  So what changed in five days?  Is this a policy change based on science, on manufacturing or on politics? And where did the FDA disappear to in the midst of this debate?  And if there is indeed such a glut of vaccine due to ramped up production, why can’t we set aside the second dose now to ensure that it will be there in 28 days rather than assume the risk?  I don’t know about you, but after enduring the first dose, I want to be damn sure the second one is waiting for me rather than relying on some bureaucrat advising me that manufacturing is “predictable enough”.  Besides, the problem may not actually be in the production, but in the logistics, and those logistics are currently controlled by the government.  Witness New York’s botched roll out with vaccine discarded when no one showed up for their appointment leaving nurses scrambling to find local firefighters and police….. anyone who fit the state’s qualifications to receive the allocation before it expired.  In Florida, seniors lined up for shots until the pharmacies ran out, while some locations were offering it to anyone within earshot.  Doesn’t instill much confidence.  Remember the nine most frightening words in the English language:  “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”. 

Sad State of Affairs

In light of the recent election results I’ve taken particular heed to some of the Democrats stated  ambitions, those of: Packing the SCOTUS, admitting PR and DC to the union, defunding the police, government control of health care, amnesty to all illegal immigrants, abolish the electoral-college, rescind the Second Amendment, reparation for African Americans, greater regulation of commerce and education, increasing taxes. What’s not to like,  huh?

And, soon there will be no Red States to oppose them, in having been over run by Blue State escapees-,  fleeing lawlessness, high taxes and social depravity-, but bringing their warped sense of a social preferences with them. A socialist curtain is descending upon us America-, one party governance is waiting in the wings! Farewell land of the free, home of the brave-, where once life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness abounded.

Our bloated government is determined to tax us back to our ancestral European socialist beginnings! Have you ever thought to ask yourself, why should we pay for things we don’t want, that the vast majority of us never receive; why should they take our money and property and give it to others to garner their favor, ensuring their position of power; enhance the governments revenue stream and their personal inordinate entitlements! We American’s had a government of the people, by the people and for the people that governed in compliance with our once revered and thought sacrosanct constitution. Today that is not the case! A cabal of bureaucratic anarchist have undermined our representative democracy skewing it toward a socialist inclined oligarchy. 

Protest Spin

The Wall Street Journal wasn’t particularly sympathetic to the cause in the wake of the recent D.C demonstrations .  All of a sudden, they had fallen in line with the detractors, adopting the same set of adjectives.  Where we once had “voting irregularities”, and hundreds of affidavits attesting to it, we now have “unproven” allegations, “false” accusations, and the old Trump standby: “lies”.  Instead of showing the public that these claims are being taken seriously, a matter that was addressed when it was Gore doping the accusing, the 80 Million Trump supporters are being told that there’s nothing here people, you lost, go home. After four years of relentless attacks on a duly elected president, our elected officials are telling us to shut up and just accept a loss, something the other side has never actually done. And the piling on continues. Many of you are not a fan of Tucker Carlson, but I think he got it right.  Trump was still full of his swaggering, incendiary bravado, but he certainly didn’t instruct the crowd to breach the Capitol.  Like all marches in DC, he called for the crowd to march to the Capitol to protest at the site where the flawed election was being ratified.  No more.  Did it get out of hand? It sure did. But no more out of hand than the riots in Portland, New York City and Kenosha.  I didn’t see the city burn and businesses looted.  The “people’s house was violated”, they screamed.  Yes it was.  By the people, we the people.  And video shows repeated examples of the Capitol Police opening barricades and stepping aside.  And by barricades, I mean bike racks.  And it’s not your house, Nancy, not the aristocracy’s house, not the house of the elite, despite the exclusive hair salon and private gyms. It belongs to the people that you brushed off and disenfranchised, chose to ignore and belittle. Even Anderson Cooper, an elitist of the Vanderbilt dynasty, mocked the protesters on CNN, suggesting that they will “go back to the Olive Garden and to the Holiday Inn they’re staying at, or the Garden Marriott…..”   The unfortunate aftermath will be more demagoguery, mostly directed at threats to Democrat power such as senators Hawley and Cruz.  It’s going to be an ugly four years, but this style of ugliness has not been brought on by Trump alone, rather by a power hungry Democrat cabal and their complicit media.

I'm Back!

Did you miss me? Well I’m back, and hereafter I’ll tell you why. But know, in the passage of time since my last post, my tolerance to suffer political pundits of any stripe and their antics, has decreased exponentially. As a consequence, you might find my rants more personal and biting then before. If I offend, mea culpa! 

So we begin, my opening 2021 Conservative Slants is a culmination of responses to recent affronts to my sensibilities by CCN, WSJ, PBS, DP and FOX news. A little long winded, but I wanted to set a tone in my return.

I’m Back.  Rejoining the ranks of the “deplorables”, “clinging to our guns and religion”.  We “insurrectionists”, Trump supporters who staged a “coup”, the “mob” that “stormed the Capitol”, mounting a “siege” against the “people’s house”.  How many times will we allow the left to paint us with a broad brush? When did conservatism become the enemy of the people?  How has the conservative label become a negative, whereas liberal and progressive have become something spun into a positive, a brand that has become a shiny commodity, something our youth want to acquire, to proclaim loudly, even violently, that they adhere to a set of values and principles that is antithetical to our Constitution, that will fundamentally change America?  

 

When exactly did the two parties decide to switch identities anyway?  The Democrats were once the party of the people, representing the blue-collar working class and the poor.  Now they represent Big Tech, the wealthy elite, white, college educated suburbanites and city dwellers, and they lay claim to all the supposedly disenfranchised minority groups that identify by color and sexual orientation.  They firmly believe in big government, cradle-to-grave entitlements, identity politics, and that identity should be a measure of your merit.  Republicans have come to represent the working class and the rural poor, small business and capitalism, America’s heartland where traditional values of family and religion still have value. They believe in a smaller less intrusive government, a strong military, and strong borders, and are guided by the Constitution.  They believe in meritocracy.

 

But words and symbols have been hijacked by the left and have been reserved as their own exclusive property or, worse yet, morphed into something else.  Identity politics has become the order of the day, where offending one of the protected categories carries with it the scarlet letter, a brand of one of a myriad of “-isms” and “phobes” the left have used effectively at the point of the spear to further isolate and divide.   Sexist, Misogynist, Homophobic, white supremacist, and of course the universally applicable and most damning of all: Racist.  A hangman’s noose and the word “lynching” for example, have been made the exclusive property of the black experience in this country where even a loop of rope hanging in a garage bay turned NASCAR upside down this past year in a wave of identity politics. Gender specific words such as him, her, he, she, mother, father, sister and brother have been recently banished from the floors of Congress in favor of gender-neutral terms such as parent, sibling, and the grammatically preposterous “they”.  Yes, the “party of science” believes, and more importantly wants you to believe, that there are more than two genders, and that those words are insensitive and not “inclusive”.  The Confederate flag, once thought to represent the pride of being from the south, has been branded a symbol of hate, a symbol of our racist past, and it too has been banned from state flags and personal display.  Professional sports team’s names and logos are being dropped for being racially insensitive and demeaning, leading us to impressive, awe-inspiring appelations such as The Washington Football Team. My personal favorite is when the left calls Trump and his followers Nazis, failing to recognize that Nazi is a shortened version of Nationalsozialistische , which translates to national socialist, when they themselves are proponents of a socialist state.  Hilarious. Even the very definition of “Patriot” has been linked with “nationalism” where the most common connotation used to be “devotion to the interests or culture of a particular nation-state” but has been cast aside in favor of the more negative definition, “a particular culture or ethnic group deserving of political self-determination”, which has been extrapolated into “white supremacy” and racism, now inexplicably but permanently linked to MAGA and Donald Trump’s presidency.   And let’s not forget the height of word-absurdity when Representative Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), in delivering the opening prayer on the first day of the 117th Congress, a prayer filled with Christian themes and scriptural references, waded into politically correct, all-inclusive territory by closing with “we ask it in the name of the monotheistic God, Brahma, and god known by many faiths. Amen….and AWOMAN.” What an idiot.  Amen is not a gender specific term, rather it is derived from the Latin, meaning “so be it”.  But facts never seem to get in the way of the leftist agenda.  Florida Republican Matt Gaetz sarcastically quipped: Don’t they know that gender isn’t binary? What about the 42 other genders?” Tennessee Rep Tim Burchett remarked, “This is political correctness gone way off the rails.” Now that’s an understatement.

 

And with the Democrats seizing control of the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House, expect it to get worse………a lot worse.  Already, in a profound demonstration of how to be a sore winner, Pelosi and Schumer are calling for Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from the Presidency a mere 12 days before Biden’s inauguration.  If not, they intend to proceed with, and are already preparing articles of impeachment. Republican Senators Hawley and Cruz, who challenged the Electoral College certification process on the grounds of claims of voter fraud, are being attacked by their Democrat colleagues, led by the reprehensible Delaware Senator Coons, who is calling for their resignations. It would appear that in the typical “never let a crisis go to waste” tactic first outlined by Obama advisor Rahm Emanuel, and recently repeated while discussing the coronavirus pandemic, the Democrats will be employing a scorched-earth policy of eliminating all potential obstacles to their radical agenda.  Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have all banned Trump indefinitely from their platforms, effectively silencing the President of the United States.  Even the uber-liberal ACLU has taken up the case as a violation of First Amendment rights to free speech.  When exactly did Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, two reprehensible human beings if there ever was one, become the gatekeepers and arbiters of what the President of the United States of America can say?  This should disturb everyone, regardless of what your political affiliation may be.  And as an extension, the relatively new platform Parler, which is a Twitter-like app that has marketed itself as a non-biased, free speech social media platform focused on user’s rights, has been removed from Google’s app store, followed by Apple and Amazon in suspending the app from being active on their servers.  Why?  Because Trump is using it to communicate.  When such a blatant violation of Constitutional rights occurs amidst radical calls from the left to silence Trump supporters, suggestions to prevent Trump supporters from flying or staying in hotels, calls to place restrictions on conservative talk radio, you are witnessing a descent into tyranny.  

 

Recall Saul Alinsky, the American community activist and political theorist who penned the book: Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer in 1971. He is largely credited with developing strategies for confrontation and community organizing to advance social justice.  Disturbingly, we see Rule #12 being implemented by the left today: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.  Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy.  Go after people and not institutions: people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective.  Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works).”  We are seeing this being played out to great effect against Donald Trump and conservatives in real time.  With a complicit media acting as a propaganda branch of the Democrat party, we are under attack, we are being silenced, ridiculed, isolated and in effect, cancelled.  We are indeed under siege, there is indeed an insurrection, and as our forefathers predicted, we are being overwhelmed by mob rule.  Yet is not a mob of conservative sympathizers that is a threat to the Republic.  It is the new Democrat party and their radical leftist, progressive agenda, emboldened by their success in taking back the Congress and the White House under dubious circumstances, emboldened by a complicit media and a compliant public that has swallowed their rhetoric and has forgotten the principles of the Constitution. That is why I’m back.  To shine a light on the hypocrisy that rules the current political landscape. To add my voice to the Patriots who choose to defend the Constitution from tyranny. While we still can.  

                                                             

Tom Swift