Category Archives: Politics

The Tax Man

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Since the 80’s, it has been an article of faith, for anyone not in the Cult of Modern Liberalism, that all taxes are bad. Robert Novak used to say that “God put Republicans on earth to cut taxes.” That generation of conservatives were convinced tax cuts would lead to spending cuts and that thinking still infests the modern mind, despite the evidence to the contrary.

Tax cuts have become a get out of jail free card for “conservatives” and Republicans. They can prattle on about moving commas around the tax code and sound butch about small government, without actually doing anything about it. Worse yet, they get to do social engineering through the tax code on the sly with gimmicks like child tax credits.

That’s why this bit from Trump got my attention. Everyone has focused on his immigration statements, but this is radical stuff on taxes. I’m not talking about the details of his tax plan, which is not terrible, but not very detailed. The radical bit is challenging the idea that some forms of income are sacred.

You never hear pols from either side talk about this because their donors would never tolerate it. Both parties love the special treatment of capital gains, because it makes their donors happy. It’s good for the financial class. The same is true of the labyrinth of loopholes and subsidies on the business side. It lets both sides cater to the donor party, while mau-mauing their voters.

Sensible people know that taxes are merely how we pay for government. They should never be a tool for social engineering, and they should never be a tool for looting the country. The former inverts the relationship between citizen and his government and the latter leads to social instability.

Both parties and their media arms work hard to keep such talk out of the public. The reason for that is it would reveal the truth of modern politics and that is both parties work in concert. It’s no longer an adversarial system. It is a game of good cop/bad cop, and the American voter is the perp. Progressives get their social engineering and Conservatives get their looting.

That’s why Trump’s line about hedge fund managers is so radical. When was the last time anyone, even a lefty, said anything like that? Once in a while Elizabeth Warren will waddle out of the wetus and say bad things about rich people, but otherwise hedge fund managers and their clients have become sacred people. Hell, we make movies glorifying the Wall Street tycoons.

What should really jump out is this line. “The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.” Trump is essentially correct. Hedge funds have about a three year run of wild success and then reversion toward the mean kicks in and they run out of juice. Usually, their good run is based on inside knowledge.

What’s radical here is the notion that dumb luck plays a part in getting rich. This is obviously so, but a taboo topic. Mark Zuckerburglar hit the lottery. Mark Cuban hit the lottery. Say that in polite circles and people start thinking you’re a communist. But it is correct. These men hit the lottery.

Acknowledging that reality is dangerous because it turns the tables on the social engineers. If we are going to use the tax code to alter behavior, shouldn’t we tax the hell out of lottery winners, while lightly taxing people who, I don’t know, build tall buildings in big cities? The building will become a part of the nation’s stock of capital. Facebook will become another Broadcast.com.

Worse yet such talk inevitably leads to talk about how the pols decide who to tax and who to subsidize. These are not conversations we have had for a very long time and that’s intentional. When one side shouts, “tax the rich” and the other side yells “tax cuts for children!” there’s no room to talk about the daily auction of tax breaks to the connected held by the political class.

Myötähäpeä

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Years ago, I was having problems with the cable and for the fourth or fifth time in a month I found myself on the phone with the cable company. The customer service woman had me push some buttons, reboot the box and report back the results. We did this a few times without success.

After the the fourth or fifth time I finally asked her why she thought another reboot would have a different result than the previous reboots. To her credit, she said she had no idea, but it was the only option she had to help me. I wondered at the time how long we would have gone on rebooting if I had not broken the loop.

I decided to cancel the cable at that point. She may not have had choices, but I had options. That event came to mind reading this story about the GOP in the Tidewater trying to run the same old scam on Trump that Fox tried during the debate.

Republican leaders in two states reportedly are plotting to make presidential candidate Donald Trump’s quest for the GOP nomination a lot harder.

Party leaders in Virginia and North Carolina told Politico.com that they are considering a push to require candidates entering their respective Republican primaries to pledge their support for the eventual nominee and not run a third-party candidacy — a pledge Trump, the current frontrunner, would not make when asked to during the Fox News debate earlier this month in Cleveland.

“Anybody who wants to seek the Republican nomination should have to commit to supporting the ultimate Republican nominee,” Virginia’s former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli told Politico. “I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

Republican party officials in North Carolina announced a similar proposal, and told Politico they already are in talks with lawyers to draft language for a provision that asks each candidate to support the GOP nominee.

“Everything is on the table,” an official told Politico.

Party leaders in North Carolina and Virginia say they hope their ballot proposals will help convince the billionaire businessman to fully commit to the Republican Party.

The primary requirements must be submitted to the Republican National Committee by Oct. 1, Politico reports.

“Ballot access usually is regarded as a party function,” former RNC Chief Counsel Tom Josefiak told the website. “It definitely would be left up to the state party to decide how it’s going to operate.”

This is just the party pushing the same button and hoping this time they get a better result. Fox News and the GOP schemed for a month about how to box in Trump on this issue and they came up with the very lame hand raising business to start the debate. That was a flop with the voters and failed to accomplish anything. I guess we can expect state party dimwits to push the same button over and over now, thinking this time is the charm.

What we are seeing here is something you hear in sports all the time. Pressure reveals character. It’s easy to be a principled man when there is nothing at risk. Sticking to your guns when you are at great personal risk is a different matter altogether. More than a few “honorable” men have been revealed as something less when faced with real risk.

The Republican Party and its media wing are being squeezed by their donors on the one side and their voters on the other. This is not unusual as rich people try hard to buy politicians from all parties. A fundamentally sound party can rely on its organizing principles to strike a balance. Right now the party and its media arm are lurching about from one crackpot scheme to the next, unmoored from anything resembling principles.

Similarly, the media wing of the party is struggling to mount an affirmative argument in favor of their team. Instead we have been treated to childish rants that resemble a baby banging his rattle on the high chair. I used to enjoy reading some of them. Now, I’m embarrassed for them. I get the sense, reading the comments in these rants about Trump, that I’m not alone. A lot of people are learning the meaning of myötähäpeä.

Something’s Happening Here

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I must admit I have enjoyed the Trump-a-palooza this summer. The truth is, I have thrown in the towel on America, so I don’t think our elections mean very much. It’s just a question about how fast we intend to drive into the abyss. Being old I should be rooting for slow as that means I can reach escape velocity before it gets ugly. On the other hand, life is for living and sticking around long enough to see the collapse has its attractions.

I can go either way, so the elections are just entertainment at this point.

Six months ago, I was thinking the Democrats would anoint Hillary, after the usual dalliances with a true believer, who excites the fever swamp types. It’s the GOP’s turn so this is when the party hands out their lifetime achievement award. The GOP would be figuring out if they can run Bush or if they have to find someone with the same polices, but a different last name.

Now, I think something is happening here. Clinton is now immersed in what could very well be the scandal of the century. There’s no way to wriggle free of the mishandling of classified data. You can finesse financial laws and ethics rules. You can’t finesse this stuff. News reports suggest there may be dozens of people who have violated the law and conspired to hide their involvement. This is Watergate level stuff given her position.

On the GOP side, Donald Trump just gave a speech in a stadium. If you are a member of the Party leadership or an advisor to one of the candidates, you should be in a panic. Trump went from sideshow at the start of the summer to leader of a revolution at the end of the summer. In-between, the GOP took their best shots at the man and did not leave a mark. Watching Trump’s crowd last night I kept thinking, “something is happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.”

One thing that is clear is I was the only guy to figure out that Trump was Beppe Grillo. The other thing is the ossified and blinkered chattering classes are wholly unprepared for what’s happening to them right now. They spend their time reading each other’s tweets, promoting each other’s work, and chatting with one another at play time. They are not even aware of the vast network of writers, bloggers and troublemakers out there complaining about the status quo.

The best evidence of that is the deranged ranting of Kevin Williamson at National Review with regards to Donald Trump. It’s like watching a robot whose CPU errors out and the robot goes berserk, smashing itself into walls. When it is a bunch of metal it is funny. When it is a human being having a nervous breakdown, it’s sad and pathetic. In this case it is emblematic. Conservative Inc. is cracking up over what’s happening outside the Acela corridor.

Trump may turn out to be a poor spokesman for the massive crowds mobbing his events. I’m not a big fan of his style and I don’t think he has thought much about any of these things, other than immigration. That puts him way ahead of the dreary dishrags running for office, but the leader of a revolt needs a coherent platform. Maybe that comes, maybe not, but the crowds are not going away.

That’s why the rest of the candidates should be scared. To get these crowds for Bush or Walker or Kasich, you would have to round up the people at gun point. Even then, you would probably have to lock the gates to keep the people from fleeing the arena once the dreary dullard started talking. Those people at the Trump rally are not buying what the GOP is selling, even if they may not be sold on Trump as a candidate.

I don’t know what they do at this stage. These things can burn out on their own or they can break up like the Tea Party. The trouble is the GOP had corrupted the grass roots long ago so they could tear apart the Tea Party movement without too much trouble. The trouble here is this is ad hoc and completely outside the control of the “grass roots” organizations that exploited the displeasure over Obama. This is a revolt against those organizations, especially the GOP establishment.

I’m skeptical about Trump. I think his lack of restraint will be his undoing. But we’re seeing a collapse of the middle. The parties and the press are now bullhorns aimed at the public and the public gets it. This is not about Trump. He’s just the flag around which the dispossessed can rally. You can take down the flag and the people may disperse, but the dispossessed are still there. Someone will come along with a new flag eventually.

The Red Pill Revolution

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I’ve been fond of the red pill-blue pill formulation to describe what is happening with non-liberals in America. It’s popular with the hobbits of the Dark Enlightenment so I never use the terminology, but it is a good way to describe what is happening. It’s not disillusionment. That’s just a precursor to a healthy cynicism. What we’re seeing today is more of an awakening, where people suddenly confront a truth they used to think was nonsense.

It’s popular to compare the Trump surge with the Perot surge, blaming it on populist anger, which is another way of saying the losers are making a racket. That’s the George Will and Charles Krapphammer view of things. Both have been ranting and raving about this on Fox for a few months now. That’s an easy temptation and even easier when you get paid to mail in bite sized commentary for an hour each night. As Buchanan used to say, they have gone native.

Anyway, the thing people forget about Perot is he started as a third party guy, even though he had a special hatred of Bush. His campaign was never a fight within the GOP. That fight happened with the Buchanan challenge of Bush in the primary. Trump is starting as a Republican and while not making his campaign about challenging the GOP power structure, that’s how people are responding to it. If Trump were running as a third party candidate right now, no one would care.

Another big difference in this cycle is the Democrats are not desperate to win like they were in 1992. They were also going through a reform effort of their own in the Bush years. The DLC emerged as the “New Democrats” promising to drag the party to the center. That’s how Bill Clinton grifted his way to the nomination. The desperate could overlook his vulgarity and the reformers could overlook his near total lack of a moral compass. Everyone in the Democrat side just wanted to win.

It’s tempting to credit the Sanders surge as merely a late reaction to Clinton, who is about as appealing as rectal cancer. Even her friends describe her as a moral nullity so there’s room for a not-Clinton in the primary. That’s not what’s going on though, as Sanders has tapped into some of the things we’re seeing on the GOP side. One is immigration and the other is economic nationalism.

Sanders is pretty good on the national question, to the horror of liberal elites. He’s also an economic nationalist, a reminder to many Democratic voters that the party used to be about the working man. Within living memory, Democrats championed the middle and working classes, while today’s liberal is the champion of deadbeats, weirdos and corporatist plutocrats. A lot of Democrat voters are pissed at what has happened with their party and they are flocking to Sanders.

I think the biggest difference here is the role of the media. The primaries were over by the time Perot started talking about a run. It was the summer of 1992 when he became a story and started building a campaign. The press filled the summer promoting Perot because they wanted an interesting story. He was treated like a rock star, just about living on CNN. Eventually, Perot’s nuttiness was the better story and the press started making sport of him.

In contrast, the media has been hostile to Trump from the start. The Conservative media has been a mix of mocking, insulting and incredulous. This column by George Will is revelatory:

He is an affront to anyone devoted to the project William F. Buckley began six decades ago with the founding in 1955 of the National Review — making conservatism intellectually respectable and politically palatable. Buckley’s legacy is being betrayed by invertebrate conservatives now saying that although Trump “goes too far,” he has “tapped into something,” and therefore. . . .

Will starts out by asserting that conservatism was not always “intellectually respectable and politically palatable” and then he calls anyone not scandalized by Trump a subhuman. At least he did not demand they be shoved into ovens. He later goes on to say that a political party has a duty to defend its borders. This from a man who is an open borders fanatic. If you are a normal person who considers themselves a patriotic conservative, how can you not root for Trump over a man calling you a scumbag?

This where the red pill – blue pill concept comes in. Fox and the conservative media have been walking around thinking they are the authentic tribunes of the people. They truly thought they would be heroes to the cause by taking out Trump in the debate. Instead of their viewers throwing rotten cabbages at Trump, they were chucking them at Fox. Watching these folks, it’s clear they are off-balance and they don’t know what’s happening to them.

Unlike the Perot phenomenon, the Trump wave is as much about the general disgust with Conservative Inc. and the mainstream media as it is about populist outrage. A lot of people have started to figure out that Fox is there to move product and sell GOP Inc. to the gullible people on the Right. These are people who signed onto the Tea Party, but have been radicalized by the GOP’s efforts to marginalize them.

The reformer wants to save things. The revolutionary wants to destroy. Perot was leading a reform movement. Trump is leading a revolution, whether he knows it or not. Maybe that’s why guys like George Will are suddenly incontinent over Trump. Maybe they sense the danger. It’s hard to know, but the antics of guys like Erick Erickson are just throwing logs on the fire. Once you take the red pill, you cannot untake it so things will never be the same now that revolution is in the air.

The Why Questions

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I’ve had some exposure to corporate security and one of the things I’ve noticed is that much of it is based on what I think of as the “why questions.” The protection of things like data is based on thinking about why someone would want the data. The more obvious the answer the more obvious the reason to guard the data. Banks put money in vaults because it is obvious why people would steal it.

On the other hand, the great capers are often based on going against the grain of the why questions. For example, why would anyone break into the office of a psychiatrist? There’s no obvious answer so in most cases the offices are not secure. Dr. Lewis Fielding’s office was burgled in 1971, because one of his patients was Daniel Ellsberg, a notorious enemy of the people, who was in league with lunatics trying to bring down the government.

This caper from Wall Street is another good example of how “why” questions control how people guard information. You can be sure there was not a lot of people wondering why hackers would steal press releases, but now we know why and you can be sure the security of such things will be much higher.

The other value of focusing on why questions, one useful for reading the news, is to see who in the press is asking or even thinking about the why questions in a story. The proof that our press is mostly a public relations department is that they never ask the people in charge a why question. They don’t want to know why.

The Hillary e-mail story is a great example of what I’m getting at with the why questions. The only question to be asked of Hillary and her flaks is “Why did she create a secret, off-the-books, email server?” The facts show there was a rush to create this thing in time for her to start at the State Department. That was not a random act. There’s a reason and knowing the reason is pretty much the entire story.

Now, normal people familiar with the Imperial Capital think they know the answer. She wanted to avoid FOIA requests and Congressional oversight. This has become so common in DC with the bureaucracy that it is fair to call it normal. When the people in the Borg are plotting malice or mischief, they do it through private chat, e-mail and even Facebook. Big fish do it strictly to avoid Congress, which is a violation of law by itself.

For Clinton, there are no good answers to the question. If she says it was for personal use, then we come to the next “why” question. “Why did she use cutouts to create the server and have it in her house instead of at the Clinton Foundation?” That would be the obvious choice. If she was worried about keeping her private affairs private, that would have been a simple, cheap and hassle free option, one she already had available.

Of course, the other obvious question is “Why did the White House let this go on?” We know the answer to this and maybe that’s why they never ask the question, but it’s laughable to pretend that the White House did not know about this thing. The same is true of senior people at the State Department. If the press was really the press, they would be asking this every day until someone offered an answer.

The big question, the one a real reporter should be asking, but we all know will never be asked, is “Why were they stashing classified material on this server?” We now know they had sensitive signal intelligence data, particularly satellite images. Why would they want that for private use?

My theory, just to be clear, is that Team Clinton was using intel to shake down donors. Look at the hundreds of millions that have poured in from foreign sources. Anyone with eyes can see that the Clinton charities are just money laundering operations. They have raised billions and much of it from foreign sources. Giving a foreign oligarch a heads up on who is watching him should fetch a big donation.

If that sounds outlandish, remember that these are the same people who green-lighted the sale of satellite technology to China for campaign cash. These are the same people who were stealing furniture out of the White House. Even their friends say that everything is for sale with them. Building a multi-billion dollar empire through the sale of intel is not a big leap for people like the Clintons.

My bet is the answer to the why questions in this case is much worse than we are seeing so far.

L’affaire Cankles

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Americans are conditioned to think that what is reported in the news is a fair representation of reality. Everyone understands there is considerable bias in the news, but everyone assumes it is deliberate. The news people know, for example, that Obama is lying about his Iran deal. They just like him and therefore cover for him on it. In other words, there’s no secret conspiracy or deep state maneuverings going on, just good old fashioned partisanship in the reporting. If you look close enough, you can figure out what’s going on in the world.

Palace intrigue, cloak and dagger capers and Byzantine conspiracies are for movies and history books. In the old days, conspirators worked behind the scenes to undo the king or subvert his enemies in court, but that’s long over. Most people today subscribe to Franklin’s maxim that the only way three can keep a secret is if two are dead. Only tin foil hate loons talk about conspiracies, the “deep state” and clandestine plots.

I’ve never been a conspiracy guy and I tend to think a conspiracy of more than a handful of dedicated fanatics is not going to go too far. Even something like the 9/11 attacks worked mostly because of sloth. There were plenty of people who knew something was not right, but they were too lazy or too stupid to do anything about it. Good old fashioned dumb luck had more to do with 9/11 than conspiracy.

That does not mean things are done in the open. Politics is thick with plotting and scheming. It’s all they do, even when it works against their interests. That’s what makes the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal interesting to watch. There’s a lot not in the public domain, but we keep getting these drips suggesting someone is doing the dripping. That someone has reasons and they have a boss, possibly in the White House.

The thing that the press never bothers to consider is what must have been known for a long time. Hillary Clinton was at State in 2009 and supposedly had the private e-mail system on day one. That means everyone at State knew about it. It means the White House knew about it. Further, all of these people knew it was unusual and maybe even illegal. The first question that comes to my mind is why did the White House let this go on? Why would State not blow the whistle on this?

My hunch is the White House looked at this as mana from heaven. They had fall in their lap the best piece of leverage possible. Their political enemy was caught red handed mishandling classified information. Maybe it was not that way at first, but it was at least a very embarrassing thing that they now had on Clinton. It’s the sort of thing J. Edgar Hoover used to collect on people in case he needed leverage on them.

The most obvious explanation for why the White House kept this under their hat, so to speak, is it was great leverage for later. If they ever needed a favor from the Clintons or they needed to take down Hillary, they had the perfect weapon. Presumably they had the NSA or CIA monitoring the server, maybe even copying the traffic to and from it. Reports indicate the Clinton people did not encrypt the traffic, which is amazing. That means they may have other stuff.

Something people don’t know about how the government polices classified data is they have multiple counter espionage shops looking at everyone, using all the tools you read about. In the course of their normal work this off-the-books server would have been in briefings that make it to the President. At the minimum, they would have been in the briefing books.

That leads to why this is getting into the public now. In politics, a standard way to handle dirty laundry is to reveal it yourself to friendly media who will spin it for you. That way you get it out in the public on your terms, deal with the initial excitement and then declare it old news if anyone brings it up again. That does not appear to be the case here as Team Clinton has been absurdly ham-fisted in their handling of this thing. They are acting as if they don’t know who knows what about this thing.

That means the White House or State as the top targets behind the leaks. People forget that it was State that leaked the information on Valerie Plame to the press. Scooter Libby took the fall, but it was State that was playing politics. In the Plame case it was just good old fashioned blabbing that was the cause. In Watergate, Mark Felt allegedly conspired with the Washington Post against Nixon entirely out of spite. That could be the case here as the Clintons have a lot of enemies.

The other possibility that comes to mind is the White House is behind it. I tend to think this is the case as the leaks to the media have a DOJ vibe to them. The FBI is involved and what’s coming out is the sort of stuff that comes from an FBI investigation into the mishandling of classified material. That cannot happen without approval of the White House. This DOJ is so politicized they don’t take a crap without calling the White House.

That would raise the obvious question of why now? Maybe it is just serendipity. Things get out of hand in politics too. My hunch is they want to get Warren to reconsider and clearing the field of the 500 pound gorilla would change Warren’s math. Six months ago she was looking at running as the liberal insurgent. That’s not easy when the “centrist” is a vicious street fighter who had access to your raw FBI files. If the gorilla is suddenly out of the picture, Warren could run as the sensible liberal alternative to Bernie Sanders.

Plan B could be to back O’Malley, but he has a penis and is white. Joe Biden is too old and too crazy to be a serious alternative. It seems to me that unless they know Warren is ready to ride in as the white knight, it makes little sense for Team Obama to be leaking this stuff. Spite is always a possibility, but these guys are cold blooded when it comes to politics so I’m not inclined to think that’s the case.

There’s one other reason Team Obama could be behind this and that’s ego. A Republican in the White House would let Obama be the wise man of his party and function as a shadow president, questioning anything he does not like about the new guy. Clinton in the White House takes that away and it gives Team Clinton a chance to settle any old scores with Team Obama. With a Republican in the White House, Obama can walk around as the greatest living Democrat. That was worth $150 million to Bill Clinton. I’ll also note that Clinton did not help Gore and was not a great friend to Kerry or Obama.

I’ve written a lot about the comparisons between Hillary and Nixon. Their lives would make a great dual biography so the reader could compare the two in real time. Nixon was ultimately undone by enemies he knew, who were exploiting enemies he never imagined. Mark Felt was a nobody and no one had a reason to care about him. Alexander Butterfield was just a guy on Haldeman’s staff. More than a few great men have been brought low by minor figures just doing their jobs. Maybe that’s what we have here.

It would be great theater if in the end, Hillary goes to jail and Bill walks free.

The Die is Cast

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Watching the GOP “debate” the other night, I started thinking about how my bias will effect my judgement of the results. That’s what you always see with these things. Everyone wears their bias on their sleeve. I know Kasich fans who swear he carried the night. Trump fans are on twitter claiming Trump had a good night. Kevin Williamson needed his meds doubled in order to avoid being committed.

That last bit is a good example. Williamson hates Trump. It is an irrational, unhinged hatred, which would be fine except that Trump is doing well. Worse for Kevin is that his readers are mostly enjoying the show and see Trump as a protest vote. The result is Kevin sounds like a low-IQ lunatic. Bias can be very powerful stuff.

Anyway, I was watching and wondering how my bias is shaping my opinions. I want to like Perry, but he’s just not very good so I’m probably doing OK on that score. I want to like Walker and I’m probably willing to overlook his wobbly responses to the important questions. I want to hate Santorum, but I have to admit he says sensible things. I can at least see why people like him.

The truth is I don’t have a big investment in the Republicans. Thinking about my biases, that’s the conclusion I hit on. I’m probably more invested in Kevin Williamson’s nervous breakdown over Trump, as I used to enjoy reading Kevin’s columns. Who the GOP nominates for their guy is simply not all that important to me. I’m just not that into them anymore and they are not into guys like me either.

The last few elections, I went to vote out of habit and loyalty to the old ways. I was born into a country where people, who were like me, tried hard to win my vote. I now live in a country where people who hate me and are nothing like me chase the votes of people who hate me. Voting, for me, is mostly about remembering the way things used to be. Occasionally there’s something on the under-card worth considering.

The other night, thinking about this stuff, I was reminded of this Sean Trende piece from the last election. This table explains Trump and it predicts who the GOP must pick for their candidates in order to win:

Whites are starting to walk away from the process. Not all classes of whites. The Trende piece shows that it is the rural and working class whites, that is staying home. He characterizes them as the Perot vote, which would now be called the Trump vote. The folks on the Dissident Right, who would not be considered downscale in any other context, are certainly a part of this dynamic.

My guess is the GOP’s biggest problem is with white men. I know a lot of white guys who are generally disgusted with the Republicans. I was at lunch the other day with men who are typical middle-class suburbanites. The sort you think of as Chamber of Commerce types. All of them were fed up with the GOP and they were talking about Trump. They know he is a clown, but they’re just tired of the bullshit from the party.

Now, Trump will never be the nominee. That circus on Thursday night was just the appetizer. While Trump helps Bush and the surrender wing of the GOP right now, he is seen as an embarrassment so he has to go. Ideally, from their perspective, the air goes out of his balloon in the fall and he drops out over the holidays. That way he is a non-story for the primaries.

Can they win without these voters?

Here are some math to consider. These are states along with their electoral votes that are Democrat locks: WA(12), OR(7), CA(55), NM(5), ME(4), NH(4), VT(3), MA(11), RI(4), CT(7), NY(29) NJ(14), MD(10), DE(3), DC(3), HI(4). That’s 175 votes and they need 270 to win.That’s just the states that are a mortal lock. The GOP will not even campaign for president in these states.

Here are the “swing states” that the media locks in on every year. CO(9), MN(10), WI(10), MI(16), IA(6), MO(10), OH(18), PA(20), VA(13), NC(15), FL(15). That looks like a lot, but states like MN have not gone GOP since the 70’s. Demographics say this can change, but until it does there’s no reason to think it is going to in 2016. Adding back the heavy leaners to the Democrat total you get 240 electoral votes.

The GOP has to sweep Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida and make sure none of their more reliable states like Missouri swing the other way. Virginia has been invaded by Hispanics and Yankees, who vote Democrat exclusively. It went for Obama the last two times for that reason. Similarly, Florida went Obama the last two times.

Can the GOP win these states if they don’t drive up that white guy vote? Maybe, but the odds are against them. Can they win with a guy like Bush at the top of the ticket? There’s where things get interesting. A Bush – Kasich ticket will give the GOP the White House as they are sure to carry Ohio and Florida. Similarly, a Kasich – Rubio ticket will get them the White House. Any other combination is probably a loser.

So, there’s no reason to pay any attention to the GOP primary. The die is cast.

The Tourney O’Champions

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I’m not sure if there is a good way to handle a field of 17 candidates, as far as holding debates and candidate forums. It’s not like most of these candidates are fringe candidates with no shot to win. All of them have at least a puncher’s chance to win a primary or two. There’s just no way to have a debate with 17 people. Once you get past five or six it get too busy.

The bigger problem is having media people run these things. They want good TV and that means a bad forum for transmitting information.It also means using the “talent” used for the news programs and many of those people are as dumb as a plank. Stupid people asking liars their views on public policy is not a recipe for success, but it is how we do things in the Banana Republic.

The Kiddie Table

I felt sorry for this bunch. For some reason they held their debate in an empty auditorium so it underscored the fact that no one likes these candidates. It had a Model United Nations vibe to it, like they were high school kids learning about elections through a mock debate.The two airheads asking questions were what you would expect from announcers at the New Year’s Day parades.

Rick Perry: They asked Perry about Trump right away and he got angry and stayed angry the rest of the show. There was one point where I was sure he was going to fly into a rage. It was not until his closing remarks that he cracked a smile. Perry’s problem has always been that he cannot explain how anything he did as governor had anything to do with the Texas economy. He also has a little of the Bush mush-mouth to him and that brings up bad memories.

Rick Santorum: I don’t want to like this guy, but he is the best informed on the topics and he holds sensible opinions on most of them. He’s the one guy who truly understands that ours is a culture fight, not a math problem. On the immigration question you could tell he has thought about it. It was a good answer too. The trouble is he is detested by the press and the Republican establishment so he has no chance the get any traction.

Bobby Jindal: I got the sense that he was looking at Pataki and Gilmore and wondering if that’s not his future. Jindal has been a competent governor by the standards of Louisiana, but you have to have more than that to run for president. He’s a guy who would look great with a PowerPoint presentation explaining how accounting saved money on envelopes last quarter. His basic argument is he will run the Leviathan better than anyone else. He’s the Nehru version of Mitt Romney.

Carly Fiorina: I get why media think she is good. She’s what Washington thinks normal people sound like. Normal people think she sounds like the woman from HR. Her argument is that she will run the custodial state better than the others thus making Americans trust the rulers again. Like any technocrat, she thinks making the columns lineup on her spreadsheet is the solution to everything. She’s Mitt Romney in drag, but the media plans to drag her into the top tier because that’s the narrative.

Lindsey Graham: I take a back seat to no man in my loathing of Caitlin Graham, or the “Bro with no ho” as they say in the hood. But, I felt bad for him. He was nervous and his voice was cracking like a teenager. His answers bordered on the bizarre they were so rambling. The look on his face is what you expect from someone reading a note on a hostage tape. You have to wonder why he is doing this. He has no reason to run, nothing to say and he sucks at it.

George Pataki: Men who have spent their lives in politics, particularly in east coast states, get very good at these things. They have stood in front of empty rooms and packed houses. They have stood in front of old folks and high school kids, giving the banal speeches local pols give every day. Pataki is a very good speaker, but he would be better off in the Democrat party. His answer on abortion was what moderate Democrats used to say in the 80’s.

Jim Gilmore: People forget that Gilmore was a solid governor. It was a different time and a long time ago, but there’s something to say for being a good governor. That’s the trouble. It was a long time ago. He’s another guy who is a good candidate, doing all the little things you want from a politician, except he has no reason to be running. Come to think of it, he had no reason to run for governor.

Kiddie Table Post Game

The show after the show had the usual collection of chattering skulls from Fox. George Will made me laugh because he has been in the bubble for so long he’s not even sure what time it is. There was a time when Will was a big deal because he was the only non-liberal on TV chat shows. Today he looks like a guy who went to sleep in 1977 and just came out of the coma. It’s kind of tough to watch.

I predicted that they would all try to pump air in Fiorina’s tires and I was right. All of the skulls took turns slurping on Carly, insisting she stole the show. One of them was puzzled as to why voters have no idea why Fiorina is running. It’s one of those times where the media reveals something about themselves they try hard to conceal. In this case, they live in the media hive and see the rest of the country as an alien land. We’re talking monkeys to them.

The Adult Table

The pregame had A-list Fox stars and a packed house, which gave it the feel of a beauty pageant. I think if I were an atheist, I’d point to this as proof there is no God. If there was a God, he would rain down fire and brimstone on any country that picks its leaders this way. I have low standards for this stuff and I was embarrassed to be watching it. Maybe having a hereditary monarch is not such a bad idea after all.

Donald Trump: The problem business people have when running for office is they are not very good at being polite to losers. Trump is not used to humoring losers and so he gets ticked off dealing with the press. That’s fine on the stump, but in a debate he just ends up looking surly and unpleasant. Chris Wallace was there to submarine Trump and he did a good job at it. Trump did not help himself very much either. He did not kill his chances, but he is going to have be better at these things if he wants to be a serious candidate.

¡Yeb! Bush: I tend to think ¡Yeb! will be the nominee simply because he has the money, connections and the support of Conservative Inc. National Review has all their folks going off to ¡Yeb! camp through the summer so they can properly pimp him next year. The trouble is he is a dull as dirt. I can’t believe anyone walked away from this thinking he was their guy. I suspect his backers are getting very nervous right now.

Scott Walker: On paper, he should be the front runner. He’s a solid conservative. He’s getting better on immigration. he took the full blast of the Cult of Modern Liberalism and stood his ground. I doubt anyone remembers a thing he said in this debate. My sense watching him is he is playing for when Trump goes away so he can take down Bush one on one. He’s going to be the reasonable guy to the right of Bush.

Mike Huckabee: There’s a sizable Evangelical vote in the primary and Huckabee knows how to reach that vote. Like Rand Paul, he is a boutique candidate who can live off the land, hoping for something miraculous to happen. Nothing like that happened in this debate, but he did not say anything weird.

Ben Carson: I kept thinking Carson was invited because he promised to bring weed. I’m sure he is a nice man, but his answers were incoherent and he stumbled through his answers like a beauty pageant contestant. I’ve heard him a few times and he always sounds confused when answering off-the-cuff. I suspect he vaporized himself tonight as there are other options for people looking for a values candidate.

Ted Cruz: He’s the one guy who says exactly what he wants to say on every subject. He’s a trained lawyer and he is the smartest guy in the race. That shines through clearly when he is given time to speak. He comes off a bit too hot for these things and probably for most voters. he’s not a man blessed with charisma. I think he did enough to stick around for a while, but he really needs Trump to go so he can be the man of the right.

Marco Rubio: He pretty much disappeared. I never got the point of his candidacy. The reason the party is pushing him as Bush-lite is he is Hispanic, which they think is magical. The rest of us just think he is too young, too dumb and too inexperienced to be taken seriously. Like Carson, I think he goes flat quickly now that his voters have other choices that say the same things.

Rand Paul: Rand Paul is right about a lot of things. His highlight was when he disemboweled Tubby over the Fourth Amendment. There’s really nothing better than seeing someone knock a bully on his ass. After that he disappeared. I don’t know if it matters as he is a boutique candidate anyway. But, he probably did enough to stick around and that’s all that matters for him.

Chris Christie: The highlight of the night was Rand Paul slapping fatty around over search warrants. I can’t figure out why Christie is running. he should be going for the good government pitch, a prol version of ¡Yeb! Instead he is bellowing like a lunatic about things no normal person would get exorcised over. It’s like he thinks screaming is his thing and he has to do in order to be authentic.

John Kasich: What a jerk. That’s what I think every time I hear him speak. He could be a saint, but his TV vibe is fingernails on a chalkboard. He’s another guy who plays too hot for TV. He’s always shouting and pointing. No one wants someone in their living room who is shouting and pointing. I always wonder why no one asks him about being a big shot at Lehman right up until they collapsed.

Post Game

The media will declare Fiorina the big winner from the junior circuit. That was obvious before this started. They like the idea of the long-shot female candidate trying to break up the pale penis people club. It’s a great example of the hive mentality of the press corp.

The big loser is Trump. He looked like a jerk and he did not seem to know much about the issues. Immigration patriots will be disappointed, but they were fools if they thought he was going to win this thing. Trump is a vehicle to shaking up the race and in that regard he was the big winner. My guess is he starts to fade, unless he gets better quickly.

The other big loser was Bush. He was just another dull white guy on stage. If you were a Bush man going into this, you saw several options that were better and similar to Bush on policy. Even Fox, which is Bush country, had nothing to say about Bush after the show. I may be biased, but Bush was a big nothing.

Watching the Debate

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I’m not sure if I will watch the debates tonight. I have been meaning to clean the dryer vent for a while and maybe learn how to do a prostate self-exam. In all seriousness, I have a tough time watching these things as they have been turned into talent shows, without the talent. The preening clowns from the media, grinning like chimps for the cameras, asking a bunch of moist robots pointless questions is no way to run a country.

I’m not alone. Last cycle, the best numbers for a debate were early on when Gingrich was bashing the press. The debate in August of 2011 got seven million viewers. The rest struggled to break three million, which is 1 out of every 50 households. I doubt the debates have any impact on voter behavior. Romney waxed the floor with Obama in the debates and still lost handily.

I think one of the things to watch for tonight is how much of an ass Chris “Thanks Dad” Wallace makes of himself trying to be clever. He’s there to mug for the camera and that means trying to trip up the candidates with silly questions he thinks are clever. Trump’s presence will be too much for him to resist so I expect Wallace to show up wearing big floppy red shoes and a red rubber ball nose.

The night is, of course, all about Trump. He’ll get the business from Wallace and how he handles it will be the story. Having Wallace asks the questions probably works for Trump, but you never know. Trump’s act works when he fills the room. Being one guy on a stage of ten may make him look small. That’s what happened to Fred Thompson. Everyone expected the bigger than life TV guy and they got just another guy.

The other thing I’ll be watching is how Christie is treated and how he does with his one shot to get attention. I’ve always suspected the media liked him as “good TV, but totally safe on policy.” Take away the bombast and you have Rudy Giuliani in a fat suit. If ¡Yeb! can’t get his act together, the fat man is a good alternative for the party and their media sponsors. I don’t think primary voters feel the same way, but Republicans tend to fall in line, rather than fall in love.

That’s the other big story. Can ¡Yeb! arrest his decline. In the candidate forum the other day he was awful. I forgot just how bad the Bush Klan is at speaking in public. They have a way of making good news sound like a cancer diagnosis. Bush needs to give people a reason to like him. Right now he is trading on his name recognition and starting now the other names will become recognized. Personally, I hope he strips naked and runs screaming into the street.

The warm-up acts are another area of interest. The kiddie table Fox has set up for the candidates not polling well enough to get a seat at the adult table could be a story of their own. My hunch is the media will be looking for one they can start to champion just to have a story to tell. Narrative journalism requires at least one long shot and plucking a Carly Fiorina from the pack and promoting her fits the narrative. Plus, the press could use her to prove Republicans hate women.

I’m going to watch Walker and Cruz. I can’t say I’m a big fan of either guy, but they have a tale to tell. Cruz is the populist firebrand, at least by today’s soft feminine standards. TV is a cool medium that tends not to work well for firebrands. Walker is a boring dork who sounds like a robot, but he has the best resume of the bunch. I’m curious as to how they try to make this thing work for them.

Otherwise, this is the first weekend of the NCAA tournament for politics. It’s fun to sort through the candidates and think about how they could win, but we all know the game is rigged. Still, it is fun to see the underdogs score some points and give the big dogs a fight. Football season starts in a month so it fills the time between now and then.

Roundheads Versus the Cavaliers

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A central thesis of mine and a reason for this blog to exist is that most of America is entirely clueless as to why the 20% are making war on them. The daily assaults on the Four Olds by the Cult of Modern Liberalism is like a swarm of bees attacking from all directions. Logically, you know the numbers are small, but it feels like there are so many of them.

Jonah Goldberg wrote a book called Liberal Fascism a few years back. In it he documents how both American Liberalism and European Fascism share intellectual roots and how early Progressives borrowed from the Italian Fascists. There’s nothing new in the book, but it is a nice summary of the topic. Goldberg had to pull his punches, of course, given his career choice. Calling your employers fascists is never a good idea.

The trouble with so much of the analysis of the Left by the so-called Right is that it starts when their people arrived in America. It is a default assumption of “immigrant America” that the wave of Europeans that arrived at the end of the 19th and early 20 century forever reconfigured American culture. The story of America for them begins in the Jewish, Italian and Irish ghettos of New York, cutting off the 200-plus years of history that still defines the country.

If you read the Dissident Right, a common theme is the Cold Civil War between one group of whites (Progressives) and the other group of whites (Traditionalists). The assumption, and probably an accurate one, is that this term refers to the American Civil War. My guess is most people who think of the culture war this way are referring to the American Civil War. That event looms so large in the imaginations of the political elites, it is a reasonable way to start.

I would contend that the better place to start is the English Civil War, the fight between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers, the Parliamentarians versus the Royalists. The people that settled New England were English, who were on the side of the Roundheads. Some actually fought in Cromwell’s army. They also came from specific areas of England, thus having customs particular to that area, which they brought with them to the New World.

The other big colony founded at the time was the Tidewater area around the Chesapeake. The men who founded and developed Virginia and North Carolina were men of high birth and they created the sort of society you would expect from such men. The colonies of the Deep South were founded by plantation owners from Barbados. They not only shared the same sensibilities as the Tidewater gentry, they were also Royalists.

Just as the two sides of the English Civil War had a different political and religious vision, they had a different social vision. This was true of the American colonies. The Yankee world was one that was highly egalitarian and defined political liberty in terms of community freedom. The South was hierarchical, defining liberty as that of the gentry and their freedom as a ruling class.

The bigger divide was in their social views. Males in a Cavalier society were going to be what you imagine. Status was conferred on those who showed courage, daring and risk taking. In a Puritan society, males attained status through the sorts of things a highly egalitarian and fanatically religious people value. Instead of flamboyance, it was competence and community spirit that were the key to status.

This standoff between the New Model Army and the high risk cavalry charge is with us today. The assault on white males is not about race as much as it is about the concept of masculinity. This insane article from Salon gets at what I mean.

Toxic white masculinity defaults to violence as a means of maintaining social and political control. It clings to guns as a symbol of “real” male identity. It fears women as equals; it lashes out at non-whites who are somehow “stealing” white men’s jobs and power. Toxic white masculinity sees “liberals,” “progressives,” “social justice,” and “feminism” as enemies — out of a fear that “white masculinity” will somehow be made obsolete or extinct. The dream worlds and paranoid fantasies of angry white men are distractions that look to some type of Other as the preeminent threat to America’s safety and security. The reality is of course, very different.

There’s the old Roundhead versus Cavalier fight. The Progressive crazies making war on white males today are the spiritual descendents of those Roundheads, who executed King Charles. It’s not a political or cultural issue as much as it is a spiritual issue. The modern Progressive sees the flamboyant brash male as a threat to the spiritual well being of the community. In the Puritan tradition, men are humble, competent and risk adverse, as God expects from the elect.

Another Puritan attribute comes into play here and that’s a fanatic’s sense of obligation to enforce their ways on everyone else. The Puritans believed they were chosen by God to protect the common good through maintaining internal conformity and unity. When John Adams won the Presidency after Washington retired, he immediately set about enforcing Puritan culture on the rest of the country.

The Alien and Sedition Acts are exactly the sorts of laws you expect from religious fanatics. Modern Iranians or Saudis would perfectly understand the point. On the one hand Puritans wanted to keep foreigners from bringing foreign ideas, by forcing them to assimilate – or else. On the other hand, they wanted to stamp out dissent, particularly from those Cavalier males to their south.