Category: national politics & policies

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judiciary national politics & policies

Yes, We Can

Ruth Bader Ginsberg, RBG, Supreme Court

“She was an amazing woman, whether you agree or not,” a visibly saddened President Trump offered reporters upon hearing that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg had passed away. She had “led an amazing life,” he added.

Not amazing enough, however, to nudge Mr. Trump to wait and let the next president nominate Ginsberg’s successor — either himself or a coin toss between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris should Democrats win. 

That delay was reportedly the justice’s dying wish.

The president’s opponents would certainly prefer that, too, but Trump vows to quickly name his third High Court replacement. 

And why not? There is a vacancy; he has the constitutional power. 

Sure, Republican senators will be charged with hypocrisy. And accurately, because they blocked President Obama’s 2016 pick of Merrick Garland, claiming the voters should decide by choosing the “next president.” Just as Senate Democrats will be orating the opposite of what they said four years ago.

Hypocrisy is as close to half-right as folks in Washington ever seem to get.

But what should you want your so-called representative who currently takes up space in the U.S. Senate to do now?

Same as always: The right thing. 

Unfortunately, not likely. 

Always hyping violations of “democratic norms,” it may be the Democrats threatening (again) to blow up the democratic norm of a stable Court. In a Washington Post op-ed, attorney and journalist Jill Fillpovic urged Democrats to “pack the court” if Republicans move ahead in confirming a justice and Democrats win the White House and Senate this November. Though, she advises, “if they’re smart, Democrats will find a more palatable [term].” 

How about a more palatable approach than a Year Zero re-making of the SCOTUS every time party control of the White House and Senate changes?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly media and media people national politics & policies

“Despacito” Desperation

Joe Biden, election, pander

When Hillary Clinton talked about carrying hot sauce around in her handbag, on the popular Breakfast Club show featuring the annoyingly monickered Charlemagne Tha God, did anyone believe her? It was such an obvious and shameless ploy to get African-Americans to see her as “relatable.” For Mrs. Clinton, however, that was ‘a bridge too far.’

Now Joe Biden provides the cringe.

“I just have one thing to say,” Biden informed his audience at an event celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month. Looking down at his phone, he struggled for a moment. “Hang on here.”

And then he played a song. “Despacito,” which means “Slowly.”

Try not to think too much about this, for the song is a little sexually suggestive. The Daily Wire reprints a translation of the lyrics, for your disgust or delectation. 

First element of cringe: It was an obvious play for Latino sympathy. The song itself had nothing to do with anything other than that it was a popular song from “the community”  When you are this pandering, this patronizing, this transparent about your play to the cliché, what kind of respect do you hope to get?

Second element: It’s such a desperation move — with the Florida Spanish-speaking vote in jeopardy. Cuban-Americans, especially, are turned off by the Democrats’ move further left, having themselves left Cuba to come to American freedom. And the generally woke-socialist mindset of the Biden-Harris team (or is it Harris-Biden?) is a bit hard to take for the generally culturally conservative folks hailing from the south.

When will Democrats try authenticity again?

Third element: Assuming riots and conflagrations aren’t precisely that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies

The Obvious Itch

vaccine

We are not idiots.

We can see where a political program is heading before it is actually unveiled, right?

I know, you know: we are supposed to wait for the first actual piece of legislation to see the light of day before we criticize the agenda.

But that puts us at a disadvantage. Insiders can spend a lot of time working up new mandates before they reach a critique-able form. And during that incubation period, the ideas are out there, developing, gaining momentum. Festering.

What am I talking about?

Well, this: our rulers wriggle in delight, contemplating shooting us all with the vaccine being cooked up for SARS-CoV-2. Mandatory vaccination! We repeatedly hear, from the respected elected, that we cannot fully “re-open society” until the vaccine.

I cannot help having doubts: folks with badges and guns may soon demand that we be prevented from traveling, going into restaurants, buying food at supermarkets, or going to a movie theater or baseball game or church (!) until we get vaccinated . . . these “folks” . . . the Nancy Pelosis and Donald Trumps and Anthony Faucis . . . they are part of a system that has been spending tax money and borrowing to spend more and more and in this cause have already racked up trillions and trillions in public debt. 

They didn’t bother protecting us from that.

The obvious itch to shoot hurriedly concocted biological agents into all our bloodstreams will definitely be pitched as “for our own good.”

But the pitchers who itch have no standing. Until they clean up their past messes, why would we trust them to accurately measure future consequences?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Insincerely Simulated Insanity

The Washington Post, war game, election, Trump

“What’s the worst that could happen?” 

That question, splashed across the lead opinion offering in Sunday’s Outlook section of The Washington Post, was answered by the sub-heading: “The election will likely spark violence — and a constitutional crisis.”

Happy Labor Day!

Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor and co-founder of the Transition Integrity Project, authored the commentary about a group of political insiders — “some of the most accomplished Republicans, Democrats, civil servants, media experts, pollsters and strategists around” — she assembled for “a series of war games” about “a range of election and transition scenarios.”

The group “explored” four different simulations: “a narrow Biden win; a big Biden win . . .; a Trump win with an electoral college lead but a large popular-vote loss, as in 2016; and finally, a period of extended uncertainty” as the country witnessed following the 2000 election.*

“Over and over, Team Biden urged calm, national unity and a fair vote count,” explained Brooks, “while Team Trump issued barely disguised calls for violence and intimidation against ballot-counting officials and Biden electors.”

Team Biden participants included John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chair; Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s 2000 presidential the campaign chair; and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

“Team Biden repeatedly called for peaceful protests, while Team Trump encouraged provocateurs to incite violence,” she added, “then used the resulting chaos to justify sending federalized Guard units or active-duty military personnel into American cities to ‘restore order,’ leading to still more violence.”

“In each scenario, Team Trump — the players assigned to simulate the Trump campaign and its elected and appointed allies — was ruthless and unconstrained right out of the gate,” informed the professor.  

Wait . . . who were these Team Trump “players”? 

Conservative Bill Kristol, a longtime #NeverTrumper and “one of President Trump’s most vocal opponents,” was one. Another was former RNC chairman Michael Steele, who has not only endorsed Biden, but serves as a senior advisor to The Lincoln Project, now spending millions on attack ads against the president.

Shamefully unfair and intellectually dishonest by Professor Brooks — and the ‘dying in partisan darkness’ Washington Post. 

But here’s the rest of the story . . . 

Even with Bidenites played as angels and Trumpians as devils, both Biden victory scenarios nonetheless resulted in peace by Inauguration Day. 

Not so for a Trump win . . . which “the Left” is not projected to peacefully accept.  

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Obviously not considered was Trump winning a solid majority of the vote. Not likely according to today’s polls, but if polls had been accurate in 2016, Trump wouldn’t be president.

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national politics & policies political challengers

The Devil Is in the Seat Cushion

Nancy Pelosi, debates, Trump

A few weeks ago, I suggested setting up a betting pool for the upcoming presidential debates. How many would there be?

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe predicted that there would be three — “no more, no less” — but prescribed zero: “America’s quadrennial presidential debates have become an absurdity,” he wrote. 

“They long ago devolved into shallow ‘gotcha’ contests, prime-time entertainments designed to elicit memorable soundbites — tart put-downs rehearsed in advance or the unforced error of an unexpected gaffe,” which is about right, though President Donald J. Trump excels at the spontaneous put-down. 

Advisability to the side, Jacoby surmised what we all have surmised: that Democrats shouldn’t be pushing debates. That is, if they want their candidate, Joe Biden, to win the election. He is too off his game. Biden should take a hint from the name given to his generation: Silent.

Enter Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House and very rarely silent herself — and indeed older than Biden but as sharp as the proverbial tack the Devil is said to need to sit upon. She says that Biden should not debate President Trump. 

“Don’t tell anybody I told you this,” she jests. “Especially don’t tell Joe Biden. But I don’t think there should be any debates.”

The president, she argues, has not “comported himself in a way . . . with truth, evidence, data, and facts. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t legitimize a conversation with him, nor a debate in terms of the presidency of the United States.” 

She dubs a debate with Trump “an exercise in skullduggery.” 

Good politics — realpolitik — but also horrific politics — setting up a transparent-but-serviceable CYA excuse. 

But it is definitely 2020 politics.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies partisanship

Voting Like a Neo-Nazi

Richard Spencer, alt-right, white nationalist, Biden Supporter, Joe Biden

Dinesh D’Souza is tickled. You see, Richard B. Spencer, the almost-famous “alt-right”/“Sieg Heil” guy is voting, he says on Twitter, “for Biden and a straight democratic ticket.”

D’Souza, who is relentlessly pro-Republican in addition to pushing conservative values and arguments, had his dearest dream handed to him. Richard Spencer, an ethnonationalist, is loathed mightily by the left. And, frankly, by most of the right. Not to mention those looking straight-ahead and -backwards. So to have Spencer prefer the Democrats is rich.

For Republicans. (And not a few others.)

Usually, Democrats revel in lambasting Republicans for garnering support among the explicitly racist set. Now, tables turned.

Yet this is not really all that “out there.” Spencer, who is often characterized as a neo-Nazi, has admitted to many leftist sympathies in the past. His only real heresy from the left is his racist nationalism. He likes transfer programs, regulations, etcetera. Hefty-sized, all-encompassing government.

In his original tweet, Spencer explained his rationale less ideologically, though: “It’s not based on ‘accelerationism’* or anything like that; the liberals are clearly more competent people.”

Uh, what?

Oh, the heights — or depths — of irony should this election between Sleepy Joe and The Donald come down to a contest over competence. Mr. Trump’s struggles with the pandemic — as well as the economic impacts of a lockdown strategy so tightly embraced by progressives —hardly proves the competence of Democrats. Nor do riots in cities run by Democrats over alleged structural racism administered by those same Democrats.

But the Democrats were competent enough to get a Richard Spencer endorsement.

That’s something?

At least for the Republicans.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

“Accelerationism” noun : the scheme to embrace one’s opponents’ ideas so that they prove themselves spectacularly bad, and one can then ride in during the ensuing chaos. [Risky maneuver.]

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Biden’s Big Lie

Joe Biden, good people hoax, liar, lies, DNC

“In war,” Aeschylus wrote in the fifth century BC, “truth is the first casualty.”

So, too, these days, in political campaigns. 

Last week, in accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, Joe Biden promised to “draw on the best of us” and “be an ally of the light.” But then the 47-year Washington veteran pivoted, waving the bloody shirt from Charlottesville by claiming that President Donald Trump had declared “neo-Nazis and Klansmen and white supremacists” to be “very fine people,” and therefore “we were in a battle for the soul of this nation.”

Did Trump dub some neo-Nazis “very fine people”?

“And you had some very bad people in that group,” the president explained to a reporter. “But you also had people that were very fine people — on both sides. You had people in that group who were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statute and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”

Noting that “George Washington was a slave-owner,” Mr. Trump asked, “Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? . . . 

“It’s fine, you’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people,” he continued. “And I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”

Unequivocal.

Outraged by the Democratic contender’s false contention, cartoonist and podcaster Scott Adams called Biden a “Brain-Dead Race Hoaxer” . . . and worse.

But Biden is hardly alone. The Democrats and most of the media join in ignoring Trump’s explicit statements, pushing their myopically malevolent misinterpretation. 

Should this smear defeat Trump in November, an era of political truth-telling will not be ushered in.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Months ago, the Annenberg Center’s FactCheck.org determined that Mr. Biden, in asserting that President Trump had failed to condemn neo-Nazis, had made false claims against the president — ignoring numerous recordings in living color of the president making those exact censures.

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government transparency national politics & policies

A Glossary for Our Times

Trump Derangement Syndrome, TDS, Covid 19, infection, virus, meme

Reminder: SARS-CoV-2 is the name of the virus that is said to cause COVID-19.

Scientists and doctors are still learning about the novel virus and the new disease. Much of the information is uncertain, in part because it has become politicized, making it hard to navigate both medical and political subjects.

Making sense of the data or the arguments is more difficult because people confuse the terminology. The virus is not the disease, the disease is not the virus, though by metonymy, we do swap terms. Don’t let a mere figure of speech fool you.

As awful as COVID-19 is, in America, more citizens are affected negatively by the virus popularly known as TDS. 

Perhaps we should call it TDS-2016, since the three letters stand for “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Though the mind-virus (meme) was rampant from the moment Donald Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, the illness is not the meme itself. The illness, or behavioral syndrome, is how host brains process the meme. And it did not really set in as a disease until Trump got the Republican nomination. That’s when Democrats stopped laughing so hard and began to take Trump seriously.

And drive themselves crazy.

As with COVID-19, the worst cases depend upon co-morbidities. In TDS-2016’s case, co-morbidities include a sense of entitlement (that your side must always win); a denial of culpability in ramping up political polarization (in such things as the corruption-challenged candidacy of Hillary Clinton); and in flirting with other memes (such as “democratic socialism” and “wokism”).

As we approach Election Day 2020, TDS-2016 will only grow. The meme itself has proven resilient. We appear not to have reached herd immunity yet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Definitions:

meme n. 1. an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation. 2. a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users.

metonymy n. a figure of speech featuring the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant, for example suit for business executive, or the track for horse racing.

herd immunity n. a key concept in epidemiology where the resistance to the spread of a contagious disease within a population that results when a sufficiently high proportion of individuals become immune to the disease, through exposure by infection or vaccination: the level of vaccination needed to achieve herd immunity varies by disease but ranges from 83 to 94 percent. [Discussions of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 that do not mention herd immunity can only have limited value.]

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national politics & policies

Of Bats and Debates

bat, flag, debate, Trump, Biden, Obama

How batty is 2020’s politics?

Adding one absurdity upon another, a minor party candidate got attention this weekend for something even more bizarre than Biden’s bumbling or Trump’s trolling:

She got bit by a bat and is now undergoing painful treatment for rabies.

Her name is Jo Jorgensen, Libertarian Party presidential candidate. 

So far, reports on this development have focused on her Twitter account, where jokes abound. 

But what dominates her Twitter feed are the usual-for-Libertarians demands that she be included “in the debates.”

What debates?

Is anyone certain that there will be debates at all? Behind in the polls, Donald Trump seems eager to debate, but . . . Joe Biden?

Well, the Biden camp has agreed to three debates and the candidate says he is “so forward looking [sic] to have an opportunity to sit with the president, or stand with the president, in debates.” But Trump wants more.

And some Democrats want none, for in that same interview (which has gone more viral than rabies), as elsewhere, Biden made so many bizarre gaffes that most folks are beginning to assume that, against the Donald, Biden might wilt worse than a vampire in sunlight.

Biden, who will not even attend his own ostensible nominating convention, remains largely sequestered, under cover of panicky pandemic protocols. Unless the Democrats somehow replace him, the odds of there being debates at all seem low. 

And if Trump’s too much for Biden, what is a Libertarian to the two major parties? The Libertarians have been excluded for a reason.* Introduction of substantive, orthogonal-to-the-duopoly ideas into a national debate might show the major parties for what they are: cognitively challenged.

What a year! Bats.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Amusingly, Donald Trump called the exclusion of challenger parties “disgraceful” . . . back when he was in the Reform Party. I doubt he’d be on board the #LetHerSpeak campaign today — unless he was certain there would be no debates.

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Masking Upside Down

upside down, inside out, masks, surveillance

After initially being downgraded as worthless, perhaps even harmful, masks are now heavily promoted. There are even demands that the federal government step in to make mask-wearing mandatory.

Nationwide. 

Bad idea. And I could marshal a number of arguments to make the case. Indeed, one really sticks out: when the CCP virus is no longer the fear, but a bad flu season strikes at an unsuspecting populace, will the masks be required then, too? What’s the threshold? How do we decide when to go into all-panic mode?

How much better it would be to argue for mask-wearing as a matter of manners — consideration for others during pandemics or simply if ill — than as policeable government policy. 

And maybe we should look at it upside down. You know, like we can reflect on school closures in perpetuity as a possible blessing — because they encourage private and communal responses.

Maybe it is a downside up, but the current pro-mask state mandates mean that governments cannot stop you from wearing masks when they don’t want you to wear masks.

All around the world, but especially in Britain, and increasingly in the United States, mass surveillance with face-recognition AI is turning free peoples into the subjects of Big Brother’s watchful gaze.

Frightening.

And the easiest way to throw a monkey wrench into face-recognition systems is to wear masks when we are out.

They can hardly stop us when they are requiring masks because of contagion fears. So even if the forces of totalitarian control fail to mandate masks nationally, take the “new normal” as an excuse to mess up their larger agenda.

Big Brother?

You may lose this one after all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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