THE COLUMN: Roll, Tumbrels, Roll

Ten years ago, back in the halcyon days when we simpletons believed the Republicans were at least some of the time an opposition party, and that Willard Mitt Romney was a man of probity and character, I wrote the following in the pages of National Review Online about the election that was about to take place. The piece was entitled "Crush Them."

Conservatives have a rare opportunity tomorrow to do something they signally failed to do in the landslide elections of 1972 and 1984: finish the job. Nixon’s victory was vitiated by Watergate and quickly revenged by Woodward and Bernstein, leading to his replacement in 1974 by Jerry Ford, a man who exactly nobody thought was qualified to be president of the United States, probably including Ford himself. Ford led to Jimmy Carter, whose ineptitude and weakness in turn lead to Ronald Reagan, who swept Carter away in 1980 and then smashed Walter Mondale and the Democrats to powder in 1984. 

And then, having won a famous victory, conservatives went home and left it to the establishment GOP in the form of another man who never should have been president, George H. W. Bush, to fritter away the fruits of ideological victory and be supplanted by Bill Clinton.

In retrospect, of course, William Jefferson Blythe III was Pericles of Athens compared to Barack Obama Joe Biden, who far more than Clinton has revealed the true face of contemporary American left-liberalism in all its coercive ugliness: a blizzard of executive orders; the deployment of the regulatory agencies that have (in the words of the Declaration of Independence) “sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance”; and the naked Marxist appeals to race and class envy. The most anti-American of American presidents has run the most un-American of campaigns.

Change only a couple of words and it's déjà vu all over again: shuffling, senile Joe Biden really is the zombified embodiment of Hussein's third term, staggering, one hopes, toward utter electoral disaster later today as long-suffering Americans finally awake and rise up against the tyranny of les aristocrates who have been torturing us these past two years and more. A la lanterne!

As my regular readers know, I have long described the Democrat Party—not just its lawless and fascistic modern incarnation, but going all the way back to its inception when Aaron Burr, the sitting vice president, a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, notorious traitor, and the founder of Tammany Hall, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804—as "a criminal organization masquerading as a political party." Indeed, I even wrote a small monograph concerning its violent, seditious history, still available on Kindle.

Now, after two years of Biden, everyone can see just how awful the Democrats really are. Not simply the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition, but (as they were during the Civil War, which they started) a movement actively hostile to the founding principles of the country that continues to give them shelter and legitimacy. Indeed, they have become the Anti-American Party, advocating unfettered abortion, public criminality, political violence, economic destruction, radical egalitarianism, an obsessive racialism that would make a Nazi blush, open and undefended borders, and the abrogation of the Constitution: a document they've long despised and which they are now actively trying to repeal.

As with the Great Reset (get your copy of Against the Great Reset here), the Democrats under the unholy trio of Biden. Chuck Schumer, and organized-crime-adjacent princess Nancy d'Alesandro Pelosi, together with their ideological flunkies in Congress and statehouses across the land, seized upon the uncertainty surrounding the Chinese-originated virus known as Covid-19 to suspend the first amendment and impose draconian lockdowns based on absolutely nothing but the word of a snake-oil peddling bureaucratic lifer named Anthony Fauci and a gullible president of spectacularly bad personnel judgment, Donald Trump.

No need now to limn the devastation—personal, economic, social, educational—that the Covidiots unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. Already, by April 2020, it was clear to some of us that the Covid panic was not a medical issue but a political weapon; it needed to be dealt with summarily before the evil of the "new normal" Leftist mentality fully took hold. Therefore, in the April 28, 2020 issue of the Epoch Times, I wrote:

From the available data, and the increasing preponderance of the evidence, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which is commonly known as the novel coronavirus and causes the disease COVID-19, has turned out to be only slightly more lethal than a normal seasonal flu—but the damage it’s done to our nation’s economy, our Constitution, and our sense of national pride has been incalculable.

Forget the pandemic—it’s time to flatten the panic curve. The fact is, the United States has just gotten a good long look at the ugly face of fascism, brought on by an overreliance on medical professionals with great taste in scarves, preening for the cameras and basking in media adoration, but without an ounce of domestic policy sense.

They’ve been aided and abetted by a hostile, ignorant White House press corps—when all you know is politics, everything looks political—intent on courting a coup against the president and determined to keep alternative viewpoints from the public as long as they can.

In this, they have willing collaborators in Big Tech, which has inflicted its peculiar brand of censorship via YouTube and Facebook to make sure nothing escapes the Washington bubble’s imprimatur regarding what constitutes acceptable public opinion.

This was my advice to president Trump:

That’s where the president comes in. The president can’t, on his own toot, command that the country reopen tomorrow. Under our federalist system, that authority lies with the governors, some of whom, such as Kristi Noem in South Dakota, never closed their states in the first place. (“I took an oath to uphold the United States Constitution,” she said.) But he can lead by example—by relishing his role as the chief executive and defender of the Bill of Rights, and making sure that freedom under the rule of law, not “safety,” remains the primary American value.

If the president wants to win reelection, he’s right to stop jousting with the press corps, and instead to break out Old Glory and announce that this unconstitutional and economy-busting overreaction is over—and will never happen again.

He didn't and that's why he isn't president any more. Had he taken command of the situation, instead of standing there beside the malignant dwarf Fauci and his wicked-witch assistant, Deborah Birx, as if watching his own funeral, Trump might still be president. Instead he allowed the Democrats to stifle dissent, punish objectors, mask children like slaves, force elderly couples to suffer and die apart, restrict travel and destroy whole swaths of the American economy, and then watched himself lose to a bitter, doddering, incontinent non-entity a few months later. And not just lose the presidency, but the Senate (and thus the Congress) as well. 

Trump's gone, but the people who did this to us are not—not yet, anyway. And now these villains have the chutzpah to request amnesty for their sins: 

In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks.  Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.

Of course you knew. You all knew. And yet you endorsed the social ostracization of dissenters—"deniers," to use the loaded word hijacked from the Holocaust by people who ought to know better. You fought every rollback. You unleashed shrieking hordes of Walking Dead Karens to accost their neighbors on the streets and in the shops and literally scream at them. You went from zero to World War Z in the blink of an eye. 

"But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society," bleats the Atlantic's writer, Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University.

And that might be the biggest lie of them all. Anyone's who dealt with the Left for more than five minutes understands that mendacity is their stock-in-trade, which makes Biden the perfect president for our times. This is a man who, after all, can literally say of coal-fired electricity generating plants, "We're going to be shutting down these plants all across America," and then have his hapless press secretary insist a few hours later that her senescent boss's words were "twisted" and that of course the man who so gleefully shut down the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office really loves the fossil fuel industry. Hey, he's from Scranton! Coal country! 

If and when their bald-faced deceptions are found out, the next step is to fall back on their old standby, a plea for "tolerance." But tolerance is a protective coloring, not a virtue; it doesn't mean "compassion" (although that's not a virtue either), it means the process by which the breaking point of anything is ascertained. You reach full tolerance when the wing busts off your airplane and you're sent screaming to your death. You never want to go full "tolerance," because if you do you will die. Oster again:

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. 

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty... Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve... The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.

No, let's not. Instead, let's vote as many of you out of office today as possible. Let's round up and fire en masse the malicious thugs and petty party functionaries and time-serving rent-seekers and the cabal of Ivy League-educated media punks and poetasters who view themselves as part of the Democrat machine and daily proclaim their fealty to the Party. Let's publicly call out the neo- and cultural-Marxists who adhere to the Brezhnev Doctrine and will never willingly take one step back in their pursuit of "social justice." For them, every Democrat executive order is Order 227, for which they are supposed to fight to the end.

So let's make them do it. Give them what they want. No surrender, no quarter, no mercy. Fire them, strip them of their pensions, blacklist them. Kick them off Twitter and hound them on Facebook, as they have done unto us. Banish them from the town square. Inscribe their names on the Wall of Shame. RICO them and their infernal political cells. Go full Kurtz on them, literarily speaking. Hell, make sure they never eat lunch in this town again. Remember: they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit.

I concluded my NRO piece thus:

It’s not enough for the GOP to win tomorrow. It needs to win big, a win so convincing that even the Left won’t be able to explain it away. The definition of victory in war is not a 50.1 percent majority that allows the other side to keep fighting — it’s the battleship Missouri, on whose deck the losing side signs articles of capitulation. The modern Left — the unholy spawn of ’30s gangland and ’60s academic Marxism — must be forced to its knees in surrender.

There’s a honored place in our political system for a leftist party, one that pushes for improvement in areas that need improving, but not one devoted to revolutionary “fundamental change.” A vote for Romney tomorrow is a vote against the socialist elements that seized control of the JFK/Scoop Jackson Democratic party in 1972, and has worked against America’s best interests ever since. A vote for Romney tomorrow is a vote for a restoration of the old Jacksonian — Andrew, that is — Democratic party, a true populist party shorn of its Communist accretions that is every bit as all-American as the other guys. Unless and until this happens, though, the modern donkeys will continue their war on the Constitution, convinced they are on the side of the angels, and taking solace in the late Ted Kennedy’s words, “the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

It’s up to the electorate tomorrow to show them that the dream is really a nightmare, from which it’s time to awake, that the cause of America always endures, and the work of restoring our founding principles begins anew today. 

Maybe I'll be right this time. It's up to you; it's up to all of us. Finish the job.

THE COLUMN: 'They Only Eat Rat'

UPDATED

When we Baby Boomers entered first grade back in the early/middle 1950s, it was not unusual for us to encounter forty or fifty other children competing for classroom space while a single harried nun or teacher herded us little darlings into some semblance of alphabetical order, made us take our seats, and began instruction. Crammed into newly built classrooms to accommodate our unprecedented numbers, cheek to jowl with a bunch of strangers, and constantly skirmishing with others for the teacher's attention, a place at the drinking fountain, or just a spot in the lunchroom, we hated each other on sight—and, like too many rats trapped in too small an area with not enough food, we've been fighting with each other ever since.

Now here we are, in our seventies, and we're still strapped together in this ghastly generational pas des millions. Some of us have died off, of course, but the remnants of the legendary pig in a python generation are still wending our way through the snake's entrails, tussling with each other as we pass through the intestines of the body politic. And yet, to our surprise, we still find ourselves outranked by those born years, even decades before us: our country currently has a 79-year-old president, a 75-year-old principal GOP contender, an 82-year-old speaker of the House, an 80-year-old Senate minority leader, an 88-year-old senior senator from California, an 88-year-old senior senator from Iowa, and an 80-year old junior senator from Vermont who has his eye on the White House. Meanwhile, waiting in wings like a sodden, road-company Lady Macbeth, is 2016's loser, Hillary Clinton, 74, ready to step over the bodies if and when they ever drop.

Geezer eyes still on the prize

There's no love lost among them, but like the Struldbrugs of Luggnagg in Swift's Gulliver's Travels, they can neither quit nor, seemingly, die—only keep aging in perpetuity, at each other's throats forever. 

After this preface, he gave me a particular account of the STRULDBRUGS among them. He said, "they commonly acted like mortals till about thirty years old; after which, by degrees, they grew melancholy and dejected, increasing in both till they came to fourscore... When they came to fourscore years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection... Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passions."

There is a certain amount of truth in the old saw that with age comes wisdom. And it's also true that our word "senate"—a body of elder statesmen—has the same root as "senility." But at this point in our nation's history, we have gone beyond mature age and into the realm of the Grim Reaper, with Washington, D.C., having replaced Florida as God's Waiting Room. A nation that was founded by young, vigorous men, most of them in their prime (in 1776, Washington was 44; Jefferson, 33; Hamilton, 21; James Monroe, 18) and with their lives on the line, has been co-opted by snarling, barely articulate, grudge-ridden rent-seekers desperately hanging onto their livelihoods, and to hell with everybody else.

Hence the cage match now being played out in the runups to the fall congressional elections. Thanks to the manifest malignancy that is the Biden administration, everyone is looking past this November and focusing on 2024, when our rancid political system could possibly stage a presidential election featuring an 81-year-old Joe Biden vs. a 77-year-old Donald Trump, both of them at that point beyond the average American male life expectancy. What do do? Take a moment and listen:

Could there possibly be a spectacle more unedifying than a (literally) terminally senile Biden scratching and clawing at a bitter, revanchist Trump, the pair of them wrestling over not the future of the country—why would they care? They won't live to see it—but over the 2016 and 2020 elections. Russian collusion! Dominion voting machines! Hunter's laptop from hell! January 6th! Get off my lawn! It would make us all remember what fun the past eight years were, and recall how little desire we should have to relive them.

Let's start with barely-there Biden, a continuing embarrassment to the country, with him the only one who's not in on the joke. He's always been a classless boor, the Fredo Corleone ("I'm smart! And I want respect!") of the Democrat Party, hitherto passed over until suddenly, two years ago, the criminal organization masquerading as a political party ran out of godfathers. By now, though, the sheer destructiveness of this man is apparent to everybody, so cue the New York Times to instruct the faithful that it's time for him to go:

To nearly all the Democrats interviewed, the president’s age — 79 now, 82 by the time the winner of the 2024 election is inaugurated — is a deep concern about his political viability. They have watched as a commander in chief who built a reputation for gaffes has repeatedly rattled global diplomacy with unexpected remarks that were later walked back by his White House staff, and as he has sat for fewer interviews than any of his recent predecessors.

“The presidency is a monstrously taxing job and the stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be a major issue,” said David Axelrod, the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s two winning presidential campaigns.

The kiss of death from Jake Lingle is no laughing member, and a signal to the Democrats to begin greasing the skids and start prepping somebody. Anybody. Bueller? Sanders has the same geriatric problem as Biden, as does Elizabeth Warren and of course Hillary. Meanwhile, their kiddie corps of Li'l Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not ready for prime time, and as for Kamala Harris:

Meanwhile, the New York Post last week came out with an editorial explicitly calling on Trump to step back from his increasingly hopeless 2024 nomination quest and for the Republicans to look to the future: 

Trump has become a prisoner of his own ego. He can’t admit his tweeting and narcissism turned off millions. He won’t stop insisting that 2020 was “stolen” even though he’s offered no proof that it’s true. Respected officials like former Attorney General Bill Barr call his rants “nonsense.” This isn’t just about Liz Cheney. Mitch McConnell, Betsy DeVos, Mark Meadows — they all knew Trump was delusional. His own daughter and son-in-law testified it was bull.

Trump’s response? He insults Barr, and dismisses Ivanka as “checked out.” He clings to more fantastical theories, such as Dinesh D’Souza’s debunked “2,000 Mules,” even as recounts in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin confirm Trump lost.

This is not to underplay the former president's very real contributions to the Republic, including most notably saving it from Hillary Clinton and her flying-monkey media squadrons and black ops practitioners. Trump was the only one who could beat her, and he was the only Republican candidate she could have lost to. And there's no question that the 2020 was "stolen" fair and square by the Democrats doing exactly the things I predicted they would  in my Sept. 7, 2020 column for the Epoch Times:

The pattern is clear: In close races, the Democrats follow the totals very closely, until they know exactly how many votes they have to fabricate or manufacture, et voila! Who needs cemeteries when [a friendly judge or two] can decree extra time to benefit the Democrats? In fact, at least since the middle of the 19th century, the Tammany Party has been rigging elections, intimidating voters at the polls, having their partisans vote multiple times, and conjuring marked ballots out of thin air. 

The reality is that the Republicans must be ready to combat levels of fraud that Plunkitt and the old Tammany sachems could only have dreamed of. For it’s clear, under the guise of “protecting our democracy” that the Democrats will instead abide by their real slogan—“by any means necessary”—to rid themselves of this meddlesome president.

Trump, in fact, lost in 2020 the same way he won in 2016: at the margins in a few key swing states, where this time they knew he was coming. Paradoxically, the more Trump continues to bark about the last election, the less likely he is to win the next one. This, however, doesn't seem to be going to stop him. According to Rolling Stone, Trump is mulling announcing his candidacy even before the midterms, and doing it in Florida, to boot:

Donald Trump in recent months has been telling confidants that he may launch his 2024 presidential campaign early — and that he’s considering launching it in Florida to stick it to Gov. Ron DeSantis. Trump has kicked around staging a large, flashy launch rally (with fireworks, of course) that would announce his White House bid before the 2022 midterm elections, according to three sources familiar with the matter.

People who’ve spoken to Trump say that one reason he’s eying the Sunshine State is to assert his dominance over an ascendant DeSantis, who — if they both run in 2024 — would likely be the former president’s most formidable competitor in a primary fight for the GOP nomination. One of the sources said Trump’s motivation is to show the governor “who the boss is” in the modern-day GOP.

Good Lord, what a terrible idea. Trump's last, greatest, and noblest service to his country would be to announce, shortly after the mid-terms, that he will not be a candidate in '24, but will crisscross the land to campaign for the party, starting at the top with DeSantis, 46, for president of the United States. He might even quote John F. Kennedy: "the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans." 

Otherwise, the Boomer cage match continues, the country slides further into the python's bowels, and all we have to eat is rat.