Month: June 2016

Now that I’m finally wrapping my head around the possibility of a Trump win, I assume the worst.  To believe in this man is to make an act of faith that I consider foolish, and I won’t do it.  If the Constitution, and liberty, are your core principles, you have no basis for hoping for a champion in Donald Trump.  The Presidency is not for egomaniacs and charlatans.  He believes, apparently, that he can make America great again.  He can do no such thing.  The American people made this country great, and will do so again if the government allows them.  The return of American greatness will require a massive rollback of the federal government, and there’s no reason to think he would do any such thing.  Cruz would have tried, and that’s why he should have won, but he didn’t.

Goldwater would have done it as well, and the Gipper tried.  But his first priority was winning the Cold War, and he couldn’t do both at the same time.  When Gingrich came to power in ’94 I had high hopes for a devolution of power, but it never happened with Clinton in the White House.  Bush 2 was a big business Republican, and big business really doesn’t mind big government.  For the most part, they get along just fine.  So I’ve been involved in politics for 52 years, and I’m still waiting for an attack on the Center to succeed.  I’ve decided it’s not going to happen, no matter who we elect.  If Cruz had won he would have had 30 strong allies in the 245 member Republican House Majority.  That’s not enough to hold a counter revolution, which is what is needed.

Congress is the enemy, regardless of Party.  The Democrats are mainly national socialists, and the Republicans are, by and large, place holders and whores.  Congress has all the power it needs.  A Congress with balls would impeach half the Supreme Court for violating their oath to protect and defend the Constitution.  None of them has the guts even to introduce the Articles of Impeachment.

I’m having a hard time maintaining interest in this election.  I can’t stand Clinton or Trump, and Johnson’s nowhere to be seen.  His silence is deafening.  Do something, man.

When I got back into politics in 2013 I had no particular interest in who won the Presidency in 2016, and after a bout of involvement, I’m back to where I started.  My main interest in 2016, all along, has been in the elections to State Legislatures, and here there’s some good news.  Our best chance of a pickup is Kentucky, where if we flip two House seats we’ll have majorities in both chambers.  We’re ready to go with our sponsors, and Kentucky would be easy pickings in 2017 for the Article V BBA.   And I think we win those House seats, even with Trump at the top of the ticket.  538.com gives Kentucky to Trump by eleven points, and I don’t generally argue with those guys.  The thing is, Clinton is hated in Kentucky, so we’re in good shape there.

Elsewhere, we’ve got problems.  The other states we’d hoped to flip were Maine, Minnesota and Washington, where 538.com has Clinton up by 10, 10, and 14.  The worst case scenario is the Democrats flipping a State back, like New Mexico.  New Mexico is one of our 28 states, but we got it a very long time ago.  The State Senate is already Democrat, and if the D’s take the House, they could rescind us.  I have other states on my worry list as well, but there’s nothing to do but sit back and watch this whole sorry spectacle.  Nothing good will come of it, and all we can hope is that out of the wreckage we have renewed interest in Article V, which is, and has been, the only solution to our problems all along.

Most everyone agrees that this is the craziest year in politics they’ve ever seen.  For Article V, that’s a good thing.  It’s the Last Resort, the Constitution’s emergency brake, and it’s never been used for a reason.  Up til now, there was always hope it wouldn’t be needed.  But those days are gone.  This year the Constitution’s only champion is a quixotic Libertarian.

Constitutional conservatives may not have a candidate, but they have a cause  —  Article V.  It’s time to pull the cord.

 

 

What’s in it for me?

This is what will decide this election.  Voters decide based on self interest.  Even though they don’t like a candidate, they’ll vote for them if they believe they will benefit somehow.  That’s why Trump, in spite of his manifest disqualification for office, has a 20-25% chance of winning (according to Nate the Great).   And, for some reason, a lot of voters think a Clinton win would be good for them, personally, so they’ll vote for her in spite of their dislike of her.

Trump is an economic nationalist, and this is proving to be one of his strengths.  After WW II the United States subordinated its economic nationalism in order to win the Cold War.  Our trade policies were strategic, and were somewhat divorced from our own self interest.  It made sense at the time, but needs a total do over, by real free traders who will be unabashedly promoting American economic self interest.

I think those are the facts, and Trump is exploiting them ruthlessly.  If this is what the election is about, he wins.  There are a whole hell of a lot of people who are pissed off about the loss of work to overseas.  Their anger may be misplaced, and in some cases they’re Luddites, but there are a whole lot of them.

I’ve been operating under the assumption that once Trump has been completely exposed as the liar and fraud that he is, that he’ll sink in the polls.  Now I’m not so sure.  Maybe people are so completely and totally pissed off that they don’t care.  Gov. “Fast Eddie” Edwards of Louisiana used to sat that the only way he could lose an election would be to get caught in a room with a live boy or a dead woman.  Maybe Trump is like old Fast Eddie was, bullet proof.

A few weeks after I got to Europe in the fall of 1967 I smuggled a Mercedes from Munich to Tehran.  I was working for a gang of Iranians.  I’ll never forget coming across the Turkish border from Bulgaria.  Bulgaria was dirt poor, but it was European, part of the West.  Turkey had an entirely different feel.  It was an alien culture to the only one I knew.  Everything seemed different.  I took a bus back to Istanbul from Tehran, and got to make a lot of stops in little towns in rural Turkey.  On one sunny day I took off my shirt to soak in some sun.  Man, did that get some ugly stares.

I hitchhiked from Istanbul down to Greece.  Back to the West.  It was a great relief.  What I learned in my little trip is that Islam and the West are night and day.  I think it all comes down to women.  We treat women as equals, they treat them like chattel.  That affects everything, and is why they’ll never successfully modernize.

My policy to the Muslim world is benign neglect, interrupted by occasional police actions.

. . . to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?

For Englishmen, money isn’t everything.  Brexit’s the proof.  For a majority of the English, at least, part of their soul is their national identity.  It’s the same, to a greater or lesser degree, in every country that deserves the name.  I’m a husband, a father, and a Christian American, in that order.  I share my human identity with about seven billion other people, so my loyalty to humanity is attenuated.  I’ve got one wife, three children, and one country, and those bonds are strong.

The title of Tom Wolfe’s most recent novel, Back to Blood,  was prophetic.  I think we’re going toward smaller and tighter communities.  It’s just a fact of life  —  people are more comfortable around people they have things in common with.  Article V is part of this movement, as it attempts to take power from the Center and distribute it among the 50 States.

NATO is walking dead, the UN is a joke, and the EU is on its way to the junk pile.  And the 21st century is only getting started.  Wouldn’t it be nice if it was a century of devolution?

Babbie and I spent the weekend in Seattle, visiting in laws to be.  Traffic on Sunday was hell because of their Gay Pride Parade, which is a very big deal, with thousands of  spectators along dozens of blocks.  Seattle is becoming more and more like San Francisco.  This is what the people of Seattle want, and it’s their choice.  I live in a part of the Far West called Gold Country, and we don’t want to be like San Francisco.  Far from it.  Our choice should be respected  by all those yuppies in Seattle.  But they want my money and my guns, for openers, so they are my political enemies.

Lew and son Kirk Uhler and Loren Enns are teaming up for an August road trip through Wyoming, Montana and Idaho to try to drum up money and support for the Article V BBA.  Lew is hoping to get Foster Friess to have a function in Jackson, and Greg Casey is setting something up in Idaho.  I’ll see if I can get something doing in Bozeman.  Lew is now 85, I believe, and is rededicating himself to the cause that he’s been leading for 35 years.  There’s just no quit in him.

By a happy coincidence, Babbie and I will be in Bozeman so that she can assist our daughter-in-law to be in preparing for the Labor Day wedding.  Our visit coincides perfectly with Lew’s plans, so I’ll get a chance to introduce him to my family.

Istanbul demonstrates the necessity of an American led police action in the Middle East to wipe out ISIS.  A while back some retired general said the 82nd Airborne could get it done in 72 hours, but that would require a President with balls.  In WW II the 82nd had a deserved reputation as a unit that played by its own rules, no holds barred.  You’d have to let these guys loose if you want it done quickly, and Obama would never do that.   So we’ll do nothing, and from now until the election we’ll probably have several more Istanbuls.  It’s almost as though the Lord is looking out for Donald Trump.  No, that’s blasphemous.  Things just keep breaking his way.

The Benghazi Report reveals Barack the Bloodless.  He’s in the situation room, and he knows what’s happening.  He gives some orders and walks away from it.  The next day he didn’t have time for his Daily Intelligence Briefing.  He really didn’t care that much about it.  He had a fundraiser to go to, a campaign to run.

A man ambivalent, at best, about the country he leads.

If the American colonies had been given seats in Parliament, there would not have been taxation without representation, and the Revolution of 1776 might have been avoided.  But it was impractical, because of the distances and travel times involved.

Today there’s no reason the English could not send Congressmen to Washington to represent them.  Great Britain is losing Scotland, with Northern Ireland a question mark.  There may be logical ways to provide what remains with multiple states, such as separate statehood for Londonistan and Wales, so that total representation in the United States Senate would consist of a total of ten Senators.

Rather than leap into this new arrangement, a transitional bilateral treaty could begin a gradual confederation.  Other parts of the Anglosphere might want to participate as well.  James Bennett, and his The Anglosphere Challenge, deserve another look.  The predictions in Zeihan’s The Accidental Superpower are unfolding before our eyes.

While this idea of English statehood is only semi-serious, it represents one of many possibilities that Brexit includes.  The world changed with that vote.  How it changes is up to the people who made it happen.

Brexit was an attack on the Center from both left and right, with disgruntled Tory and Labour voters uniting to form a majority.  Trump, Cruz and Sanders voters also span the ideological spectrum, united in their disdain for the corruption and arrogance of the political establishment, aka the Center.

The EU was morphing into a multi-national superstate, which spelled its doom.  Its demise is the end of such experiments.  The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are other recent examples of the failure of such entities.  Federalism, localism and the fully sovereign nation-state are the future.

Statehood for England is a mind attack, and just one of many possibilities as the Old World Order breaks up.  The last time something like this happened was a little over a hundred years ago, as the Russian, German, Austrian and Ottoman empires collapsed after World War I.  The international response was the League of Nations, a pathetic joke, and some toothless  disarmament.  We’ll do better this time.  With change, there is hope.

The Center cannot hold.

 

After months of freezing, starving and eventually cannibalizing one another, in February of 1847 the survivors of the Donner Party were rescued by fellow Americans from California.  Thirteen year old Virginia Reed was among them, and although she was skin and bones, and barely alive, one of the young men who saved her asked her to marry him.  She declined, but was a bride within a year and had nine children.  Virginia Street in downtown San Jose is named for her.  Three months  after her rescue she wrote her cousin Mary back in Springfield, Illinois, “Tell the girls that this is the greatest place for marrying they ever saw and that they must come to California if they want to marry.”  (From Bernard DeVoto’s “The Year of Decision, 1846”.  That is a book you should read if you’re interested in this part of the country.)

The Far West has always been a good place for a girl who wants to marry.  The men who explored and eventually settled it wanted wives, and families, but it was a tough sell.  When women did show up they were treated well, and the culture of the West has always been partial to the fair sex.  At least, that’s the way I see it.

And, of course, it stretches all the way back to the founding of this country in Virginia.  When the Jamestown survivors finally figured out how to make a living, by growing tobacco, the colony started to modestly prosper.  But wives were needed, and the first boat load of them arrived, around two hundred strong,  in about 1619.  They were young and healthy women recruited for the task in urban England, mainly, and upon arrival they were all immediately paired up and married off.  The women who undertook that adventure are among the Founding Mothers of America, and many of us are descended from them.  The men who came here first always understood that you can’t have a society without women, and it’s best to treat them right if you expect them to come to the New World.  At least if they’re English women, who were as liberated as much as any woman in the 17th century was.

Because these women were English, they created a society that was based on the Absolute Nuclear Family, which the ancient English had adopted from their Anglo-Saxon invaders.  This meant that every woman was free to choose.  And when she chose a husband, he was expected to carve out a living for their family, and acquire a homestead apart from his parents or hers.  And when they had children of their own none of them were automatically entitled to anything from their parents.  They might, or might not, inherit.  These were large families back then, and the younger boys were on their own.  This is why early Americans were always land hungry.  Every new generation needed more land.  You could say that the tipping point in favor of the American Revolution was the British determination to prevent the Americans from spreading West, into lands reserved for the Indians.  George Washington personally “owned” vast land tracts in the west, and he didn’t want to give them up.

Because of the Founder’s Effect, the attitudes of the first settlers of this country became the basis for our American culture.  The Absolute Nuclear Family is the American family.  And women have always been held in high regard by actual American men.

I think Trump has always objectified women, and it’s one source of my dislike of him.  When he was younger his motto with women was “Treat ’em like s—.”  He apparently was a serial adulterer, and liked to brag about the well known married women he slept with.  Oh, and if you aren’t a super model, you aren’t up to the Donald’s standards.   Add it all up, and it’s no wonder he’s got a problem with women voters.  They can see right through him.

Women will save us from Trump.