Well, I’m not willing to try Palmer’s rehabilitation.
Now what, Bill?
Category: Politics
Trying not to start the public floggings
Hell To Pay
Seen as part of this article:
“The real question is not whether Trump will leave office in the event that he loses, but whether Democrats will accept the result if he wins.”
Hell, they didn’t accept his election in 2016, so expect the Loony Hysteria Switch to be pushed from 10 to 15.
It may involve mass rioting — worse than at present — and overt rebellion. Clean yer guns and make sure of your ammo stocks: this could get interesting.
Quote Of The Day
From Lileks:
“What the modern hard left wants is the same they’ve wanted since the French Revolution: claim the present in the name of the future, repudiate the past, then own the past, redefine it to their terms, then make it off limits for discussion unless you keep within the lines they’ve defined. Discussion of the past outside of the boundaries is counter-revolutionary, and proper consciousness has to be displayed at all times. “
An example (still from JL):
“But is it possible now to discuss motel signage and architecture without discussing discriminatory rental policies?”
I have a better idea. Discuss whatever you want, without ever checking your speech or writing for anything that these assholes may think is doubleplusungood (to use one of their literary epithets).
Hell, it’s what I do every single day, here on this back porch of mine, and I encourage you to do likewise in your everyday conversations and thoughts.
Fiddling Time?
As NYFC seems to be about to crash and burn, and given that the situation seems to be echoing in other large, similarly-Democrat-governed cities and states around the country, it raises rather an interesting discussion point.
Should the federal government even get involved? (That explains the hidden Nero reference in the title, by the way.)
In the first instance, we all know that as a federal republic, the states have a great deal of autonomy when it comes to various policy initiatives and experiments — the famed laboratories of democracy of which USSC Judge Louis Brandeis once spoke. Logically speaking (I know, I know), should a state like New York have no problem with abolishing the NYPD, should it not be regarded as such an experiment? Ditto Seattle, where Pantifa seems to have created an enclave within the city and declared it a Soviet collective or something. In both cases, the attitude of these states’ respective governors is best characterized by a “boys will be boys” laissez-faire response.
My question is: in the absence of any state action, is there a compelling reason for the federal government to step in and end such experiments?
I’m not sure there is. And yes, there’s a certain degree of Schadenfreude involved, in that I know that this foolishness will end in tears; but at the same time, I also have a kind of Let Africa Sink attitude towards the whole thing — as long as when the cities implode, the federal government is not expected to be part of either the deconstruction of said stupidity, nor the mini-Marshall Plan that will be required to rebuild the fools’ paradises.
The question arising from the above, therefore, is: as the nation’s economy has greatly decentralized away from the large urban centers, are cities still that important to our country? Strip away the romantic public relations veneer, and I think we can find that they aren’t.
Take Wall Street, for example. With the growth of the Internet and the ability to conduct stock trades remotely, i.e. away from the actual floor of the NYSE, I can think of no compelling reason why the stock exchange should occupy any real estate at all. The importance of New York as a financial center is not what it was, say, in the 20th century, and if the Wuhan virus has taught us anything, it is the degree to which the Internet has taken away the need for such centralization.
I know, it sucks for those fools wealthy people who plonked down $5 million for that 2BD 2BA condo on the Upper West Side, and who would have to pull up the drawbridges against hordes of rampaging looters every night; but quite frankly, I don’t think there’s going to be a great deal of sympathy for these people in the population at large — even though The Donald is one of those same people. (His hotels, for one thing, are going to go under in such a scenario, but the vagaries of fortune of overpriced urban real estate investments are not, as a rule, the concern of suburbanites and country folk in Ohio, Missouri or Utah.)
So, to quote a one-time quasi-revolutionary: “You say you want a revolution?” Go ahead, have fun. Just don’t expect taxpayers from Texas, South Dakota or Arizona to bail you out when it all goes pear-shaped; because while you’re screwing around with anarcho-socialist communes (which have always — always — failed in the past), we Deplorables in Flyover Country will be too busy making America great again to have the time or money to waste on helping you out. And contrary to your expectations, American greatness does not depend solely on places like Seattle or NYFC anymore.
Nose To Nose?
And then we have things like this to laugh at:
Far-left actor Tom Arnold took to Twitter over the weekend to announce it is time for “white liberal men” to borrow their dad’s hunting rifles “and go nose to nose with Trump’s gang of misfit tools” in the wake of the death of George Floyd, amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests.
“2nd Amendment is for everyone including black men with long guns but it’s fucking time for us white liberal men to stand up for our brothers & sisters,” tweeted Arnold. “Borrow our dad’s hunting rifles & go nose to nose with Trump’s gang of misfit tools.”
Actually, Tom, we Trump Misfits know that hunting rifles are really not the proper weapons to be used at arms’ length — unless, of course, a bayonet is attached to something like one of my own “hunting rifles”:
I’m too old to mess with close-quarter fighting anyway, and prefer to engage at, shall we say, a little further than arm’s length:
But your call to arms has been noted, Mr. Arnold. Go ahead, keep prodding the bear, and let’s see how it turns out.
Failure
For those who’ve seen Band of Brothers, there’s a very telling conversation between Carville and Winters, as the sergeant complains about his platoon commander, Lt. Dyke:
“It’s not that he makes bad decisions; it’s that he doesn’t make any decisions at all.”
Any time you see that situation in a manager, any manager, it is a flashing neon sign of incompetence.
One of the reasons why Marxists make such poor managers is that if they are presented with a situation which cannot be addressed by Party doctrine, they are largely indecisive. Even worse, if that doctrine runs counter to good management, they will use that as the underpinning for their indecisiveness. We saw this a lot under Obama, who was pathetically underqualified as a manager, having had no executive experience in his entire life before becoming POTUS. More often than not, when faced with a decision, he simply froze and allowed events to dictate the outcome, even if that outcome was inimical to the interests of the country he was supposed to be governing. (And to prove my point above, his Marxist doctrine held that the United States was a malignant force in world affairs, so allowing harm to befall the country was — to his mind — actually the proper thing to do as it “corrected” or atoned for America’s past sins.)
And of course, today we see the same thing happening in New York City, where the doctrinaire Marxist Mayor De Blasio faces a situation of riots, looting and general lawlessness and mayhem on the city’s streets. Bob McManus at the NY Post sums it up perfectly:
In 1991, anti-Semitic rioting in Crown Heights took two lives and then ran for three full days and nights — allegedly with the approval of then-Mayor David Dinkins. He denies he let it run, but the fact is that when he finally ordered his deputy police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, to end it, it ended.
So even belated firmness works.
But in December 2014, ever-escalating anti-cop protest turmoil was tolerated — even wink-and-nod encouraged — by de Blasio’s City Hall. Each day was more violent than the one before — and it didn’t end until a suicidal lunatic drawn by the disorder opened fire on two cops sitting in a patrol car in Brooklyn, killing them both.
Feckless acquiescence of the sort we’re seeing now bred tragedy — and worked only insofar as the shock of the assassinations took the steam out of the demonstrations, and they faded on their own.
So there are two models here.– De Blasio can go the firmness route — and Cuomo, who has never before hesitated to interfere in the mayor’s business, can back him up. That is, if need be, he can force de Blasio’s hand.
– Or they both can stand by and let the rioters roll.Then there will be more looting, more burning, more victims — and an ever-escalating sense that the city is incapable of preserving the public peace and that it lacks the courage even to try.
I’ll take “stand by and let the rioters roll” for $10,000, Alex.
And the reason I can be so confident of my prediction is that De Blasio’s Marxism puts him on the side of the “people” — in this case, the rioters and looters who are either protesting racism — which he has to support — or else going after The Man (looting Macy’s and redistributing wealth) — which he also supports. (That he would have the tacit support of his state’s neo-Marxist Governor Cuomo is likewise a given.)
I should point out, seeing as I started with a historical anecdote, that the situation we now face in New York and other socialist-Democrat cities is pretty much the same as Chile faced during the presidency of Marxist Salvador Allende. Unfortunately, Donald Trump is no Augusto Pinochet (as much as his Marxist opponents would like to paint him as such), so it is unlikely that what saved Chile from Communism will be replayed here, to save the United States.
But tell me that the thought of Mayor De Blasio being tossed out of a helicopter at 2,000 feet over Long Island Sound doesn’t give you at least a mild frisson of pleasure…
Lest anyone think I’m being too radical, let me point out that if the Marxists could do it, they’d do it to you. Except that they don’t do small stuff like helicopters; no, they have things like gulags, “education camps” and insane asylums for their opposition — i.e. oppression and suppression on a mass scale.
And if you don’t believe me, I have a New York City bridge to sell you — if it’s still standing and hasn’t been burned up yet, that is.
Interestingly enough, what we need now is not leadership of the Dick Winters type: cool, cerebral and logical. No, what we need is more Lt. Ronald Speirs: get in and get the job done, regardless of how many assholes you have to kill.