Changing Tide

I have to admit that I’m starting to lean this way myself:

Donald Trump is being largely blamed for the midterm red wave that never happened, with Republican strategists pinning the party’s underwhelming performance in the 2022 midterms on his selection of ‘flawed’ candidates. 

Trump endorsed some 300 candidates, held 30 rallies and raised millions of dollars for his ‘army’ of candidates. It was supposed to be the amuse-bouche for a Presidential run, intended to set him up for a sweeping 2024 success.  

But overnight, many of Trump’s chosen candidates crashed and burned.

It seems to me that Trump is becoming like Her Filthiness Hillary Ciinton, the “broken glass” candidate (in that people would crawl over broken glass to vote against them).

Where there was previously no strong candidate to back in the fight against socialism, Trump was the default because all the Stupid Party could bring to the [ahem] party were candidates of the Romney/Mitch McConnell stripe — establishment GOPe drones.

Thanks to Trump, however, we have more radical leaders like Kristi Noem and of course Ron DeSantis around who, provided we could actually vote them into power, might continue or even improve upon the works of President Trump.

And let’s be honest:  another Trump similarity to Hillary is age:  in 2024 he will be 78, and if Biden is anything to go by, we do not need another octogenarian in the White House, no matter how energetic he may seem at the moment.  (A depressing thing about advanced age — ask me how I know this — is that two, three or four years has a far more radical effect upon one’s physical- and mental capabilities at 65+ years than they had at age 40 or even 50.)  Trump would be 79 if he were to win the next election, but 81 by the next mid-term election.  Could he still be as effective?  Hell, given the obstacles the Swamp would throw at him, could he be effective at all?

I have no problem with Trump continuing to hold rallies all over the place, as long as they support the MAGA philosophy and not his candidacy.  But that ain’t gonna happen.

And given that the supposed “red tsunami” turned out to be more of a pinkish trickle (a topic for another time), there’s no guarantee that even a conservative maestro like Ron DeSantis would be successfully elected.

Is it too early for a second gin?  I think not.

Florida vs. Davos

Here’s FuturePOTUS Ron DeSantis, talking about how conservative states rule, and the best way to bear the Internationalists.

I think the difference between then and now is, government is bigger and more powerful. But these agencies, particularly in law enforcement and national security, have been weaponized, so that they really represent the enforcement arm of one particular faction of society against the rest of us. And you do not have equal zeal with which they wield their power. People talk about the deep state like it’s some conspiracy. It’s not a conspiracy. What we have right now is the logical result of having an absence of constitutional accountability in the administrative state. And basically what human nature will do, of course, power is going to accumulate there. The founding fathers would have told us this if we had told them what was going on. So that’s the logical outgrowth of Congress abdicating its responsibility to hold the bureaucracy accountable for decades. It’s a logical result of Congress empowering the bureaucracy and letting them do a lot of the heavy legislating. And so that’s what we have. It’s not anything that really should surprise anybody.

All good stuff, and more besides.

Pinochet Wins Again

I loved visiting Chile back in 2015.  The country was lovely, the people were friendly, and the food was not only fantastic but cheap.

The problem is that in Chile, the ghosts of Augusto Pinochet and Salvador Allende are still a presence in the country — the former in country-club toasts like “To General Pinochet:  the savior of Chile”, and the latter in the elections such as the last one, which installed a Marxist government.

Speaking of the Marxists, they wasted no time in drawing up a new (Communist) constitution for Chile, which they put up to the vote last week.

Seems as though the Chileans figured it all out, though, because they voted down the proposed constitution, 62%-38%.

Predictably, the Left had promoted the new constitution with rallies in their usual manner, such as this one:

One particularly alienating performance occurred in the city of Valparaiso just a week before the vote at an event in favor of the new constitution when “a drag queen had the national flag pulled out of his rectum while his bandmates encouraged the audience to ‘abort Chile,’” according to the Economist, resulting in widespread outrage.

Valparaiso, lest we forget, is the birthplace of Augusto Pinochet, where women place fresh flowers reverently outside his old house every day.  This is not the place for the Left to let their freak flag fly, as fellow-Lefty David Crosby once crooned;  but they did, and then wondered why the people told them to jump off a building.

I bet a lot of Chileans would support Lefties jumping from helicopters far out at sea, too.

Like I said, Pinochet’s ghost is never far away.


Update: the Communist Party (U.S. Division) are dismayed at all that democracy.

Calling Bullshit

While I’m all over the idea of some stout patriot bringing down a modern jet with a hunting rifle, this one just flat-out didn’t happen:

VLADIMIR PUTIN will be left fuming after a Ukrainian pensioner shot down a SU-35 fighter jet over the skies of Chernihiv, according to claims. Marketed as “world-beating”, the plane costs a whopping £74 million to manufacture. The jets have been deployed to Ukraine and have flown many sorties during the current war. They boast all the qualities associated with the best modern fighters in the world, such as super-manoeuvrability and supersonic speed.
Yet despite these advantages, a humble Ukrainian pensioner was allegedly able to shoot down one of the jets with his hunting rifle – leaving the Russian President incandescent with rage.

Read the article, and study the photographs to understand my skepticism.