Thoughts about the current state of the 2020 election
Every one of the icky Democrat party candidates is a wannabe tyrant who is not qualified to be president but that doesn’t mean one of them can’t win.
I watched the Democrat primary debate and had very mixed feelings. On the one hand, I thought that this collection of despots, whether socialists (everyone but Mike Bloomberg) or just naturally despotic (Mike Bloomberg) doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in a hot place come the general election. On the other hand, the mere fact that five of them are the ones the party faithful have winnowed down as potential presidents and that one of them was easily able to buy his way onto the stage really terrified me. Is this what America has come to?
But let me back up a little bit. The debate had to be watched at two levels. The first level was the accomplishments and personalities of those running. The second level was the type of America they see before them and the promises they make should they become America’s chief executive. I thought that they failed at every metric.
Here’s my quick rundown on the personalities:
The only person on the stage whose accomplishments arguably qualify him to be President was Mike Bloomberg. He has started businesses and most certainly understands how money works. He’s run one of the world’s largest cities and did a decent job there. Those are the pros.
The cons are that Bloomberg has a reptilian personality, that he’s so far beyond the common touch he comes close to being a Zuckerberg-type alien being. He also really hasn’t built anything. I know that last sounds funny because he’s built something extremely useful in terms of information and created prodigious wealth for many people, but those are actually quite abstract things.
Trump has built things — real, solid things that people can touch and that need to last. Trump’s time in the building world has given him the common touch and has forced him to deal with reality, rather than with only ideas and theories. I can’t explain better than that, but I think Trump’s accomplishments, although less profitable than Bloomberg’s, are more significant.
Elizabeth Warren is a harpy and a shrew. She’s someone who’s never created anything. She was (in my humble estimation) a mediocre teacher because she was a poor communicator and she then traded on a stolen identity to leverage herself into the academic big time.
Being a congresscritter also isn’t a useful qualification. Congresspeople are pack animals who come up with ideas but have never had responsibility for the success or failure of those ideas. While being a shrew made her a good attack dog against Bloomberg during the debate, my feeling is that, just as no one wanted Hillary the Harridan in the White House, Warren the Shrew is not an appealing personality either. And the lies, the endless, endless lies. If there’s one person who can make Hillary seem almost honest, it’s Warren. That’s not a good selling point.
Bernie is evil. I know I’m not supposed to say that. I’m supposed to say that he’s just the crazy uncle who’s a straight shooter with his consistent beliefs, something that must earn him respect.
No. This is a man who lived through more than 50% of the 20th century, a century that saw socialism in its various forms send around 100 million people to early graves through murder, war, torture, and slave labor. Bernie was around for that. He was born during WWII; he saw what happened in North Korea; he saw what happened in Vietnam; he saw what happened in Cuba; he saw what happened across Latin America and Africa; he saw what happened in the Soviet Union; and he saw what happened in China. That he can still believe in socialism despite seeing the misery it relentlessly inflicted around the world means that he’s either completely evil or he’s a fool . . . and I don’t think he’s a fool.
Moreover, Bernie is a grossly dishonest person. Back in 2016, when he was merely a parasite who lived off of government and wives, one could say that he was an honest man who lived in accordance with his belief system. Since then, though, as Bloomberg was good enough to point out during the debate, Bernie has become a multimillionaire with real estate holdings and fast cars, who flies around American in private jets.
Rather than give up this wealth as a good true believer should, Bernie has instead given up his attacks on millionaires and now only attacks billionaires. While Trump may puff about statistics, he’s completely honest about his core beliefs. Bernie, however, applied his apparent core beliefs to himself only because he was incapable of earning money (angry communists usually are).
When Bernie finally earned money, he didn’t act like an honest man and say, “I was wrong in my beliefs.” Instead, like every tyrant in the world, he said, “I don’t have to live by the rules I intend to impose on others.” That’s hypocritical and, because socialism and death march hand-in-hand, evil.
Biden is a dead man walking. As the evening wore on, he struggled to hold on to his mental functioning. I would say it’s sad, but it’s not, because Biden is a corrupt man whose every policy for decades has been bad for America. And the fact that he likes to boast about his small bank account is irrelevant. He’s cleverly channeled money to his family and that still counts for corruption.
Have you ever seen the movie Election with Reese Witherspoon? She plays this sunny, perky, unbelievably vicious high school student whose running for election as class president. That’s Buttigieg. His tight little grin says it all: This is a power-hungry little guy who hides behind his chipper “class valedictorian” persona. In many ways, he’s the perfect foil for. . . .
Amy Klobuchar who probably reminds more people than just me of the un-nice PTA president. There are tons of wonderful PTA presidents but anyone with children has run across the other type. These women look like the perfect suburban housewife, they willingly take on projects because they want to be a star and believe it will make them likable, and they’re mean, bitchy, and like to play both ends against the middle. They’re also the types who take all the credit and none of the blame, no matter how either of those things should actually be allocated. When pushed into a corner, they’re mean.
The mere fact that both Buttigieg and Klobuchar remind me of bad high school stereotypes is a reminder that neither is ready for primetime. Additionally, Buttigieg, aside from being the perky, gay, class valedictorian has absolutely no meaningful accomplishments or skills that would justify entrusting him with the entire United States. And Klobuchar is just another Senator (see Elizabeth Warren, above, or Bernie Sanders).
That’s the candidates’ personalities and qualifications. On that list, Bloomberg is the only one who should even be looking at the White House. What about the policies?
On a policy basis, none of them should be allowed within 100 miles of the White House. They’re all despot wannabes. Everything they stand for is antithetical to what’s made America the greatest, freest, richest country in the world.
Bloomberg (probably) has managerial skills and he did stand up for capitalism. On the other hand, he hates the Second Amendment, which should knock him out of the running right off the bat.
Bloomberg also hates the Constitution, the American system, and the American voters. How do I know that? Because he’s using his wealth to do a complete end-run around our democratic system. That’s not reverence for the Constitution. That’s a man who sees it as a meaningless piece of paper. And it’s not respect for American voters, it’s deep, deep cynicism. A man whose life is defined by money, he thinks everyone can be bought.
Moreover, we know from the way in which he ran New York that Bloomberg has no time for individual liberty. You’re all stupid and he knows better. He believes in capitalism — and I appreciate that — but he doesn’t believe in freedom, which is America’s core promise. He’s not a socialist because he doesn’t want the government to run things. He’s a tyrant because he wants himself to run things.
Do I need to say anything about Warren and Bernie running as far left as they can? Perhaps I should break down the kind of leftist that each is. Warren is more of a fascist than a communist. That is, she doesn’t want to nationalize the means of production. Like the National Socialists in Germany or the Fascists in Italy, Warren is okay with private ownership provided that everything functions within the state. Bernie, of course, is a hardcore communist. It was not a low blow for Bloomberg to call him out on it; it was the truth
Biden, again, is a dead man walking. He’ll do anything and say anything to get elected. He’s hitched his wagon to the Democrat party, but Biden’s always in it for himself.
Klobuchar and Buttigieg are Fabians, aka the slow-walking socialists. Their proposals about everything have a full socialist endpoint, they just want to do it gradually, kind of like dropping a frog in the pot of water and slowly heating it to boiling. His chipmunk grin and her motherly demeanor shouldn’t disguise that they are every bit as despotic in their goals as everyone else on that stage.
Aside from their different forms of despotism, the only thing animating the Democrat candidates is raw Trump hatred. They’ve become feral about it. They don’t attack his policies or his outcomes because they can’t. All they can do, like rabid dogs, is bark and foam about his being an evil fraud who’s making America a horrible place.
It tells you a lot about these six people that their idea of an “evil place” is a country with more wealth, more employed people, fewer poor people, better racial harmony, more border control, and a drawdown of endless wars even as the military is kept incredibly strong. They live in a Bizarro Land in which all of these good things are bad and the only way to remedy things is to raise taxes, destroy the southern border, socialize medicine, take away guns, and limit individual liberty.
At this particular moment, I think the Democrat candidates cannot win. Having said that, there are all sorts of things that can happen:
One: The Deep State is still gunning for Trump and it’s very powerful.
Two: Coronavirus can upset the world economy, which could hurt Trump’s prospects. I know doctors who are panicking. Having said that, I believe that it’s just going to be a bad flu season. American ingenuity is mapping the virus’s gene, which promises better treatments and cures.
We also have a useful piece of information now, which is that the disease is spread via fecal matter. America is far ahead of China and other second and third world countries when it comes to stopping that kind of spread. We have better plumbing and, even more importantly, we have a culture that knows people should wash their hands after using the facility. Some don’t, obviously, but they know better. With a deadly disease out there spread through poop, a whole lot of people who have been slackers about washing their hands are about to change that. The Chinese and Muslim cultures don’t have that respect for the power of fecal bacteria. Their countries may be hit hard. . . .
Lastly, we have better treatment than you’re going to find in China or North Korea. Funnily enough, their socialized medicine systems don’t seem to be up to the job of treating the disease.
Three: The media, although it should have been in the trash heap of history by 2012, when it managed to get Obama reelected, is still a force to be reckoned with. Even though more people than ever recognize the lies it tells, its sheer presence around America and it’s never-ending, repetitious messages make it powerful. We’d be fools to count it out.
Four: Something else. Yeah, I know that’s a meaningless statement but the nature of black swans is that they’re completely unexpected and unpredictable.
Five: Even if Trump wins again, the Democrat money aimed at congress could see Democrats retain control over the House and the Senate switch hands. Keep in mind that Republicans have a razor-thin margin in the Senate. If Trump loses Congress, he will be hounded from pillar to post in a way that makes the last three years look like a garden party.
So, what’s your job? Vote. In the primaries, vote for the congresscritter who will support Trump. (And yeah, I know that in Democrat open primary states your vote is meaningless, and I’m sorry about that.) And in November, vote, vote, vote for Republicans, all the way down the line, from Trump right down to the county dog catcher. Democrats need to lose so soundly that it will take a generation before they again think about imposing socialism on the constitutional United States of America.
