Assessing the Political Landscape
No.108: May 20, 2022
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Dear Friends,
I have enjoyed a very nice, long respite from political commentary. And I hope the same is true of you, although I suspect some of you are as addicted as ever to the nightly cable news talking-head circus. If that’s you, all I have to say is, watch this video and, as Bob Newhart says, “ Stop it!”
However, as we are in the midst of the primary season and looking ahead to the November midterm elections, I thought I’d share a few thoughts about the state of things on both the right and the left. Let’s talk about the Republicans first.
Too Big a Tent?
As things stand right now, the Republican Party is poised for pretty much a landslide victory in November. Barring some “black swan” event, they will take control of the House and the Senate, possibly by very large margins. And since we are heading into a summer of ridiculously high fuel prices and continued inflation on consumer goods, and given that the President hasn’t a single clue what to do about any of it, it is unlikely the environment will shift in favor of the Democrats, who are, after all, completely in charge of things. They are headed for pain at the ballot box.
That’s good news for Republicans, of course, but it will come with headaches. The incoming class will be a diverse bunch, and I don’t envy whomever is going to have to herd those cats (but I’m happy to report that Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina will no longer be among them). It’s going to be a mix of full-throated “stolen election” MAGA folks along with more traditional Republicans. The party as a whole has lost most of its ideological cohesion over the past six years—it would be difficult, in fact, to say with any confidence what the Party actually agrees on as a matter of governing philosophy. I am quite at a loss to see who is going to provide actual leadership to the incoming class, besides Mitch McConnell (one of the greatest Senate Majority Leaders of all time). On the House side of things, Kevin McCarthy and Co. seem to just want to “own the libs,” get themselves on TV, and purify the party of principled conservatives like Liz Cheney. (Love her or hate her, yes: principled)
I am optimistic for Republican electoral chances in the fall. I am less optimistic about what it can or will actually accomplish.
Sadly, in my view, you still cannot talk about Republican politics without talking about the former President. So far I am encouraged that he appears to be less of a “Kingmaker” than his ambitions would suggest. Aided by their megaphones in right-wing media, the MAGA contingent remains vocal and loud, but they are not a majority in the right-wing coalition. I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: the Party cannot leave behind Donald Trump and his self-aggrandizing grievances fast enough. But, alas, many of them (politicians and primary voters) insist on hauling a ten-ton electoral anchor along with them into the future. I had thought that nothing could ever compare to the sheer ardor and devotion that was given to Barack Obama, but it turns out that was nothing.
On that note, I suppose I should, with great reluctance, comment on Dinesh D’Souza’s latest attempt at “proving” the stolen election theory. To my dismay, I’ve seen plenty of people who ought to know better promoting it.
I was told there was a “Kraken” to be unleashed—a mountain of “evidence” of voter fraud. I was told that the pillow guy had “incontrovertible” proof that the Dominion voting machines were programmed to add and subtract votes. Or wait—was it servers in foreign countries hacking into the voting systems and adding votes? Or was it suitcases full of ballots adding the votes? It is difficult to keep all these (redundant and mutually incoherent) theories straight. Then there were ballots with bamboo particles that proved that China was behind it all!
None—I mean none of the “proof” materialized. In fact, many of the most vocal advocates of these theories might soon be bankrupt because they are likely to lose their defamation lawsuit to Dominion employee Eric Coomer. That’s my view after reading the transcript of Eric Metaxas’s deposition in the case. Ay-yi-yi! It’s bad. It pains me, as someone who once respected Eric. But even in our post-Christian society, the law doesn’t allow you to shoulder shrug violations of the 9th Commandment forever. Proverbs 26:18-20 is eerily on-point:
Like a maniac shooting
flaming arrows of death
is one who deceives their neighbor
and says, “I was only joking!”
“I was only entertaining people” is not appreciably different.
So now comes Dinesh with yet another theory of how all those “extra” ballots materialized (of which there are no actual, physical examples). His new documentary film, “2000 Mules” analyzes cell phone tracking data and alleges that “mules” were repeatedly stuffing ballots into public drop boxes. He knows this because … he tracked cell phones that regularly went in the vicinity of these drop boxes (which are… hmm… usually in very public places) and, apparently, he has video proof of people putting multiple ballots into a box!
Anyone who believes this theory desperately wants to believe it. Never mind that this is an entirely new theory straight from the same group of people who assured us in no uncertain terms they had proof of all the other theories. So, one last time, let me dispense with this nonsense:
I am a ballot mule. Yes, friends, I confess that I have sometimes stuffed multiple ballots into a drop box. In fact, I’ve done it numerous times over the years. How can I possibly justify myself? I must be an enemy of democracy! Even worse, I stuffed a ballot box with multiple ballots that were not votes for Donald Trump!
To be more specific, I dropped off my wife’s ballot, my daughter’s ballot, and my ballot. We have three voters in our household. We each filled out a ballot, sealed it in an envelope with our individual names, address, and signatures on it, and I delivered them. And that’s Dinesh’s theory. That this is the voter fraud that “stole” the election. I’m sorry if this offends you, but it is stupid.
I don’t care if somebody stuffs a thousand ballots into a box. The fact is that ballots must have provenance. They are required to be somebody’s ballot. They have to come from somewhere. They are not generic things. That’s why, in our case, each ballot has its own envelope, its own name, address, and signature. Election officials open each ballot individually and verify its provenance. That’s the way it works. If you stuff a thousand ballots into a box and they don’t have verifiable names, addresses, and signatures, they get thrown out. That simple.
Moreover, those ballots have to come from precincts. Election officials know exactly how many voters are in each precinct. If a precinct with 1,500 registered voters suddenly has 5,000 ballots to count, people notice. And even if some nefarious election worker is in on the conspiracy, election watchers notice, and election analysts notice. Do small-scale shenanigans happen? Sure, all the time. Someone casts a ballot for a recently departed family member, for example. Someone who moves votes in two different places. But it simply isn’t possible to stuff the system with the tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots it would take to steal the 2020 Presidential election, and even if it were possible there is zero evidence it happened. They’ve promised and promised and promised to deliver the goods, and they haven’t. So, newsflash: Trump lost.
And that’s the last I’ll ever say about that. I will promptly ignore Dinesh’s next try, and I hope you will, too. In fact, I hope we’ll all just ignore Dinesh altogether. He’s not a credible figure.
Too Small a Tent?
As I see it, the Democrats have a deeper problem than just their unpopularity and unfavorable midterm environment. They are captive to the most radical fringe of their left wing. The Woke Jacobins who are apparently running The New York Times these days are true believers, and they will settle for nothing less than everything is racism, white supremacy, patriarchy, misogyny, Handmaid’s Tale, bigotry, and hatred.
There’s not much of a “center” in the Party; it’s all hard-left. It’s become a parody that the vast geographical (if not numerical) majority cannot and does not take very seriously; when the new Georgia voting law that the President of the United States called “Jim Crow 2.0” just delivered a historic turnout on Tuesday, the rhetoric gets less and less compelling. How do you take that seriously? So also with the notion floating around that pro-lifers want to abolish abortion because … they hate gay people and minorities? (Yes, the ACLU really tweeted that overturning Roe would disproportionally affect … the LGBTQ+ community.) That’s fever-swamp, insane, and bizarro-world, and it is the stuff of approved Democrat discourse these days.
In 1988 the Party ran Michael Dukakis against George H.W. Bush. Dukakis was the epitome of the faculty-lounge liberal. Educated at Swarthmore and Harvard, he was a man of the Left. He got slaughtered in the general election. It turned out it wasn’t a very good idea to nominate a man of the Left.
So, in 1992 the party turned to something different: William Jefferson Clinton, a pragmatist’s pragmatist. Sure, he had a left-wing pedigree (not as much as his wife!) but he could speak in the vernacular of … American. As a pragmatist, he was a chameleon. (My favorite window into his character is when he was caught on camera yukking it up and laughing outside of Ron Brown’s funeral. Spotting the camera, he frowned, looked down, and pretended to wipe away a tear.) He talked about the decline of the black family and supported programs to help the inner cities. He said that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” He signed welfare reform!
I rehearse all that to ask: where in the world is the next Bill Clinton? Where is the Democrat who can moderate like that? In this environment? In our Woke world, it seems to me well-nigh inconceivable. And it happened so fast. Barack Obama, just yesterday, it seems, vocally opposed gay marriage. That could never happen today. The Party is caught in a vortex: a vicious, self-reinforcing bubble of progressive pieties. And I don’t see the politician that can break them out of it.
In fact, Joe Biden was supposed to be that person. He was nominated instead of Bernie Sanders precisely because Democrats remember the lesson to not nominate a consummate man of the Left. Now, I happen to think Biden has always been a left-wing hack and that his reputation for “moderation” is entirely undeserved. Notwithstanding that, whatever moderate and normal impulses he may have had upon entering the office, they’ve been nowhere to be seen; he has been held hostage by the radicals in his party.
I saw a passage quoted recently from C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet:
“Have you ever noticed,” said Dimble, “that the universe, and every little bit of the universe, is always hardening and narrowing and coming to a point?”
“I mean this...If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family—anything you like—at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren't quite so sharp; and that there's going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing.”
And it seems to me that this is the Democrat problem: while the Republican Party arguably has too big a tent, as I’ve just suggested (at very least there’s an honest-to-goodness fight for the ideological makeup of the Party), for the Democrats there is very little elbow room at all anymore. The religious fanatics—yes, they are religious fanatics—setting the agenda will not allow a Bill Clinton. They will not allow anyone to appeal to that broad geographical base that doesn’t take progressive pieties seriously.
If you would like an exhibit for this lack of “elbow room,” consider that with the single exception of Joe Manchin, every single Democrat in the Senate just voted (and lost, thankfully) to legalize abortion everywhere, at all times, through all nine months of pregnancy, and to prohibit any and every form of restriction (e.g., parental notification laws). It was the most radical piece of legislation imaginable. And the Party was in lockstep agreement.
Here’s Exhibit B. This is the kind of thing you are expected to say if you have a (D) after your name. Watch and behold:
That is going to continue to be a big problem when Election Days roll around.
In case you missed it, Monday’s Off The Shelf was about a fun juvenile classic, My Side of the Mountain. Wednesday’s Quarter Inch was about the Buffalo massacre, the situation in Ukraine, and my (brilliant, if I do say so myself) idea to solve MLB’s strike zone problem. Sad to say, I have no solution to its Commissioner Rob Manfred problem. You can receive those publications on an ongoing basis as well as this one with a $5 per month paid subscription. Just click the button below.
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Thanks for reading, and have a wonderful weekend!
Sadly it appears that you didnt watch 2000 Mules. It wasnt the fact that the "mules" simply put ballots in the boxes. It was that the pattern is one person putting a small number of ballots in over a hundred boxes in the early hours of the morning and the "mules" all began their routes by starting at non-profits who are involved in democratic politics. Your point that every ballot must have a valid name and address wasnt covered in the film but I'll bet that somehow each ballot appeared to be legit. Please watch it with the attitude that it could be valid evidence of corruption. I have a lot of respect for "True the Vote".