Dear Friends,
It’s been a few days since you’ve heard from me. Normally, I like to put out a Pipe & Dram or something on a Monday or Tuesday, but we were pretty busy over the weekend. The girls and I put in a good deal of studio time, culminating in a late Saturday night session in which we finished laying down the (extremely challenging) scratch track for the final song. That means the foundation has been laid; now the fun begins. We get to build the album. It’s gratifying (and a good sign) when the producer/engineer is excited enough to harass us to keep up the momentum because he can’t wait to start laying down bass tracks himself. (He’s doubling as a session player, and we couldn’t ask for better.)
With that quick update, let’s talk about some current events!
Ayaan Hirsi Ali had a friendly debate with Richard Dawkins on Saturday. Dawkins concluded:
I came here prepared to persuade you, Ayaan, that you’re not a Christian. I think you are a Christian and I think Christianity is nonsense.
She meant it.
Donald Trump’s trial in New York regarding his alleged “campaign finance” violations is in full swing. Andy McCarthy will get you caught up. But, basically, the trial is a complete sham. The judge is a Biden donor. His daughter is a progressive activist whose company worked with Kamala Harris’s campaign. Yesterday, he allowed prosecutors to put Stormy Daniels on the stand to provide testimony completely and utterly irrelevant to the charges, not to mention extremely prejudicial to the defendant. This is all in addition to the fact that prosecutor Alvin Bragg brought a dubious case in the first place. Essentially, by some legal alchemy he is attempting to take two separate misdemeanor charges, rub them together, and voilà! Suddenly they make a Federal felony!
It’s a joke. It is law-fare; partisan political warfare by means of weaponizing state judicial power.
And it is all Donald J. Trump’s fault.
Two things can be true. Donald Trump can be treated unfairly, and Donald Trump can also be the primary reason he is being treated unfairly. The man who supposedly plays “4-D Chess” somehow couldn’t foresee that his actions would bring extremely predictable reactions. Nobody made Donald Trump be the intentionally polarizing figure he is. Alvin Bragg didn’t make Donald Trump sleep with a porn star while his wife was pregnant. He didn’t make him pay her off as a political embarrassment. Same goes for all of the other cases pending. Nobody made Donald Trump ignore his own Attorney General and egomaniacally insist that the election was “stolen,” whip his followers into hysterics (take a walk down memory lane and listen to what Eric Metaxas was saying in those days), and try to get Mike Pence to re-write the Electoral Count Act to simply make him President again. Nobody made Donald Trump haul boxes of classified information to Mar-a-Lago and stack them in a bathroom. Nobody made him show a reporter Top Secret plans for a potential invasion of Iran and then admit on tape that what he was doing was illegal. Nobody made him instruct his lawyers to hide the fact from the FBI that he had the documents.
So, yes. Donald Trump is a victim (in this particular case) of a sham prosecution; but in all of it he is a victim of his own making. I encourage you to take the time to read the book of Proverbs. It is a book about folly. The folly of promiscuity and adultery. The folly of telling lies. The folly of boasting. The folly of pride and hubris. The folly of autonomy and rebellion against moral norms. The folly of not seeing and avoiding disaster ahead. The folly of incuriosity and ignorance. It is as though Mr. Trump as a child rightly read Proverbs as a life instruction manual, but then willfully inverted its every maxim. He gets exactly what Solomon said such a man gets.
It’s all bad for our country, but we deserve it. And he deserves little to no sympathy.
Oh, what’s that? I must be in the tank for Joe Biden, then. Right? No.
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