On November 25, 2020,
in Uncategorized,
by magoo1310
It’s Monday, November 23rd, 2020…and we mark the recent 57th anniversary of the death of our 35th President with a warning for the man who may well be the 46th, courtesy of the lovely Shannon:
Now, here’s The Gouge!
We lead off our last pre-Thanksgiving 2020 edition with, courtesy of Commentary Magazine via AEI, Yuval Levin opining on what he suggests is…or was…
“If you were prone to understatement, you might describe Donald Trump as a very unusual president. He came to the job from a career that mostly involved selling himself. Unlike every prior American president, he had never been elected to anything before or held any senior post in government or the military. His engagement with politics consisted of offering bombastic commentary. And that is also how he spent much of his time in office. Trump seemed to understand the power of the presidency as fundamentally rhetorical—a way of changing reality by saying it should be different, or insisting that it was.
In some respects, this blurring of the line between presidential talk and action has been with us for many decades. Jeffrey Tulis’s brilliant 1987 book The Rhetorical Presidency described an accelerating presidential tendency to engage the public directly through the media, reaching over the heads of members of Congress and other public officials and using executive statements and directives to drive policy. Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, epitomized that approach.
But in the Trump era, we have witnessed a far more radical rhetorical approach to the presidency, which has treated presidential talk not as an enabler of government action but as its form and substance. Trump took speaking for his voters to be the essence of his job. He implicitly assumed that announcing a new policy or action was the same thing as undertaking it. And at times he even behaved as though declaring a new reality simply made it true. In the end, this rendered Trump a weakened president, and it should serve as a cautionary lesson to his successors about the nature of the office, and the sources of its strength. (Yes, a Deep State bureaucracy devoted to continuing its existence and amassing ever greater power.)
To trace that lesson, we have to first overcome the most common confusion of the Trump era: the notion that Trump was a strong and assertive chief executive. This was a view shared by his fiercest critics and staunchest supporters. Many on the left insisted that Trump was a budding authoritarian, deploying executive power for corrupt purposes and threatening to suffocate our democracy. Many on the right insisted he was a giant among men—going where no prior president dared, unleashing the economy, putting America first, draining the swamp, and deconstructing the administrative state. (We’re down with the latter…absent the belief he was a giant among men.)
Trump was none of these things. He was, for better or worse, a weak chief executive. His time in office saw only one significant legislative measure advanced—a tax-reform bill in 2017—even though his party controlled both houses of Congress for the first two years of his term. Fairly little happened in the regulatory arena (Really?!?), so that while Trump’s administration did not expand the administrative state, it also did not significantly roll back its system of regulations (Really?!?), or indeed transform it in any durable way.(True enough.) On that front, as on many others, the Biden administration is pretty much in a position to pick up where Barack Obama left off.
…The chaos that marked Donald Trump’s approach to the presidency was deadly to effective administration. And that chaos was not a failure, exactly; it was Trump’s aim. Chaos can help to displace deeply lodged corruption and force change in rigid establishments. It has its uses, as some of Trump’s successes showed. But ultimately, chaos cannot be the ethos of an executive, and it does not allow for the construction of anything durable.
This can help us understand the pattern of Trump’s successes and failures. His greatest success was a transformation of the judiciary, which involves the use of a presidential power that does not require much endurance at all. The president chooses an appointee (in this case from a list that resulted from decades of work by others, which was anything but chaotic), and with that his part is done. The Senate confirms that appointee, and then the new judge can do valuable work for decades without ever requiring any further presidential intervention or engagement.
No other facet of the president’s job demands so little perseverance. Executive appointments can put good people into office, but they can do little without the president’s continued engagement and support.(What about Betsy DeVos’s success at the Department of Education?) Eliminating bad regulations or replacing them with good ones can be useful for a time, but that good cannot endure without focused reforms of the structure of the administrative state—which would require a durable, focused effort. Advancing a legislative agenda requires patient engagement with Congress, which persists for more than one news cycle. (And likely the life span of any human.)
But even more fundamentally, administration means engaging with concrete reality. This is the essence of the executive’s function. At the margins of his job, the president might advance a legislative agenda or appoint judges, but the office is neither legislative nor judicial. In those parts of the job that are most fully his own—responding to a crisis, directing foreign policy, administering the bureaucracy—the president essentially confronts reality on behalf of the country. He must respond to circumstances, adjust to events, and make hard choices under pressure. In such situations, you cannot will a different reality into being by saying so…”
As you know, while we’ve never been a fan of The Donald’s character or personal conduct, we found him infinitely preferable to the likes of either Biden or Hillary, both of whom are not only utterly corrupt, but promote policies which run completely contrary to everything we as a Christian Conservative believe.
And though Levin’s sometimes off target, he also scores some hits, particularly as regards his explanation for Trump’s judicial successes.
However, there are three aspects of Trump’s term in office he missed mentioning: first, we’ve always thought one of Trump’s biggest weaknesses was, upon his election, he lacked the preexisting support team most Washington insiders would have already had at their beck and call, putting him at a distinct disadvantage day one.
Second, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, no President in history ever suffered the unrelenting assaults Trump endured, attacks which began before he was even elected. So while there’s no doubt Trump’s tweeting and mercurial character limited his effectiveness and support, given the constant combat and nature and number of the forces allied against him, it’s a wonder he accomplished as much as he did.
Case in point: Only a MSM as rabidly biased as America’s currently could pretend a terrorist leader as…
…a religious scholar, or portray the killing of a terrorist leader like General Qasem Soleimani as anything…
…but a victory for the forces of freedom.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, though the office of the President is in fact neither legislative nor judicial, Trump’s appointments to the federal bench will likely prove a stumbling block to The Left’s concerted effort to create a Socialist Amerika for decades to come. And if the Dimocrats manage to steal both Georgia senate seats on January 5th, the only thing standing between our country and Kamalunism.
In a related item, writing at The Stream, one John Zmirak assures us…
A close friend who has dealt with Powell expressed a similar assessment. Guess we’ll know soon enough.
Still, as the editors at NRO recently recorded…
“Powell’s story is that the surprisingly strong Trump turnout “broke the algorithm” of the corrupted machines, and then the fraudulent ballots were desperately hauled in to make up the difference…If there’s serious evidence for any of this, Giuliani and co. need to produce it immediately.Waving around affidavits at a press conference without allowing anyone to examine them doesn’t count.“
Regardless, ignore everything you hear from those claiming Trump’s refusal to go gently into that good night somehow constitutes a crisis. Al Gore didn’t concede until December 13, 2000, yet the Founders’ Republic somehow survived. And the election of 1876 wasn’t settled until the Compromise of 1877, under which Dimocrats conceded the election to Hayes in return for an end to Reconstruction and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South…along with Republican leaders agreeing to a number of handouts and entitlements, including Federal subsidies for a transcontinental railroad line through the South.
The better to institute Jim Crow and lynch Blacks with…
And puhLEESE, don’t talk to us about “Constitutional crises” after what we’ve just endured for the last five years.
Meanwhile, the kleptocrat who as a candidate responded to tough questions with personal attacks…
…continues to do so as the MSM’s anointed President-elect:
We’d appreciate someone…anyone…forwarding us a video clip of either Biden or Obama ever answering anything but a softball or pre-rehearsed question.
Next, our COVID coverage continues. First, writing at Townhall.com, Beth Baumann details the dumb, as…
Second, the dumber, as in response to another cog in the Progressive propaganda machine announcing it’s giving another meaningless award to one of its own…
“I’m not surprised at this point,” Dean told Fox News. “When he sold a book during the pandemic – that shocked me, but it’s what I’ve come to expect from this governor.” Dean lost her elderly in-laws to COVID-19 after Cuomo mandated that nursing homes accept COVID-19 patients released in hospitals.
Cuomo insists that New York’s original nursing home policy was in line with a March 13 directive from the Trump administration’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But that is little comfort to those who lost loved ones as a result.
“The number is possibly twice as many because they didn’t report the deaths as COVID-related,” Dean said…”
Sorry, but since when do Dimocrats follow any of The Donald’s directives?!?
“The City of Buffalo and AT&T are encouraging residents to shop local this year, especially from Black businesses. Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown announced the city’s new initiative to help Black businesses not only survive, but thrive this holiday season.
Buy Black Buffalo Week will take place from December 4-11…”
We can only imagine White Buffaloons flocking to frequent the likes of…
…or…
No word on whether AT&T is subsidizing any local, Black-owned cellular service providers as part of its promotion.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
…along with these from Balls Cotton…
Finally, courtesy of James Patrick O’Crilley, we’ll call it a day with this…
…assessment of the moral and intellectual havoc The Left has wrought upon America (the italicized comments are ours):
No matter how I vote, no matter what I say, something evil has invaded our nation, and our lives are never going to be the same.
I have been confused by the hostility of family and friends.
I look at people I have known all my life–so hate-filled that they agree with opinions they would never express as their own. I think that I may well have entered the Twilight Zone.
You can’t justify this insanity. We have become a nation that has lost its collective mind!
If a dude pretends to be a woman, you are required to pretend with him.
Somehow it’s un-American for the census to count how many Americans are in America.
Russians influencing our elections are bad, but illegals voting in our elections are good.
It was cool for Joe Biden to “blackmail” the President of Ukraine, but it’s an impeachable offense if Donald Trump inquires about it.
People who have never owned slaves should pay slavery reparations to people who have never been slaves.
People who have never been to college should pay the debts of college students who took out huge loans for their (largely useless) degrees. (Not to mention those who’ve already paid for their own and/or their children’s educations!)
Immigrants with tuberculosis and polio are welcome, but you’d better be able to prove your dog is vaccinated.
Irish doctors and German engineers who want to immigrate to the US must go through a rigorous vetting process, but any illiterate gang-bangers who jump the southern fence are welcome.
$5 billion for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion for “free” health care is not.
If you cheat to get into college you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country you go to college for free.
People who say there is no such thing as gender are demanding a female President.
We see other countries going Socialist and collapsing, but it seems like a great plan to us.
People are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while others are not held responsible for what they are doing right now.
Criminals are caught-and-released to hurt more people, but stopping them is bad because it’s a violation of THEIR rights.
And pointing out all this hypocrisy somehow makes us “racists”?!?
Nothing makes sense anymore: No values, no morals, no civility. People are dying of a Wuhan virus, but it is racist to refer to it as Wuhan virus, even though it began in Wuhan, China. We are clearly living in an upside down world where right is wrong and wrong is right, moral is immoral and immoral is moral, good is evil and evil is good and where executing murderers is wrong but killing innocent babies is right.
Wake up America, the great, unsinkable ship America has hit an iceberg, is taking on water and sinking fast. The choice is yours to make. What will it be? Time is short, make your choice wisely!
This has so much truth to it that seeing it all pulled together is frightening.
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