Echoes of Cromwell

So the House of Representatives stands adjourned, having failed to transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate for action.  You know, the articles that were so urgent they were rammed through in a party-line vote.  Mixed messages much?

Perhaps when Congress returns to town they should be forced to listen to this speech from nearly four centuries past:

It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter’d your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil’d this sacred place, and turn’d the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!”  (emphasis added)

Oliver Cromwell, dismissing by force the English Long Parliament – April 20, 1653

These are no longer merely parliamentary games.  The Democrats are carelessly playing with literal fire.  Confidence in Congress has been in the dumpster since long before the current chapter.  The bewildered reaction of the Left to the 2016 election showed they simply did not comprehend the level of anger in the country — an anger that had only been stoked by their treatment of the earlier, more ‘polite’ Tea Party movement.  The past couple of days show they are either still clueless, or past the point of caring.

Trump is undoubtedly no Cromwell.  But the more the Democrats shred our institutions and precedents in their hunt for his scalp, the more the door is opened for one to appear.  When social and/or governing systems break down, people cast about for the rescuer on the white horse.  Not since the early 1930s has the U.S. been so ripe for such a development.

History will judge Pelosi’s partisans as harshly as Cromwell judged his own miscreant legislature.  Perhaps, like the England of old, the U.S. is due for a reminder just how rare, precious and fragile self-government really is.

Showdown

Tomorrow (Wednesday), the House of Representatives will attempt to legitimize their “impeachment inquiry” by holding televised hearings.  Make no mistake, though: this is as much a sham as every other bucket of mud they’ve thrown at the President over the last three years.  It is nothing less than sedition:

Exhibit A: “Sedition is overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that tends toward insurrection against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent towards, or resistance against established authority.” (Wikipedia, emphasis added)

Exhibit B: tweets in 2017 by Mark Zaid, the lawyer for the shadowy “whistleblower” upon whose anonymous, second-hand statement this whole debacle of a proceeding depends:

Consider that not long before these tweets, Peter Stzrok and his FBI lover, Lisa Page, were texting about putting into place an “insurance” policy in the case of a Trump win.

And we’re told there’s no such thing as the Deep State.  Right…

These people like to claim they’re acting on some “higher authority,” but what that really means is that they refuse to recognize the authority of the American people, who put Trump into office.  For three years they’ve been trying to overturn an election, and even with the 2020 election less than a year away, their efforts continue.

It continues to be my hope that Trump, Attorney General Barr, DOJ Inspector General Horowitz and U.S. Attorney John Huber have carefully uncovered and documented the trail of sedition that has consumed this nation since 2016, and are ready to present their case to the public — complete with multiple indictments, prosecutions, convictions and punishments.  If the source “Q” is to be believed, we’re just about there:

The current controversies, and next year’s election, are a defining moment for the U.S.  To quote Victor Davis Hanson again:

Like it or not, 2020 is going to be a plebiscite on an American version of Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four. One side advocates a complete transformation not just of the American present but of the past as well. The Left is quite eager to change our very vocabulary and monitor our private behavior to ensure we are not just guilty of incorrect behavior but thought as well.

The other side believes America is far better than the alternative, that it never had to be perfect to be good, and that, all and all, its flawed past is a story of a moral nation’s constant struggle for moral improvement.

One side will say, “Just give us more power and we will create heaven on earth.” The other says “Why would anyone wish to take their road to an Orwellian nightmare?” The 2020 election is that simple.

And so is the Congressional circus that will begin playing out on television beginning tomorrow.

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Note to readers: yes, it’s been quite a while since I posted.  All I can say is that it’s a challenge just keeping up with the depths of deception and misdirection being thrown around these days, much less trying to synthesize it into commentary.  Thanks to those who’ve inquired about the extended absence.  Several times I’ve started to post, then thought better of it.  I can’t promise this post marks a return to regular writing.  It was born of a sense we may be reaching a crescendo in the near future.  Pray and speak out accordingly.

This needs to stop. Now.

Robert Mueller just announced his departure from the Department of Justice.  While doing so, he had this to say about his report:

“If we had had confidence that (Trump) clearly did not commit a crime we would have said so.”

That one sentence shows everything that is wrong about how this ‘investigation’ has been conducted.   Our system of justice is based on the idea one is innocent unless proven guilty beyond credible doubt.  The statement above, however, assumes that unless Mueller’s team could prove Trump didn’t commit a crime, the presumption should be there was some sort of unspecified wrongdoing somewhere.  It is public conviction by insinuation and gossip.

That is a standard of justice none of us would ever want to face.  “Well, your honor, the accused has an alibi and lacks a clear motive, but if we were confident they didn’t kill the victim, we would say so.”   Forcing someone to “prove a negative” is one of the basic logical fallacies.   This latest comment by Mueller is an attempt to revive the dead horse of his report at a time when the circumstances surrounding the start of said report are themselves under increasing scrutiny.  Unbelievable.

As a person, Trump is no saint.  The electorate who put him into office already took that into consideration, and still decided he was a better option than Her Hillariness.  Everything that has transpired since then has been rooted in the fact the Democrats cannot accept that decision.  Nor can they accept the fact their increasingly hysterical efforts to overturn a valid election have failed to bear fruit for going on three years now.  Their behavior shows they are willing to wreck the Republic rather than concede.

And wreck it they still may.  The House Democrats’ flirtation with impeachment proceedings got a boost from a maverick Republican-in-name-only who now publicly agrees with them.  Note carefully, however, that nobody has laid out a specific charge against the president that would justify impeachment.  This is an emotional appeal, not a reasoned argument.  As such, they are spinning up their base.  And to the extent they try to go through with impeachment, they will spin up Trump’s base, who are already convinced the Establishment they rejected in 2016 will never yield power or pursue the real interests of actual Americans.   So with emotions at fever pitch, let’s say the Democrats pass articles of impeachment in the House.  Barring an unexpected revelation, I don’t see the Senate agreeing to convict and remove the president (and, in my opinion, that would be the correct response).  So what happens next?

Let’s all pray we don’t have to find out.  This clown show has gone on far too long already.

Burn it down

Here’s hoping all the veils will shortly be removed:

Today, at the request and recommendation of the Attorney General of the United States, President Donald J. Trump directed the intelligence community to quickly and fully cooperate with the Attorney General’s investigation into surveillance activities during the 2016 Presidential election.

The Attorney General has also been delegated full and complete authority to declassify information pertaining to this investigation, in accordance with the long-established standards for handling classified information.

There is enough information already in the public domain to indicate that full disclosure will be highly damning to the previous administration and its would-be successor (Her Hillariness).  It’s time to stop the drip-drip-drip and let the dam burst.  Americans need to be confronted with how much their own government has been weaponized against their interests and intentions.

May justice then follow swiftly and surely, not only for the individuals involved, but for the alphabet-soup-apparatus that allowed them to plot in the shadows against those they are supposed to serve.

Yankee, go home

There’s an old joke: what’s the difference between a Yankee and a damnyankee?  The first describes a person from north of the Maxon-Dixon line.  The second describes such a person who moves to the South, then tries to turn the South into the north.  That latter variety is easy to spot these days, as several States move to restrict or end organized infanticide.  Yankee transplants are having to come to grips that, outside their trendy neighborhoods in select cities that have been seduced economically, there are still wide swaths of the country that reject the currents of the current age:

Living in a very liberal city in a very conservative state is a trick mirror. “You really forget that you are in the Deep South here,’’ she said. The news was an awakening. When she had moved to New Orleans she volunteered for Planned Parenthood. She knocked on doors to ask for donations, expecting at least some to be slammed in her face. But nearly everyone she met was already making contributions to Planned Parenthood…

How will these new abortion laws affect the redistribution of talent to places whose economies prosper from that talent? Under the current conditions, I wondered if women like Tess and her friends, many of whom moved from New York or Los Angeles, would have chosen to relocate to the Deep South. I asked some of them, and they told me that they were not sure.

Well, they moved once… maybe a roundtrip ticket was in order.  Southerners have had just about enough of progressive proselytizing down here.

I concede that it’s interesting to talk to progressive Northerners who moved South, thinking that the Grand March of Progress would inevitably make the benighted (but cheap) metropolises of Dixie into non-deplorable locales — but who are learning that they, in fact, live in the South.

What chaps my butt about the piece is the assumption by the author (and those she writes about) that the South ought to assimilate to the dominant progressive culture. The message of this piece is, If you Christianist troglodytes don’t let us progressives have our abortions, we’re not going to move there and contribute to your economies.

I have an idea! All y’all could pack up your progressive colonialism ethic and go the hell back home.

And all God’s people said “amen.”

By passing the nation’s most restrictive abortion law, pro-life advocates are setting the stage to provoke a legal fight they hope will culminate with the Supreme Court revisiting Roe v. Wade.

It’s like the Alabama legislature watched all the giddy, tone-deaf hubris surrounding the New York legislature’s passage of their own bill expanding abortion rights (you remember the cheering pro-choice crowds and buildings awash in celebratory pink lighting), and said enough.

It is heartening to see a developing repentance and rejection of the idea of abortion on demand.  I pray our nation experiences such revival that one day our descendants look back on its supporters with the same horror reserved today for those who defended slavery.

That which can’t continue, doesn’t

The fiscal day of reckoning may be close at hand for the United States:

According to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Debt Management, the U.S. government is just five years away from the point where every new dollar it borrows from the public will go toward funding interest payments on the national debt.

That is the main takeaway from the Debt Management Office’s Fiscal Year 2019 Q1 Report, which featured the Office of Management and Budget’s latest projection of the U.S. government’s borrowing from the public…

Net interest on the national debt has become one of the fastest growing segments of federal spending. When the national debt reaches the point where all newly borrowed dollars must be used to pay this mandatory expenditure, the U.S. government will have passed the event horizon that marks the boundary of the national debt death spiral.

Cities and territories in the United States that have crossed that crisis point have either gone through bankruptcy proceedings or their equivalent, or they have implemented major fiscal reforms that reversed their fiscal deterioration, wherein the best-case scenarios, they acted to restrain the growth of their previously out-of-control spending to restore their fiscal health.

Interest on the national debt is going up quickly for two reasons.  Obviously, the government continues to spend waaaaaaaaay more than they squeeze out of the economy (us) through taxation, adding to the total amount it owes.  More importantly, however, the many record deficits recorded over the past 10 years were done so at historically low interest rates (engineered by the Federal Reserve, which in the process robbed productive citizens of some of the proceeds they would normally have earned through their savings).  Inevitably, those rates have begun to climb again.  It may seem incremental on a chart, but keep in mind that just one percent of $22 trillion is $220 billion.

Be grateful or be gone

The depths of ingratitude some people possess is simply astonishing:

(Congresswoman) Ilhan Omar’s country collapsed as a child. She lived for years in Kenya in that refugee camp. She may have died there without outside help. But help came, from where? From here, America. And this country didn’t just welcome Ilhan Omar to America, we paid to relocate her family and many others from a foreign continent purely for the sake of being good people, for altruism. Because no country in history has been as generous as we are. To places we have no ties to and no obligation to, we have been kind anyway because that’s who we are. Despite her humble and foreign birth, Omar has been elected to our national law-making body. And good for her. So how does she repay her adopted country, the one that may literally have saved her life? She attacks it as hateful and racist, and for that she is applauded by the Democratic Party because they view this country as hateful and racist too.

It should be noted that among the many freedoms enjoyed here is the freedom to leave at will.  Unlike the old Soviet Union or today’s Communist China, there is nothing preventing any resident of the United States from picking up and relocating to a country they believe suits them better.

So why don’t we see millennials migrating to Venezuela, or Cuba, or some other alleged “workers’ paradise?”  It’s because no matter how strongly they rail against America in public, they know full well how good they have it here.  In Omar’s case, she knows first hand what conditions can be like outside of a stable, representative, capitalist country.  She simply chooses to ignore that because her preferred rhetoric, sad to say, helps her accrue power via today’s ignorant masses.

Our country is not, and never has been, perfect.  But I defy anyone to name any country, anywhere, that has provided a better standard of living and greater freedoms than has the United States.  And yet so many of our people listen to the siren songs of these pied pipers that we need to throw out all of the social and legal foundations upon which those successes rest.  Arrogance, ignorance and ingratitude are a toxic cocktail.  That’s how we end up with freshmen in Congress who believe socialism simply hasn’t ever been implemented correctly, or that somehow Islamic Sharia law is to be preferred to secular self-governance guided by Christian principles.

We have such representatives because we’ve allowed ourselves to be invaded and colonized.  An enclave of Somali refugees is the base of Omar’s political ascent.  Immigrants who fail to understand the fabric of how our system works, along with Americans who’ve failed to learn about it, are the constituency of people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (also known appropriately as “occasional cortex.”)

The Musketeers’ Mom isn’t known for being publicly political very often.  She made a good point yesterday, however.  In response to an online story about Hollywood celebs threatening not to make films in Georgia if the State passes a heartbeat bill protecting the unborn, she posted “aren’t ya’ll supposed to be in Canada already?”  It’s time we extend that sort of dismissive shunning to everyone who takes routine potshots at our country without acknowledging the many things it gets right — particularly those who come here from abroad, then disparage the country that’s taken them in.  They act like spoiled children throwing temper tantrums, so I don’t see why anyone needs to take them seriously.

It’s time that when these ingrates bite the hand that sustains them, that hand smacks some sense into them.  Don’t like it here?  Get out… there’s over 190 other countries you can choose to call home.  So stop tearing down the one I live in and gave two dozen years of my life in uniform to defend.  I have no sympathy for it.  Neither do many, many other Americans.  So don’t be surprised when there’s broad public support for keeping people out and sending people home.  America’s not a flop house, people.

 

Such lovely expressions of civic virtue… let’s adopt them.  (Not)