Year-End Thoughts 2020
We’re almost out of this dreadful year. Think 2021 will be better? Here’s what I think.
KNOWNS:
The Swamp has won. No doubt about that. The combination of electoral mischief and the utterly inert performance of the Department of Justice in prosecuting FBI/CIA/NSA/Obama/Democrat Caucus crimes against the Trump administration are all the proof needed of that. The Supreme Court is also likely a Swamp creature, consisting of two genuine conservatives, two hard lefties, two more traditional liberals and three RINOs (i.e., all three Trump nominations, two men of weak character and a woman who will prove a tree hugger in deferring to existing court precedents). Dems should not have any need to stack the court, if that’s any consolation to Conservatives. Regardless, the Republic is dead. More about that later.
In the meantime, you can prepare for the coming recession by investing in companies that make paper-shredding products. The lights will be on all night in every cubicle of the Justice Department for months as the Uni-Party functionaries destroy mountains of evidence so that not even future historians will be able to reconstruct what happened during the last five years.
So it’s all clear sailing for the Democrats, right? No. There may a bandwagon careering down Pennsylvania Avenue, but there is no mandate. The 2020 election(?) of Biden-Harris bears no resemblance to the 2008 election of Barack Obama. For the Dems, Obama was an iconic, history-changing symbol. Biden is exactly what everyone who’s paying attention suspects he is, a not very bright political hack who is rapidly losing the few marbles he ever had. He is also still carrying a huge amount of baggage regarding his ties to China and the Ukraine, which could resurface when he has to make policy regarding them. Kamala Harris, tapping her foot not so quietly in the wings, is potentially more controversial than Biden. Her presidency, should she achieve her ambition of replacing the new incumbent, would be akin to Hitler’s chancellorship in 1933 Germany — a fringe minority politician maneuvered into power over a people who do not agree with radically destructive positions in almost any policy arena. She may be as ruthless as Hitler, but she is not nearly as smart and is devoid of charisma. He destroyed everyone who opposed him. She is likely to marginalize herself in office, partly because like Biden she was never that smart in the first place and partly because she is just plain obnoxious.
Whether Biden manages to hang on or Kamala dislodges him with insider help, there are other knowns that will make the next two years very rocky for the new administration. As I said, there is no mandate for a massive, aggressive, radical leftward turn in this country. The election was close. The losers, unlike the 2008 Republicans, are furious, deep down mad about everything Dems have done in the last five years. They will not go gently into that good night.
A key factor that was concealed by Trump-hating media during the campaign is that there is a distinct difference between the hard-left bandwagon and the Swamp. The Swamp doesn’t care about political issues and causes except as weapons against their competitors for power. They were content for fools on the left to promise the earth, moon, and stars to every aggrieved constituency in the population, but having won, they would be perfectly happy to forget those promises now and placate the useless idiots in the electorate with token changes that can be claimed as major reforms. The Swamp knows that dramatically increasing taxes on everyone, destroying the fossil fuel industry, eliminating police departments and opening the borders to an overwhelming wave of illegal immigrants in a rampaging Hundred Days would infuriate all the numbskull voters who thought all the bad, punitive things would happen to someone else.
The Swamp knows, because they helped engineer it, that the election was won largely due to the vast confusion and doubt created by the COVID-19 crisis. Issue by issue, the majority do not want what the lefty flamethrowers want. They don’t want middle eastern refugees zoned into their neighborhoods and school districts by federal fiat. They don’t want a renewed transfer of jobs from the U.S. to China. They don’t want their taxes to go up. They don’t want to pay $5 a gallon for gas at the pump. They don’t want a return of onerous regulations that strangle small businesses. They don’t want to lose their private healthcare insurance and get hurled into an incompetent Medicare ghetto. They don’t want to have their guns confiscated. They don’t really give a rat’s ass about Climate Change. They plan to be dead before it does any real harm. They particularly don’t want their little girls sharing restrooms with 200-lb transvestites in fishnets and falsies. (Another reason they don’t want to give up their guns.)
The Swamp has ways of enforcing a go-slow strategy on the Marxist aims of the cabal that has the bit in its teeth as it begins its conquering march on DC. For one thing, there has been no orderly transition, as fights about election irregularities have kept the incoming administration from learning even where their offices will be on January 20. It will even take quite a while for the federal regulation-making machine to gear up again. For another thing, the Democrats — in the absence of a once-in-a-lifetime election of an uncritically admired messiah — aren’t very good at organizing or running anything. This isn’t necessarily because they’re stupid, but because their political bedfellows since the New Deal have also been competing constituencies, united only by their belief that big government is the only possible redress for their particular grievances. Once in office, the inherent rivalries and conflicts re-emerge, and the creation of legislation that can be passed becomes complicated, contentious, and subject to various kinds of geographical resistance. (You know. The states, damn them.)
Even with control of both houses of Congress, enacting a Biden-Harris legislative suite is going to be like herding cats. Which could be handled by a strong and persuasive executive. But there isn’t one. And the Swamp is perfectly happy with a glacial implementation of the part’s insincere Revolution. The one thing you can count on, the primary reason why the Republic is dead, is that a bullseye will be painted on the back of the Electoral College, thus ensuring that California and New York will hereafter choose the president for the rest of us. That’s one thing the Bandwagon and the Swamp can work together on, because its horrific consequences can’t impact the midterms, only the remainder of post-American history.
No doubt the process of a Biden first term will be messy enough to slow the economy substantially. Not even the Swamp thinks Happy Days are really here again. But they have fought, and survived, a long battle for power over the most talented adversary they have ever faced. They are, in fact, as I write this, licking their wounds and wondering if they have achieved a Pyrrhic victory consisting of a dead man and a Communist shrew in the White House, razor thin margins in the House and Senate, and the possibility that the mass media may be tempted to leap into the age-old Democrat melée of tearing each other to bits over what the most effective approaches are for continuing the destruction of the hated American Way. You can bet they have no interest in wasting their rhetorical might on lionizing Joe Biden.
Which leads us to...
UNKNOWNS:
At base the Democrat election strategy consisted of letting the inmates out of the asylum to create so much havoc the public at large would blame violence and hatred and privation and illness and facemasks on the Trump administration in just enough numbers to defeat him at the polls. Now what?
Nobody knows. Can the loonies be returned to the asylum before they do irretrievable damage to the economy and civil order? When you fire up college students to fancy themselves as the reincarnation of Abby Hoffman, Jane Fonda, Mark Rudd, and Tom Hayden, can you gentle them down again? When you convince deprived and angry urban black youth to model themselves on the doomed ghosts of the Black Panthers — fronted in the media now by millionaires in NBA and NFL uniforms — can you keep them from burning down more of America’s cities and suburbs? If you trade in your party platform for a resounding commitment to the worst single political and economic philosophy ever devised in order to win a presidential election, can you still figure out some way to keep that ruinous and always murderous philosophy from turning the United States into Cuba, Venezuela, East Germany, or the USSR?
Well, we’ll see about that. It’s an unknown.
Here’s another big question mark. What will the mass media do? Will they, knowing as they do in their heart of hearts what disastrous policies the insane wing of your party has committed to, try to delay the catastrophe of real legislation by whipping the public into a vengeful fury against the so-called traitors of the Trump administration? They just might, you know. The hatred you incited and nurtured beyond all reason is no longer amenable to reason. You may have ensnared yourself in your own trap, a guarantee of a useless do-nothing government. It’s called being hoist by your own petard.
Best case. Unexpectedly uneventful gridlock, with some downturns and congressional setbacks and a bumpy road to the midterms.
Worst case. All the festering shit you splashed everywhere, and all the festering shit you’ve covered up in your own stinking closets, will hit the fan big time. Biden’s inaugural address will alert even the most gullible that they have elected a Second-Phase Alzheimer’s patient. Kamala will or will not engineer an ugly 25thAmendment coup, though she and Valerie and Susan and AOC and even Hillary will attempt it. Meanwhile, Antifa and BLM will discover and resent the fact that they were only props in the 2020 campaign and should pipe down now; the cities will start burning again, police will go on strike, and lockdowns will continue beyond the virus threat to keep citizens in the dark about what’s happening in the streets of their once fair cities. The entertainment industry will die of diversity, transgenderism, and hatred of all things white and male. The economy, accordingly, will suck.
And we haven’t talked about foreign affairs yet. The Middle East will inevitably flare up again (as AOC tries to hobble our energy industry), Hunter Biden won’t go away, and eventually even the ones who only learn by trickledown will detect that the Paris Climate accords are nothing but a deliberately crippling tax on America.
I used the term Pyrrhic victory. Maybe all you left wing intellectuals should look it up. Not that it isn’t too late by now. The midterm elections, btw, are already less than 24 months away. Ciao, baby.
Astute and dark, as always.
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