Sealing The Deal

It seams that the Donald is issuing his political manifesto on the same day as the first Republican debate.  All the other candidates no doubt have teams of aids pouring over its every word trying to devise the best angles of attack. (And no doubt colluding amongst themselves to coordinate the attacks.)

No one ever rightly accused Trump of being stupid, so I can well imagine that the decision to re-release this book, originally published in 2011, is a clever faint. Neither can I imagine him coming to the debate with out a clever, and hopefully disarming, trick or two up his sleeve.

I can only hope that he would outline how career politicians who make promises one the campaign trail and them promptly ignore them once elected the greatest obstacle to getting anything done in Congress and then announcement that his first legislative proposal would be to send a comprehensive bill to Congress for a Constitutional amendment creating strict term limits for Congress and the Senate.  And by that I mean VERY strict limits such as no more than 4 terms in the House, with no more then two being consecutive.  No more than 2 terms in the Senate, again non-consecutive. Then throw in a restriction that no sitting member of either chamber may be a candidate for either a seat in the other chamber or the Presidency until their present term has expired and one full election cycle has passed.

The hope of ridding ourselves of the bane of career political parasites like the Bushes and Clintons and name most any sitting Senator or House member, will attract even more voters to his candidacy.

Just watching the ensuing apoplexy and forcing them to scramble to try and respond without the benefit of consultation with advisors or study groups would be worth the price of admission.

Presidential Politics Moves To Comedy Central

With each new politically incorrect statement that comes out of Donald Trump's mouth the beltway pundits and political elites loudly proclaim, with great self assurance, that he has finally gone to far or signed with own death warrant etc. etc. etc. And then the next batch of poll data comes out a Trump gains another two points.

No mea culpas from the talking heads over their previous or previous or previous failed predictions just new ones about the latest "Trumpism".

Just a few months months ago we were all being fed the learned wisdom that the 2016 race was going to come down to Clinton vs. Bush and the rest of the candidates and what they said or what the voting public thought was just entertainment and window dressing.

Well here we are today and Jeb Bush has gained about as much traction as a worn out tire on rain slick highway.  Hillary Clinton is increasing being seen as the worn out, vindictive, untrustworthy, political hack has been.  It's hard to say whether it's her poll numbers or the turnouts for her events that are going south the fastest.

The latest headline on Drudge "Democrats for Jeb" links to a story at  Bloomberg news about prominent wealthy Democrats holding fundraisers for Jeb Bush.  An act of desperation both pitiful and laughable.

If one were to ask for a demonstration that there isn't a dime's worth of difference between the elites of the two parties there could be no better one.

The election cycle is nowhere near reaching its peak yet so no doubt there will be a full array of knives brought out and directed at the Donald.  If the current trend continues the political elites will grow even more desperate and desperate people spawn desperate acts. I can only hope that Mr. Trump's security team is numerous, well versed and well paid.

Self Inflicted Wounds Part II

As I previously stated I have always considered the Civil War to be the South’s self-inflicted wound.  That said the South was not the only victim of the conflict.  As the North developed industrially, the South consciously decided not to and to cling to a way of life that they regarded as static and unchangeable. Slavery was part and parcel of this system, and although it was not the only issue between the North and South it was the major one.  The ongoing conflicts in Congress during the first half of the 19^th century over maintaining balance between “free” and “slave” states as the nation grew is more than ample testimony to that fact. 

By the time the war ended hundreds of thousands, both Northerners and Southerners were dead or maimed for life, so was the antebellum way of life.  Worse still the issue of “States Rights” was laid in its grave for all the states and the so-called progressives have been shoveling dirt on it for 150 years.  As historian Shelby Foote put it, America was transformed from The United States are to The United States is.  Today pride in or love of the state where you live seems to have been reduced to little more than what college basketball or football team you cheer for. 

This latest spasm of assaults on anything and everything Confederate or Southern is but a trampling on the grave.  In reality those behind it are seeking to impose a politically correct, homogenous, orthodoxy that is both anti-white and anti-Christian, on the entire nation.  Such can never be, never will be and never should be.  They are attempting to force all those who disagree with them into the impossibility of trying to prove a negative.  For the left it is axiomatic that if you take pride in your Southern heritage you must by default be a racist. If you don’t support gay marriage you must by default be homophobic.  I you want to build a fence on the Mexican border you must by default be racist and anti-immigrant.  For these ideologs there can be no other explanation, either contemplated, accepted or respected. 

These left-fascists refuse to accept that any argument coming from a white person that one can be racial but not racist.  They argue from a position irrationality and hypocrisy. Their politicians flock to the conventions of La Raza and the NAACP, they openly stand with black racist hate mongers like Louis Farrahkan and Malik Shabazz and all is well and good, but let a single white person raise the subject of defending or having pride in the accomplishments of their race and the are immediately shouted down and condemned as a closet KKK or Aryan Nation member. 

If the Quaker theologian Elton Trueblood were still alive he would accuse them of what he called the “sin of contemporaneity”.  Judging and as in this case making blanket condemnations of persons and events long past based on the standards of today is a fool’s errand.  It is sophistry and it is deceitful.  In the simplest of terms it’s akin to throwing out the baby with the bath water.  Slavery didn’t begin with the tobacco and cotton plantations of the American South and it sure as hell didn’t end with Lee’s surrender at Appomattox’s Court House.  The earliest records of slavery go back to 4000 B.C. in ancient Mesopotamia and it’s still practiced today in much of the Arab and African worlds.  The civil war in the Darfur region of southern Sudan was as much about the Muslim Arabs of the north carrying the black Christians of the south off into slavery as anything else.  The Boko Haram fanatics in northern Nigeria regularly slaughter Christians and those they don’t kill (usually young girls) they sell into slavery.

 

If these leftists really believe that “black lives matter” and that slavery is still an issue today, I’d argue that their energies might be better spent confronting that evil where it still exists instead of worrying about symbols of an era long since past.  One might say that that is common sense but there are even some on the left who argue that just being white is inherently racist and that since the structures of logic and reason are the products of white European culture they are therefore racist themselves. I guess that would make trying to explain the fallacy of circular reasoning another fool’s errand. That these people actually think of themselves as intelligent just makes my head hurt.

One More Thing To Piss Off Putin.

As the average American what or where Moldova is and you'll get looked at like you're joking or at best a shrug of the shoulders. Rest assured Putin knows and he's not happy about the latest goings on.

Before World War One Romania was know as Rumania and was not much larger than its southern neighbor Bulgaria. After the war however it grew to one of the largest countries in Europe, taking in swaths of the former Austria-Hungary known as Transylvania, a small slice of northeastern Bulgaria and a large section of the former Russian Empire extending eastward almost to the port city of Odessa. At that time it was known as Bessarabia. All these area contained large majorities of Romanians.

When Stalin signed the nonaggression pact with the Nazis part of the secret protocols it contained was German aquessience to the Soviets seizing the Baltic states and Bessarabia from Romania. The southern sections where their were large numbers of Ukrainians be came part of the Ukrainian S.S.R.  The rest became know as the Moldovan A.S.S.R. a nominally autonomous sub state of the Soviet Empire that was in fact tightly controlled by Moscow.

After the collapse Moldova quickly joined what became known as "The flight of the Sovereigns". Today many Moldovans have become increasingly weary of governmental inefficiency, corruption and its inability to control Russian meddling along its northern frontier.  Accordingly there has been a growing number protest rallies calling for reintegration into Romania. The reason it had not happened earlier is of course that even after the fall of the Soviet Union, Romania was still in the grip of the evil Chouchescu family. Apparently some Moldovans now want reunification and the NATO membership that would come with it.

The prospect of more NATO forces right on another border of Ukraine must have Putin pissed off if not loosing sleep.  Appears Russians aren't the only chess players in Europe. check to you Vladie boy!