RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2024/07/when-putsch-comes-to-shove/

Scrawled on the mailbox outside the apartment I’m subletting in Manhattan is the message ‘Fuck Trump’. You expect that sort of thing, I suppose, in this often vulgar and always blue city, where any 12 names from the phone book will convict a Republican in a New York minute. About 500-odd miles to the west, in the yard of a heavy machinery dealer beside an Interstate near the West Virginia border, there is a monster flag on a very tall pole with the white-on-navy message ‘Fuck Biden’. One imagines it has now been brought down, just as Biden himself has been brought down, and that in some distant Chinese sweatshop the first rush orders are arriving for ‘Fuck Kamala’ banners.

In America’s legacy newsrooms, there has been no need for such prompts or instructions to begin stoking, as Joni Mitchell put it, “the star-maker machinery of the popular song”. And boy, was the media choir quick to get on-song with their hymns to Her. Behold Kamala, not the cackling klutz you might think you remember but a newly sainted smasher of glass ceilings, a strong woman  overlooked and underappreciated for too long. This has been quite the somersault. The same field hacks and big house pundits who just four weeks ago decried any coverage and all footage of doddering Joe as “cheap fakes” have performed contortions that would daunt the India Rubber Man.

The shamelessness is breath-taking and recourse to salty exclamation at the chutzpah of it all almost unavoidable. Today, the woman it appears Jill Biden picked to lead the secret Service was being grilled on Capitol Hill about the attempt on Donald Trump’s life and it didn’t go well for her. Mind you, this is one failure that can’t be laid at the for-the-moment president’s feet as it certainly wasn’t Old Joe who selected Kimberly Cheatle. Asked just before he came down with Covid (reportedly, if you believe it) if the Secret Service director should resign, he expressed confidence in “him”. In that same interview he also forgot the name of his Defence Secretary, calling him “you know, the black man”. That he might not recall Lloyd Bentsen isn’t terribly surprising as eight months have passed since the last White House cabinet meeting. Yes, eight months. One might object to the way Biden was ousted by the big-dollar donors and Democrat silverbacks whose actions say they value fourteen million primary voters not at all, but there can be no argument the man being thrown on the scrap heap is nowhere near fit to serve nor has been for quite some time.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/creating-the-cult-of-kamala/

Whether it’s a product of motivated reasoning or wishful thinking, the race is on to make America’s famously maladroit vice president into a cultural sensation.

If there was going to be an upside to Joe Biden’s presidency, its earliest days suggested it might be found in the lack of a cult of personality around the man. The president inspired support and opposition in Americans but not abject devotion. He was a functionary – a flawed and fallible bureaucrat – and it would be healthy for the country to revert to the mean after twelve consecutive years in which the president was regarded by his supporters as the personification of the national will. That experiment ended in failure.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Biden years proved that presidents who are not ballasted by celebrity worship sink into the abyss. The president’s camp conceded as much with its bewildering campaign to popularize “dark Brandon” – a vaguely menacing figure with lasers for eyes and a conspicuous appetite for ice cream, who, as Politico put it, is also “a master of the political dark arts.”  The artifice was a bad fit for Biden, but the enterprise acknowledged a lamentable truth: In the absence of a pop mythology and the thoughtless adulation that accompanies it, the president will be evaluated on his or her performance alone. In a polarized era typified by broad and sustained dissatisfaction with the status quo, that would be a heavy lift even for an accomplished chief executive. For the middling sort, it’s the kiss of death.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/brace-yourself-america-kamala-harris-democrats-about-put-incredible-show

Heads up America: Democrats are as phony as they are dishonest. All those accolades pouring in about Joe Biden being an “historic” president and a “great public servant”? Phony. Even before his catastrophic debate Biden’s approval ratings were in the gutter. 

Gushing over candidate Kamala Harris? Also phony. Democrats have been hand-wringing for months about how they could eject President Biden but not allow the unpopular V.P. to take his place. They are only coalescing around her now because they are panicked that an open selection process would throw their party into total disarray.

Kamala Harris has been one of Joe Biden’s most stalwart defenders, lying brazenly for months about his fitness to serve as president for another four years.  

As his vice president, Harris has played a pivotal role in perpetrating one of the greatest political deceptions ever, a deception that has undermined confidence in our political system and put our country at risk. For this alone, she is disqualified from ever serving as this nation’s commander-in-chief. 

Still, Republicans need to steel themselves: Democrats are about to put on an incredible show. No, I don’t mean the Democratic Convention in Chicago, which starts on August 19. I mean the tidal wave of money and faux enthusiasm which is about to flow into the campaign to elect Kamala Harris. Democrats everywhere will inundate the airwaves with excited testimonials about Harris’ candidacy; MSNBC hosts will be positively giddy. 

https://tomklingenstein.com/our-elections-are-more-vulnerable-than-ever/

At no time during the Cold War with the Soviet Union was it imagined that the Russians could manipulate a United States presidential election in favor of their preferred candidate. Hollywood’s portrayal of a “Manchurian Candidate” aside, American elections were held in person, using paper ballots, counted by human beings, with other human beings watching them. And, however vicious and corrupt the normal partisan interplay of American politics may have been, this practice insured that a fair enough election could be held. Today that is no longer the case.

Regardless of who the nominees are in 2024, just as in 2020, much of America will hold their elections in the least transparent, most vulnerable method possible: absentee ballots. Because of this, a free and fair election cannot be assured. It matters not that President Trump is ahead in all the polls and in ways that some pollsters believe cannot be overcome. Citizens should expect that, since America is in a war with Communist China, November’s election will be the target of a massive intelligence operation to decide the next president.

It should be noted that America’s election system was not built to stop the Communist Chinese or any nation state, or for that matter any dark money group, with the capacity and the interest in deciding an American presidential election.

The United States is made vulnerable by being the only developed country in the world to allow for this wide-spread use of absentee ballots. Every other advanced democracy conducts their elections in person, with identification shown, on paper ballots counted by large groups of people transparently tallying vote totals with the results available the same day of the election. In states around America, Secretaries of State have allowed or been part of the development of elections systems that would appear to be designed to allow for fraud. So whether or not an election is stolen, a free and fair election system has been stolen from the American people. Today we have systems that lack transparency, whether it is the absentee ballot process or the electronic voting systems. That it can be exploited by the Chinese Communist Party should seem obvious.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-trump-transformation/

Remember in October of 2008, when Barack Obama boasted, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America” into an even bigger and more intrusive big government nanny state? That prediction was on its way to being confirmed by Obama’s two terms and his policies both at home and abroad, from the expansion of illiberal identity politics, racial divisiveness, and tax-and-spend economics here; to an appeasing, self-loathing, serially cringing apologies overseas. His handpicked successor, Hillary Clinton, was poised to take over the project and lead it to its completion.

Then the unthinkable happened––Donald Trump. At first, he was a novelty act, too crass and déclassé for the bipartisan political guild to believe he could displace the five more conventional Republicans in the primaries. He lacked the credentials typical of postwar presidents––election to state or federal office, a degree from a tony law school, and experience as a lawyer.

In addition to being tainted by commerce, his business ventures were infra dig for the political establishment––beauty pageants, professional wrestling, real estate development, and a successful reality television show The Apprentice, with its insensitive catch-phrase “You’re fired!” For cognitive elites who fancy themselves culturally literate, his book, The Art of the Deal, reeked of hucksterism and profit-grubbing. Worst of all, his take-no-prisoners, blunt, often brutal, hyperbolic speaking style was more suited for a biker bar than the hallowed halls of government, and their decorous, elevated discourse redolent of a country club soirée.

But Donald Trump’s biggest sin was winning the presidency, which discombobulated the pundits, experts, consultants, and political guildsmen. His scorn for their haughty “norms” and fossilized received wisdom was unforgivable, and his patriotic populism was an ominous sign of incipient fascism, since every well-bred globalist technocrat knew that nationalism is the gateway drug to racism, xenophobia, and ultimately Hitlerian tyranny.

That his first term was successful on every level, with economic growth at home, and peace abroad, didn’t matter to the bipartisan Trumpophobes. He just wasn’t one of them, and made his disdain for their missish rules and gate-keeping “norms” crudely obvious. For the political establishment, he had to go “by any means necessary.”