A post-election comment sampler

The New Neo Posted on by

Here are a bunch of blog comments I found at Ace’s that I think are interesting although I don’t necessarily agree with them and certainly not totally.

In no particular order:

It has little to do with never Trump. It has to do with human nature history.

The border is sealed. The economy is booming. China is out of Venezuela and Cuba. Iran is a no longer a threat and is now a failed state.

We wanted all of these things. And we got them. So why vote Cause they can’t possibly be reversed.

The Party in power always loses in midterms. Not hard to look up. Cause why vote when you are winning? Human nature never changes.

This makes no sense to me. Dems took the evil side of every 80-20 issue, R registrations far outpaced D, people have been abandoning woke, Dems have been threatening their fellow Americans, Trump has reversed the Biden administration’s abuses against Americans, Dems have lost funding for their riots and other nefarious doings, crime is down, inflation is down, employment is up …
What is going on?

People are upset over everything being expensive, so they are putting the people who caused it back in power?
Make it make sense!

I’m not going to analyze the results in detail today. Maybe some other time, when we learn more about what blocs of voters voted for what.

My initial impressions are that Hispanic voters – who voted for Trump and the GOP in 2024 – veered to the left in this election. I’m not sure exactly what the motive was. Also, the Democrats’ emphasis on “affordability” was brilliant and they hammered it home. They didn’t have to explain what they would do to fix it; it was enough to talk about it and hope that people’s short memories would mean they had forgotten the Biden years (and the gas prices and sky-high inflation during some of those years, as well).

Calling Iran a “forever war” about a month after it started was another factor, and the Tuckeresque right was very instrumental in disseminating that message as well, despite the fact that it’s been a war in which there have been very very few American casualties and pretty much no boots on the ground, against an implacable enemy that’s done much damage all around the world for almost fifty years. No matter. A lot of people on the right feel that Trump broke one of the promises on which they had relied, and that it’s the fault of his listening to the nefarious Jews.

Now what? A personal note

The New Neo Posted on by

Even before yesterday’s election, I was feeling down. As regular readers know, I’ve been reeling from the death of my ex-husband, and in connection with that I’ve also been very occupied with sad legal tasks and practical and sometimes overwhelming chores like going through his things and clearing out his home. My son and my grandchildren live far far away. And several of my friends are very ill, and I mean very.

My ex probably would have been able to joke me out of my funk at yesterday’s election results, at least for a moment. He’d been making me laugh for almost sixty years. But now he’s gone, and it’s been very hard.

I have no intention of stopping the blog. However, I had already been thinking about writing somewhat less about politics and more about other things. I’m not really sure that I’ll be writing less about politics. I’ll just go with how I feel, day by day.

The day after

The New Neo Posted on by

As I wrote last night, the results are even worse than expected. And what was expected was already bad.

The whole debacle reminds me somewhat of the 2024 British election, the one that put Keir Starmer in the driver’s seat because the voters were mad at the conservatives who’d been in power. Afterwards voters had some buyer’s remorse but they couldn’t do very much about it except substitute another PM of the same party.

For years the left has been foaming with rage at everything Trump does, but a large number of voters on the right are also angry at Trump and the GOP for this or that or the other thing, whether it be the war in Iran (despite the very low number of US casualties), the high price of gas and real estate, or the failure to pass the SAVE Act.

And when in doubt, blame the Jews. As Tom Lehrer sang long ago:

Trump is still president, though, since we don’t have a parliamentary system. If we did, he’d be out. He also will have veto power for the next two years. However, the Democrats will do what they can to stymie and undermine everything he attempts: his war efforts in Iran, his support of Israel, his judicial appointments, you name it.

Will they try impeaching him once again? Of course. But as with previous impeachments, I don’t think there’s much chance there will be the requisite 67 Senate votes for removal. That would require a lot of Republican cooperation.

It’s not just that Democrats won yesterday. It’s the large margin of victory by which they won, even in some red states. Talarico, for example, in Texas, seems to have won by twelve points. Paxton was a weakened candidate, to be sure. But twelve points? In Texas? Democrats have been saying for years that they will turn Texas blue; have they finally done it? Was it an influx of Californians?

And even Susan Collins, who usually manages to defy the polls, could not win against Troy Jackson, who was far from a stellar candidate. The quality of the Democrats didn’t matter, for the most part. All that mattered was having a “D” after their names.

Some people are saying it will be good for voters to experience the awful things Congressional Democrats will do. However, it occurs to me that, because Trump is still president and will veto the leftist bills Congress passes, the Democrats will not have to take responsibility for much of anything they try. They can say they would have accomplished wonderful things but evil Trump thwarted them, and so if voters elect a Democrat for president in 2028 all will be well.

And then – watch out if they get both houses of Congress and the presidency in 2028. Maybe it won’t work out that way because life is unpredictable. But right now I’m not seeing anything that’s cause for optimism.

I think the most basic problem is that the Gramscian march through the institutions has been successful, and the internet and especially social media have helped it along tremendously. Younger voters in particular are affected by this.

This feels like the worst election of my lifetime, by far. Maybe I just don’t quite remember the others. But this feels irreversible, I think in part because the Democrats of today are different than the Democrats of the past. They intend to make it impossible for the right to ever win elections again. They’ve done it in states like California, and they intend to do it on a national level now.

I certainly hope they don’t succeed. But so far we have failed to heed this admonition:

Election night results

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m probably going to stay away from listening to or reading news for at least a little while. I want to try to relax. But yes, I’ll be planning to come back and update later tonight.

Here’s a thread for you hardy ones to discuss it all.

UPDATE 11:15 PM:

It seems at least as bad as expected. Perhaps worse.

I’m not going to get into the details tonight. Too depressing, although expected.

The pollsters must be feeling vindicated, though.

One thing I’ve noticed over the years I’ve been blogging – something that you can very much count on – is that when there’s a bad night for conservatives the trolls come out to celebrate and mock. This has already happened here, but the new comment system has made it more difficult for them.

Oh, and at least the political spam phone calls I’ve been getting will stop.

On ending aid to Israel

The New Neo Posted on by

I started to notice serious talk about the US cutting aid to Israel not long after 10/7 – and this was on the Israeli side. They realized that depending on the US for Israel’s arms was dangerous, although it might have been an okay idea back when US support for Israel was bipartisan.

Now US support for Israel no longer is bipartisan, and that became obvious during the Biden administration – or actually it started to be obvious with Obama. Now it’s even more true, because there is significant anti-Israel sentiment on the right as well, although nowhere near as much as on the left.

So it’s in Israel’s interest to become even more militarily self-sufficient.

No more aid to Israel would seem to rob the Israel-haters and Jew-haters of a talking point, but not really. First of all, they will lie, and second of all, they have plenty of other anti-Israel talking points to lie about. There’s an almost insatiable appetite for such things.

But anyway, Trump made this announcement today:

“We give them more than anybody else, and they no longer need it. We’ve been doing it for years. I’ve been doing it, but Israel is a very thriving country. They don’t need it. If they did need it, I would say keep it going.”

The president said the idea came from Netanyahu himself, suggesting that the agreement was also made to stop Democrats from using US funding to Israel as ammunition to criticize Republicans. …

“Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like El-Sayed?” he asked, referring to Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed. who has made Israel aid a flagship issue of his campaign.

“You take that off the table,” Trump said. …

Netanyahu has been publicly pushing to end the aid since at least January, when he told The Economist he hoped Israel could stop relying on American military funding entirely within a decade. By May, he was telling CBS’ “60 Minutes” that he didn’t “want to wait for the next Congress.”

Days before Israel’s Oct. 27 election, he went further, telling Israel’s Channel 10 that the aid “won’t keep coming because America has changed, not because Israel has. It’s over and it will be over; it’s just a question of time.”

That conforms to what I recall in the post-10/7 world. But of course, as I said, it won’t stop the haters.

NOTE: The bulk of that four billion comes back to the US anyway because it has been used to buy our arms (the haters conveniently leave that out). There’s a long post at Ace’s today on the entire subject that I recommend reading.

Election Day thoughts on stupid voters

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I plan to put up a new post after the polls in the east close, one for Election Night.]

Here’s food for thought – “Stupid Voters Are the Biggest Threat to America”:

What worries me are voters. Sadly, many of them are stupid. And angry. …

We have millions of Americans heading to the polls who believe socialism will make their lives more affordable. That price controls and government takeover of private industry will ease inflation and cure what ails capitalism, so abhorrent to their central planning sensibilities. …

“If a majority of Americans think that socialism is the right path, well the American experiment is over in a sense. It would be very, very difficult to recover from that. That’s a multi-generational recovery kind of thing,” Charles Steele, director of the Center for Commerce and Freedom at Hillsdale College, told me on a recent episode of The Federalist Radio Hour.

Yes, of course there are plenty of stupid voters on the left. And there are also many stupid voters on the right – for example, a significant number of those who follow and admire Tucker Carlson and are bona fide isolationist Buchananite “conservatives.”

As I said, plenty of stupid voters – but there are also plenty of misguided voters (who tend to land on the left) who’ve been fed a steady diet of leftist propaganda all or much of their lives. They are not necessarily stupid at all. Some are actually very smart, and I know plenty of Democrats in the latter category.

The author of that piece I linked goes on to acknowledge this:

How did we get here? Ignorance. Willful ignorance.

From pre-K through grad school, America’s education system has failed America and the American Dream in many ways. None more so than in sweetening socialism and poisoning capitalism in the minds of the last few generations of voters. Marxist critical theory — oppressors vs. the oppressed — dogma has indoctrinated millions to believe that socialism can work if only done right, failure after failure notwithstanding.

The media and social media are right up there as agents in this, with some foreign players in the mix (for example those behind TikTok).

But are the stupid more susceptible to this sort of indoctrination? That’s not what I’m seeing out there. Orwell’s famous remark in his essay “Notes on Nationalism” was this:

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

It’s often been misquoted/paraphrased as something like “Some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual would believe them,” which captures more or less the same idea.

But remember something. Orwell was a brilliant man, and an insightful one. But to his dying day he was a socialist. I wrote about that phenomenon in this 2014 post. An excerpt:

Orwell was a brilliant man, and he struggled to reconcile his wish for a certain type of world with his knowledge that such a world could probably never come to be as he wished it. Much of his writing was devoted to the horrors of failed attempts to achieve that world. …

It is my opinion that Orwell came very close to understanding that his vision of a planned economy plus freedom could not come to pass, that the contradiction was basic, and that socialism would always sow the seeds of its own destruction. I just think he couldn’t fully face and embrace that knowledge because to do so would have meant renouncing a lifelong dream. So he clung to some notion of a kinder gentler socialism without the totalitarianism, while at the same time he wrote tirelessly about the evils of Communism.

Also, in this 2008 post of mine I quote Orwell in 1937’s The Road to Wigan Pier:

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker. nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.

Was Orwell a time-traveler?

But yes, he remained a socialist anyway because the dream dies hard.

What happened to Oakland?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a City-Journal piece on that topic, in case you’re interested.

An excerpt:

But Oakland’s problems are extreme even by California’s dismal standards, and it’s worth understanding why. The most important factor is Oakland’s dysfunctional police department, which has been neutered by a combination of decades-long adversarial oversight, internal mismanagement, and pervasive low morale. Until it ended recently, federal oversight of the Oakland Police Department had been in effect since 2003—the longest-running federal police monitorship in U.S. history—following a settlement of its “Riders” scandal, in which four officers were accused of beating suspects, planting evidence, making false arrests, and falsifying police reports.

Under this regime, the OPD’s internal hires (including its chiefs), use-of-force policies, and officer-discipline protocols were all subject to the approval of a nonresident federal monitor, Robert Warshaw, who had overseen the department since 2010. His monitoring operation, paid for by Oakland, for years cost the city roughly $1 million annually, though that figure fell recently as the department moved closer to ending federal oversight. Warshaw, who set the OPD’s compliance goals and determined whether the department was meeting them, took a direct role in the firing of several police chiefs.

The OPD is also subject to the Oakland Police Commission, a civilian oversight body with substantial authority over department policy. Among the most controversial policies adopted under this system was Oakland’s restrictive rule on police pursuits, which generally permitted officers to chase suspects only for violent crimes. The policy proved so problematic that, in 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom took the extraordinary step of deploying state police to patrol Oakland’s streets and catch criminals who “flee with impunity because it’s common knowledge that OPD [pursues] in only very limited circumstances,” as he put it in a letter to then-Mayor Sheng Thao.

Much more at the link.

Oakland should be a lesson for other cities in what not to do. But I doubt they’ll heed the warning.

[NOTE: I wrote about the federal oversight problem back in 2022, in this post.]

I am extremely apprehensive about tomorrow

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve felt this way for at least a year. It’s not just the prospect of the Democrats taking control of Congress, although that’s definitely a big part of it. It seems to me they offer nothing but empty slogans (“affordability” with no history of achieving it, for example), Trump- and GOP-hatred, and promises to achieve permanent power through radical changes in the structure of the federal government.

But it’s also some of their candidates this year. It’s El-Sayed, Troy Jackson, Talarico, and others too numerous to mention. I cannot believe the polls that favor them, and yet I cannot disbelieve those polls because I’ve seen seemingly-unbelievable things happen, such as Mamdani’s becoming mayor of New York.

When I get this way I find it very hard to follow election results in real time. Usually I just wait till 11 PM or so and then tune in.

How about you?

Haley Stevens of Michigan endorses Rogers the Republican and becomes a pariah

The New Neo Posted on by

Haley Stevens is a Democrat member of the House who ran against El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate primary and lost by just a hair. So there probably wasn’t a lot of love for him on her part to begin with.

But she was willing to endorse him – if:

Stevens has pressed El-Sayed to condemn an outside group’s ad linking U.S. support for Israel to higher grocery prices, which she called antisemitic.

El-Sayed said the ad was not produced by his campaign and that he disagreed with its contents.

Then El-Sayed disinvited Stevens to a planned “unity rally” at a church, and said she shouldn’t attend any of his other election functions. At which point she endorsed Rogers, his GOP opponent.

There’s also this:

Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., who helped organize the planned appearance, said Stevens was asked to skip it after the dispute became a distraction and upset the church’s bishop.

I’d be very curious to know what aspect of this upset the bishop. There are many possibilities.

Haley also is engaged to a Jewish man who had previously said publicly that he will vote for Rogers because of the Israel question.

Not all that long ago (pre-Obama, anyway) that would have been a mainstream Democrat position. No more. Absolutely no more. And endorsing a Republican is a bridge too far, although when it happens in reverse (Liz Cheney, anyone?) Democrats of course applaud it.

Stevens’ stance has been widely condemned by the party regulars. This isn’t just about Stevens, either. It’s to show others what happens when you break ranks. It’s not a pretty sight.

James Carville just might be the worst:

“If you think that these Republicans are going to treat you as anything other than what they view you as…a used condom,” he fumed, addressing Stevens in a low-quality video. “The Democrats don’t even think you’re worth a used condom.”

“You made your bed, sleep in it; you sh*t in your mess kit, eat it,” he sneered. Carville then made a fat joke about Stevens and Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) maybe needing to open up a cheeseburger restaurant. As always, putting the a** in classy.

Bill Kristol was milder, saying that Stevens had suffered a ‘breakdown,'” and Axelrod and Van Jones and Debbie Dingell said the same thing. Must be the approved talking point for those not willing to go as far as Carville.

Schumer called it a “despicable betrayal.” . As we used to say as kids, it takes one to know one, because Schumer is the king of despicable betrayals.

There’s also the argument – presented here in a USA Today opinion piece – that Stevens is merely a sore loser whose feelings got hurt when El-Sayed disinvited her from events.

Hakeem Jeffries – who is poised to become Speaker of the House if the Democrats gain control as expected, says there is more trouble in store for Stevens:

“Haley Stevens made a terrible decision, blindsided everyone and isolated herself from the House Democratic Caucus,” Jeffries told Politico on Monday. “We will have a discussion about appropriate next steps upon our return.”

Warning to all who would fail to support a candidate like El-Sayed, or who actually endorse a Republican: beware.

I read over and over that Stevens has ended her political career with the Democrat Party. But it turns out she may have been finished anyway – she is not running for re-election to the House, and of course she lost in the Senate primary. Stevens has had four terms in the House, but when she announced her Senate primary run she also said she wouldn’t be running for House re-election. My guess is that she wanted out of politics for a while.

I mentioned that Stevens is engaged to a Jewish man, and here it says that she has been contemplating converting to Judaism in connection with her marriage. That certainly indicates that she is defending a principle here, although Democrats don’t seem to credit her for that at all. In addition, Stevens had a previous short marriage and divorce, and she is forty-three. I wonder if her contemplation of political retirement for a while has to do with a desire to try to have a child before it’s too late.

None of this matters to the Democrats who are enraged at her. Whether her endorsement of Rogers will hurt El-Sayed is anybody’s guess. He has cast his lot with the Israel-haters and Jew-haters and cannot afford to offend them even if he wanted to (which I doubt he does). He believes this is a winning position.

El-Sayed’s campaign says that after the Stevens endorsement of Rogers he had his biggest fund-raising day:

Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign says it raised more than $2.4 million in a single day, setting a fundraising record in the final stretch of the Michigan race.

The Democratic candidate’s campaign said Sunday’s haul came from more than 65,000 donors, who gave an average of $36.74. Nearly 29,600 people contributed to the campaign for the first time.

I wonder where they’re from and what motivates them. Could even be Tucker Carlson fans.