The Republican dilemma redux: Don Quixote versus Sancho Panza

The New Neo Posted on by

For a long time I’ve seen the repetitive Republican in-fighting in terms of that classic work, Don Quixote. Today’s example starts with this from commenter “Bauxite,” Panza’s stand-in:

Gregory Harper wrote – “With the exceptions of DeSantis and Vivek, everybody on the stage last night was completely irrelevant. They represent a party that no longer exists.”

It may no longer exist, but its remaining voters exist and they are increasingly refusing to vote for Trump and similar candidates. Hence, Trump and other MAGA candidates’ spectacular failures in general elections over the past three cycles.

What Trumpers fail to grasp is that MAGA is not a majority, not even close. You need a coalition with that party that “no longer exists.” You can’t, for example, swear off John McCain voters because you can’t win without them.

This isn’t rocket science. It’s arithmetic. I’m flabbergasted that Trumpers still haven’t figured this out after 2018, 2020, and 2022.

However, the sentiment comes from many long years of those same people – who now are the die-hard Trump supporters referred to there as “Trumpers” – being angered and frustrated at being told to support tepid losers such as McCain and Romney, as well as those RINOs who continue to vote with the left on certain important issues. Bauxite is correct that you can’t win without McCain voters, but I think most Trump supporters would respond by saying, “Well, you can’t win without us either, and we’re sick and tired of that loser argument. We won in 2016 and we can do it again – or maybe no Republican can do it because of fraud anyway. But we’d rather go out with a fighting candidate than one we can barely distinguish from the opposition.”

And what do I think? It might sound like a copout, but I think they both make excellent points and that’s the reason we’re stuck in this miserable in-group conflict on the right. We don’t know the answer, the formula that leads to victory. That formula might change from election to election and place to place. We don’t know if victory is possible on the presidential level with either approach. Meanwhile, the left racks up too many victories and the outcome of each election becomes more and more important. There is a sense that we might run out of time to remedy things in our lifetimes.

“Frederick” – standing in for Don Quixote – responded to “Bauxite” this way:

@Bauxite: “You can’t, for example, swear off John McCain voters because you can’t win without them.”

Obamacare forever. Debt ceiling increases forever. “Winning” has to mean something other than putting red hogs at the trough instead of blue.

The GOP has spent at least thirty years trading full loaves for quarter loaves and then smugly telling us that “half a loaf is better than none” and “what are you going to do, vote for the Democrats”? Too many people have woken up.

But does Frederick – or those who would agree with him – actually think a half loaf isn’t better than none? Because if you can’t get a full loaf, you will starve without a half.

Personally, I’d rather have red hogs at the trough than blue ones. Because in politics and government, there will always be a lot of hogs at the trough, until we’ve found the secret to cloning Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith.

NOTE: The other thing I want to mention is that I don’t see that the middle-of-the-road candidates like Hutchinson have any chance whatsoever of the nomination. And anyone who sees DeSantis as a middle-of-the-road candidate, policy-wise, has fallen prey to anti-DeSantis propaganda. You don’t have to like DeSantis or his style to notice that his record is a strongly conservative one.

Fires in Paradise

The New Neo Posted on by

Reading about the horribly destructive fires in Maui and the victims as well as survivors who endured so much has got me remembering. Maui – a place I’ve never been, although I’ve been to Oahu – is often thought of as a kind of Paradise.

And the place I’m remembering is another Paradise, which was just a town. Five years ago, as most of you know, it was destroyed by fire. Most of you also probably know that Gerard had lived there and escaped that morning. But I’ve never written about my own experiences in Paradise, before that fire and after.

Gerard moved there from Seattle in 2014 to help take care of his mother, who was still in pretty good shape despite being about to turn 100, but who needed more help than before. He’d had it with Seattle, and decided to return to the part of California in which he’d grown up. I helped him move.

Initially, he thought maybe he’d live in Chico, where his mom lived. But rentals there were more expensive than in Paradise, which was a smaller town about twenty minutes away. The road from Paradise to Chico is called Skyway, and it’s aptly named, passing by a lovely canyon for most of its route is it moves from the higher elevation – and slightly cooler clime – of Paradise down to the flat heat of Chico. The house he rented in Paradise had a relaxing yard and deck, three bedrooms and the usual comforts, and it suited him just fine.

I, on the other hand, would have preferred Chico. Paradise was somewhat dull, and almost every time he needed to buy anything more than groceries, or wanted to go to a restaurant, we’d haul ourselves off to Chico. But I had to admit that the Skyway views were beautiful, as were the vistas from a park there. I spent somewhere between two months and four months living there each year during the four years Gerard rented that house, and so I got to know the town very very well and found my own rhythms within it.

I wasn’t there for the fire. But on November 8, 2018, I got an uncharacteristically early call from Gerard. It was about 1 PM my time, 10 AM his time, and he started out by saying, “Well, I’ve moved in with my mother.”

I had no idea what was going on. It sounded like a joke, or maybe his mother had taken ill – but no. He explained that he’d woken up around 6:30 AM and it looked a bit hazy outside, and then he smelled the faint whiff of smoke. As someone who’d grown up in that area, he knew that he probably shouldn’t mess around. So he grabbed the cat, the cat carrier, his computer, his hard drive, and a few shirts, and drove down the Skyway. Just to be safe. He expected to return in a couple of days.

He had left before the road became a corridor between two walls of flame. You’ve probably seen the videos; people who left just a while later encountered a harrowing journey and some didn’t make it. But for Gerard, although there was a lot of traffic, it wasn’t yet too bad. And when he spoke to me, he had no idea the town was no more.

About an hour or so later my phone rang again. It was Gerard. This time he said, “It’s gone.”

“What’s gone?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

“Paradise,” he said. “It’s completely destroyed. Everything. Gone.”

Then of course I followed the news and spoke to him daily, and I arrived there about three weeks later shortly after he’d managed to get a tiny apartment in the same apartment complex as his mother. The day I got there, there were two things in that apartment: a couch and a chair. Three things I guess, because to me Olive the cat was a new addition. For the next month or so, I went with Gerard as he outfitted both himself and the new apartment. There were large warehouse-type places with donated clothing and household goods, there were trips to Walmart and Costco and the Dollar Tree and many others. We kept meeting other people with carts piled high, full of basic goods like brooms and dustpans and pots and Comet and everything a person might need to completely outfit a new dwelling.

Slowly but surely, the apartment started filling up. Packages arrived daily from readers who sent all sorts of things: toys for Olive, books for Gerard. At the end of November, it was his mother’s 104th birthday, and I took a few photos. Here’s one:

A short while later, the authorities let the ex-residents of Paradise return to the town to look at their homes. Gerard already knew his was destroyed. We drove up the Skyway from Chico and stopped at a checkpoint where Gerard had to show his ID, and then they gave us two Hazmat suits. It was a strangely foggy day that lent an unreal quality to an already unreal scene, as though Paradise was a mirage that had emerged from some sort of time warp.

When we got to the town, I was surprised to see that, because many of the thick trees were now gone, the views were far more spectacular from many more places. Other than that, though, what we saw was grim even though we expected it. Here are a few of my photos. The first is the moment of our arrival at his house, which is directly in front of us:

It was almost completely reduced to ashes, except for a few metal things that were twisted but recognizable. Here’s Gerard’s ironing board, minus its padding and cover:

Here’s the Safeway where we used to shop. The carts are still all neatly lined up:

As we drove around, we saw many sights like this one: entrances made of fire-proof material such as brick, now leading to nowhere instead of their former homes:

Here’s Gerard talking to his neighbor; she’s in a Hazmat suit, but he never wore his. Those are her kids’ tricycles:

This is what the road back to Chico looked like:

And then, about a week later, I was walking near Gerard’s apartment and I felt a sinking feeling when I saw a neighbor of his mother’s running fast towards me. He asked me urgently which apartment Gerard lived in. Gerard’s mother had fallen and it turns out she’d sustained a concussion and went to a rehab facility for a few weeks. This was the beginning of a cascade of events that signaled the end for her; she died about six months later.

What a year.

Gerard returned to Paradise two more times after that with me, and I’m pretty sure those were the only two times he ever went back. The first time was for a benefit concert. The second was at my urging, perhaps a year later. I wanted to see what had been rebuilt, but he didn’t want to go. I decided to go myself and was okay with that, but he suddenly decided he’d go with me. He was very quiet on the trip, and on the way home he said, “That’s it. I’m not ever going back.”

And that was that.

More developments on the anti-Trump lawfare front

The New Neo Posted on by

John Eastman, esteemed law professor, appeared in the Georgia court today to surrender. But he had a few things to say:

He’s a man of letters; he’s a teacher, a debater, a serious constitutional thinker, and a generous donor of his time to causes he believes need his expertise. And suddenly, he’s confronted by a “buffoon” of a district attorney, who accuses the constitutional law professor of being a mobster for the crime of representing a client who believes the election was rigged. …

John Eastman’s crime, therefore, is that he gave President Donald Trump the same advice the left has previously tried but with which it now conveniently disagrees. Therefore, John Eastman’s career must die, and he must go to jail. …

“I am here today to surrender to an indictment that should never have been brought,” Eastman announced to a small gaggle of reporters outside the courthouse. He warned that the indictment of a president’s attorney “represents a crossing of the Rubicon for our country, implicating the fundamental First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances.”

Eastman wrote these words that Fani Willis had apparently never heard before.

“As troubling,” he said, “it targets attorneys for their zealous advocacy on behalf of their clients, something attorneys are ethically bound to provide and which was attempted here by ‘formally challeng[ing] the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means.’” An opportunity, he added, that was, “never afforded them in the Fulton County Superior Court.”

“Troubling” is a mild word for what it is. I think that the current charges against Trump, in Georgia and elsewhere, are definitive signs that our legal system is utterly politicized and very dangerous – something we already knew.

There’s also been a somewhat puzzling development in the Mar-al-Lago case. You can read about it in in this post by Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection. The gist of it is that one of the potential witnesses against Trump has changed his story and now implicates Trump in the act of trying to delete subpoenaed security footage.

What we know for certain is that this witness – “Trump Employee Number 4” – has lied to authorities. But was it then or now? And what made him change his mind? Was it a threat? And is there other evidence to back up his new claim, or does it rest merely on his word?

Another thing we know is that the feds will be using the pressure technique, threatening Draconian prosecution, in order to get some witnesses or especially some co-defendants to flip against Trump. This always makes such a person’s testimony suspect, although sometimes there is independent corroboration, which makes it stronger.

We also know that this case would never have been brought against Biden, Obama, Hillary Clinton, or probably any other Democrat had that person done the same exact things as Trump and his employees.

The Shokin firing wasn’t about corruption after all. Who would have thought?

The New Neo Posted on by

Joe Biden’s bragging about his threats to withhold aid to Ukraine unless the prosecutor Shokin was fired always had a strong stench of corruption and protection of his son Hunter. Always. And yet the MSM and many others insisted it was done because it was Shokin who was so corrupt.

Back in 2019 and 2020, I wrote posts on Shokin. Rather than recap everything, I’ll just link to a couple of those posts: this as well as this. The latter quotes this piece by lawyer “shipwreckedcrew” that appeared in mid-October 2020, just a few weeks before Biden’s election. Here are some excerpts:

The media has propagated a fictional account of why Biden demanded Shokin’s firing, and that account has been repeated over and over again to the point that it is now conventional wisdom. The reason for the fictional account was to provide a rationalization for Joe Biden’s demand that appeared to support a crackdown on corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs by blaming Viktor Shokin for inaction and thereby justifying Biden’s demand that he be fired.

That story is a lie. It was a cover story offered to divert attention from the fact that Joe Biden demanded the firing of Shokin so that an allegedly corrupt Ukraine oligarch could be quietly exonerated, which was a plan all along because the Oligarch in question was paying Hunter Biden nearly $1 million a year for the benefit of having access to such influence. And we now know that Hunter Biden was the frontman for illicit streams of income going to several members of the Biden family, including Joe Biden himself.

The media and the Democrats made sure little to nothing of this reached the general American public. But now we have more confirmation via State Department documents:

Just weeks before then-Vice President Joe Biden took the opposite action in late 2015, a task force of State, Treasury and Justice Department officials declared that Ukraine had made adequate progress on anti-corruption reforms and deserved a new $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee, according to government memos that conflict with the narrative Democrats have sustained since the 2019 impeachment scandal.

“Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee,” reads an Oct. 1, 2015, memo summarizing the recommendation of the Interagency Policy Committee (IPC) – a task force created to advise the Obama White House on whether Ukraine was cleaning up its endemic corruption and deserved more Western foreign aid.

The recommendation is one of several U.S. government memos gathered by Just the News over the last 36 months from Freedom of Information Act litigation, congressional inquiries and government agency sources that directly conflict with the long-held narrative that Biden was conducting official U.S. policy when he threatened to withhold a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee to force Ukraine to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, the country’s equivalent of the American attorney general.

At the time the threat was made in December 2015, Shokin’s office was conducting an increasingly aggressive corruption investigation into Burisma Holdings, an energy firm the State Department deemed to have been engaged in bribery and that employed Hunter Biden and paid him millions while his father was vice president.

Is the MSM covering the story now? I just checked via both Google and DuckDuckGo for any articles in the past week on the subject, and all that came up were sources on the right. If you can find something I missed, please provide links in the comments.

Biden the empath; Biden the mellow

The New Neo Posted on by

Not.

Details on what he said and did during his Maui appearances can be found here and here.

Biden may be the most tone-deaf politician who ever lived. The left must be desperate to replace him but for a host of reasons hasn’t done it yet, and may not be able to figure out how to do it. Then again, what with anti-Trump lawfare and rigging and MSM propaganda and perhaps even voting fraud, they may think they can win again in 2024. And so which candidate runs becomes almost irrelevant.

And yet, and yet – what an awful guy Biden is. Last night I was asking a friend of mine who’s also a Democrat-to-Republican changer if he can ever remember liking Biden, even back when he was a Democrat. I can’t. He said he couldn’t either.

Then again, we have the seemingly delusional Mona Charen and her ilk. Look, I’m familiar with Republican – or ex-Republican – NeverTrumpers and their often-bizarre reasoning. But Mona Charen’s column on cuddly, mellow Joe Biden reads like parody. Can she really mean this?:

So Biden has some work to do to prove that he’s not senile or decrepit. This has been a favorite GOP talking point since 2020, yet Biden has not been able to debunk it despite owning the bully pulpit, so something has to change there.

What could it be? What on earth could it be that might have to change? Could the problem reside in the fact that Biden is somewhat “senile and decrepit,” and so despite all efforts it’s been hard to disguise that fact and “debunk” (love that word) that “GOP talking point”? In other words, maybe it’s not just a talking point?

More from Charen (and I think this is my favorite part of her piece):

Biden, by contrast [to Trump], does seem to have mellowed with age. I can recall a younger Biden who got himself into multiple embarrassing gaffes because he was prickly, sensitive about his dignity, and quick to anger. The older Biden is more comfortable in his skin.

I can recall a younger Biden who got himself into multiple embarrassing gaffes because he was prickly, sensitive about his dignity, and quick to anger – and that younger Biden was as recent as yesterday and the day before. In fact, Biden has been that way his entire life, and age has done the opposite of mellowing him, although it has made him less energetic.

Charen’s piece is just another reminder of the hollowness of many people who were once considered thoughtful and intelligent observers, worthy of listening to on political matters.

The Maui fire disaster

The New Neo Posted on by

I have no idea how the people of Maui will react, but Biden will finally be visiting.

There are still between 850 and 1,000 missing people from the area. It is tragically ominous:

“For the schools that started today, I can’t imagine what roll call looks like … when one in every four is likely not going to be there in those classes, in those neighborhoods,” Fielding said. “I don’t know how you have enough teachers or counselors or therapists, or how you… there’s no way to do justice to the real tragedy on the ground.”

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green told reporters over the weekend it’s “possible that there will be many children” among the unaccounted for.

The exact number of missing people is still changing.

Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen said in a video that 850 names are on a list of missing persons. Bissen said the number of missing people dropped from 1,000 people after lists from the FBI, Red Cross and Maui police were combined.

When there is a large disaster of that sort, many people flee and stay in shelters or with friends. So my guess – and hope – is that a great great many of the missing will be found alive. But the fear is that most of them are actually dead. I assume we’ll be finding out in the next few weeks as it all sorts out.

No matter what, the Maui response appears to have been very poor:

The fire itself was started by poorly maintained power lines, which for years had been identified as a wildfire risk due to their poor condition and proximity to invasive grasses that act as tinder in late summer. The power company was well aware of the issue and had been slow-walking remediation.

Battling wildfires in Maui is a politically contentious issue–so much so that water is not routinely released to battle wildfires and in this case, it took hours to get the water turned on to battle the fire once it got out of control. In fact, early in the day, the fire had been classified as “contained” when it obviously wasn’t. …

The official in charge of emergency response in Maui was a politician with no experience in emergency management, who has since resigned. He made the fateful decision not to warn residents of the raging wildfire. No sirens were sounded, and by the time the text-based warning system was activated cellular service was already out for most people. Residents literally had no warning until they saw the flames speeding toward them. …

When residents finally began to flee the fire all the exits from town were blocked by police cars, who had been ordered to push residents to Front Street at the water’s edge, and a police car blocked the exit out of the town on Front Street as well. That is why you see photos of cars packed together on the main street of town–they were prevented from leaving by the authorities.

Much more at the link.

I don’t know whether some of this is rumor or whether all of it is true. But it makes for ghastly and infuriating reading. There seems to have been a tremendous lack of preparedness and a tremendous amount of confusion. Again, let’s hope we find out more over time.

Weiss: the whistleblowers made him do it

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s even worse than previously thought:

David Weiss, the US Attorney who has led the criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, reportedly did not plan to charge the president’s son until IRS whistleblowers came forward about his alleged tax fraud, according to a report.

Weiss was willing to conclude the investigation without even as much as a plea deal before the agents accused the Justice Department of interfering, according to private correspondence between Weiss and Biden’s legal team obtained by the New York Times.

After the whistleblowers spoke out, Weiss suddenly demanded Mr. Biden plead guilty to committing tax offenses

“It appears that if it weren’t for the courageous actions of these whistle-blowers, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose, Hunter Biden would never have been charged at all,” a team of lawyers for one of the I.R.S. agents told the newspaper in a statement.

Sadly enough, this is unsurprising.

And recently the intrepid crime-fighter Weiss was appointed special counsel in the Hunter Biden case.

Another story about Weiss that broke recently:

U.S. attorney David Weiss, who offered Hunter Biden a sweetheart plea deal and is now serving as a special counsel in the Biden investigation, worked for years with Biden’s late brother Beau, the Washington Post reported on Sunday. That’s just another of several connections between Weiss and the Biden family, which led a spokesman for House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) to say that Weiss “can’t be trusted.”

Perhaps the strangest thing about these two stories is that they were reported by the NY Times and the WaPo, respectively. What gives? Is this part of the preparation to dump Joe Biden in 2024? Or do they believe Weiss is now too motivated to go after Hunter to prove he’s on the up and up, and they want him dumped and replaced by someone new who will also give Hunter a sweet deal or even drop the charges? I doubt very much that the two newspapers are now committed to following truth wherever it may lead, so there must be another agenda here.

The pro-Trump forces are at it again with a truncated and misleading DeSantis quote

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve dealt with the phenomenon in this previous post:

But what I detest – no matter what side does it – is the use of propagandist truncated quotes. I’m quite aware that waging war against that practice is a losing game. The propagandist truncated quote is a very clever tool, used constantly by each side. It’s a way of telling the truth – “So and so said this awful thing!” – while taking the quote out of context in order to lead to a misperception (or at the very least an incomplete, misleading perception) on the part of the listener or reader. I hate it when it’s used against anyone. That very much includes when it’s used against Trump – which happens constantly and to great effect, both from the left and from NeverTrumpers who used to be on the right.

How boring and time-consuming to look up the longer and more complicated story. The press knows this; politicians’ enemies and/or opponents know it, too. Nice guys finish last and all that. Much better to go with the attention-getting, incendiary quote, the one the leads people to the conclusion you want. It works for both Trump’s enemies and for DeSantis’ enemies, on both left and right, and both sides are adept at spinning someone’s words. For Trump-boosters on the right, the theme is DeSantis as betrayer stabbing Trump in the back, as well as DeSantis the wimp, DeSantis the GOPe candidate – despite DeSantis’ record in Florida and in Congress as a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, the most conservative group in the House.

And so we have another case of the use of the technique against DeSantis by pro-Trump forces. You may have encountered it – the “listless vessels” statement. The assertion by the pro-Trump forces is that RINO DeSantis attacked Trump voters by calling them “listless vessels,” sort of a Hillaryesque “deplorables”-lite. Here’s an example. The headline is, “DeSantis Draws Outrage From Trump Campaign Over ‘Listless Vessels’ Comment.” My my, the Trump campaign has gotten awfully sensitive all of a sudden. Here’s a quote from the article:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis drew broad outrage over the weekend following his comments suggesting some Trump supporters are “listless vessels” in an Aug. 19 interview with a conservative Florida publication.

While the 2024 campaign for the Republican presidential candidate has since claimed the comment referred to “some congressional endorsers,” the comment has been widely interpreted by the Trump campaign and supporters as referring to all his supporters, drawing comparisons to former Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton calling Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables” in 2016.

“DeSantis goes full-blown Hillary and [calls] MAGA supporters ‘Listless Vessels,’” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, referring to Mr. DeSantis’s remarks made in an interview with The Florida Standard.

“Widely interpreted” – in other words, twisted and used and lied about. The Trump forces have done it, and of course the left is also doing it. The two groups are in lockstep with each other in their approach to DeSantis, because both of them would like Trump to be nominated – for different reasons, of course.

If you’re interested in what DeSantis actually said, here it is:

Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli called out CNN host Kasie Hunt on Sunday for airing a deceptively edited video clip of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

On “State of the Union,” Hunt claimed that DeSantis described Trump supporters as “listless vessels” in a recent interview, suggesting that DeSantis had disparaged them by implying they do not think for themselves. Hunt then played a clip of those remarks.

In response, Cuccinelli called out CNN for having spliced together two parts of the interview to make DeSantis sound like he was attacking Trump supporters.

“Everybody just saw there that there was a cut. You cut from the beginning of that quote to the ‘listless vessels,'” Cuccinelli protested. “You just did what the problem is. So, everybody who just watched that, understand, go read the transcript, and it is not correct.” …

DeSantis, however, was clearly saying that the Republican Party should be united behind principles — not a single leader.

Here is what DeSantis said in full:

“So there will be people who are huge Trump supporters, like in Congress, who have incredibly liberal left-wing records that is really just atrocious, and yet they’re viewed by some of these folks as, like, really, really good. Then you have other people, you know, like a Congressman Chip Roy, who has endorsed me, Congressman Thomas Massie. These guys have records of principle fighting the swamp that are second to none. And yet they will be attacked by some of these people and called RINOs. So it’s just been totally detached from any type of substance. And ultimately, a movement can’t be about the personality of one individual. The movement has got to be about what are you trying to achieve on behalf of the American people. And that’s got to be based in principle. Because if you’re not rooted in principle, if all we are is listless vessels that are just supposed to follow whatever happens to come down the pike on Truth Social every morning, that’s not going to be a durable movement.”

I think it’s very interesting that what DeSantis was addressing there was the very type of thing that then occurred: the left and the Trump campaign uniting to attack DeSantis or his supporters in a deceptive manner.

Such approaches often work, though, as I wrote earlier. And I believe they are a form of suicide for the right, because I believe that at this point Trump will be the nominee and cannot win the general. I also have come to think that Trump and his most fervent supporters – not all of his supporters by any means, but a significant number – feel that if Trump isn’t the nominee they don’t want the Republican nominee to win. It’s Trump’s way or the highway. And I wonder what sort of principle that represents.