Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

Are we having fun yet?

I’ve continued to have intermittent trouble sleeping, when certain fears for the republic swirl around in my head and alternate with angry imaginary letters I compose to liberal friends.

These links might not be cheerer-uppers, either:

(1) The media’s (news and social) coverup of the Hunter Biden laptop revelations paid large dividends and may have prevented a Trump win. The media has two types of effective propaganda: commission and omission.

(2) COVID was just the excuse; the change in voting rules was planned. And if the Democrats manage to win in the Georgia runoffs (heaven forbid), we will probably see this again on our way to following in the glorious footsteps of post-Chavez Venezuela:

Mrs. Pelosi unveiled a 600-plus page bill devoted to “election reform.” Some of the legislation was aimed at weaponizing campaign-finance law, giving Democrats more power to control political speech and to intimidate opponents. But the bill was equally focused on empowering the federal government to dictate how states conduct elections—with new rules designed to water down ballot integrity and to corral huge new tranches of Democratic voters.

The bill would require states to offer early voting. They also would have to allow Election Day and online voter registration, diluting the accuracy of voting rolls. H.R. 1 would make states register voters automatically from government databases, including federal welfare recipients. Colleges and universities were designated as voter-registration hubs, and 16-year-olds would be registered to vote two years in advance. The bill would require “no fault” absentee ballots, allowing anyone to vote by mail, for any reason. It envisioned prepaid postage for federal absentee ballots. It would cripple most state voter-ID laws. It left in place the “ballot harvesting” rules that let paid activists canvass neighborhoods to hoover up absentee votes.

(3) I don’t watch much TV news at all, but for those of you who do, Newsmax seems to be gaining on Fox as the latter executes a speedy shift to the left.

(4) Jack Cashill on Obama’s new memoir:

This had absolutely nothing to do with you or with race, Mr. Obama, but everything to do with the fact that your party has written these “fragile” white people off.

(5) Meet one of Georgia’s Democratic Senate candidates, Raphael Warnock:

At the link, it says that Warnock is a minister at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, which I recognize as being Martin Luther King’ church. That trajetory tells us a lot about what’s happened to America in the last fifty years.

(6) I don’t think MSNBC was really fooling anyone into thinking it has bee anything but a propaganda organ for the left and the Democrats. But still, for anyone who managed until now to avoid knowing MSNBC’s bias, this should make it crystal clear:

President-elect Joe Biden hasn’t even taken office yet but he’s hiring.

Biden was able to snag four MSNBC contributors. On Wednesday, the network confirmed to The Hill that health expert Ezekiel Emanuel, legal analyst Barbara McQuade, political analyst Richard Stengel and historian Jon Meacham will no longer be paid by the network. They will all be moving on to work with Biden in various capacities or have already started.

Meacham also managed to hide the fact that he was already working for Biden as a speechwriter, and even offered on-air praise for one of Biden’s speeches that Meacham himself had a hand in writing.

The MSM protected Biden during this campaign to a degree never before seen, even in their near-worship of Obama. This coddling of Biden by the media will continue until such time as the Democrats may decide to jettison Biden and to replace him with Harris.

COVID case increases vs. death increases

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting article – the only one I’ve found so far that compares death rates in the very elderly (over 80) towards the start of the pandemic to deaths in that same age group recently. There’s been a big drop in the percentage of people who die (Illinois is one of the states currently experiencing a spike in cases):

Illinois’ overall CFR [case fatality rate] data since the inception of the virus shows that the fatality rate is now just over 2 percent. However, that’s heavily influenced by the 22 percent CFR [average over time] for those 80 and older. The fatality rate for those under 20 is just 0.012 percent.

Those numbers drop significantly, however, when you look at the deaths and cases of just the past three months. The CFR for those 80 and older has fallen to 13.3 percent. While still deadly for too many, that’s a significant improvement in the CFR of more than 30 percent [for that age group] during the May/June peak.

On the other end of the spectrum, the CFR for school-aged children has collapsed even further to 0.006 percent.

That’s the sort of news that doesn’t get a whole lot of publicity.

I’ve also noticed, by looking at graphs for each state at Worldometers, that many states have case levels that are up, but there’s a lot of variety. Some are only up to previous levels, some are up higher, some are experiencing a rise but the level is still considerably lower than it was for that state at peak. For many, though, death levels either have not risen from quite low levels, or have risen only slightly. The worst numbers seem to cluster in the midwest, but I have no idea why.

If Biden becomes the next president, I would not be the least bit surprised if, after his inauguration, COVID reporting shifts from alarm at high case rates to credit for lower death rates.

Election 2020: Jimmy Carter to the rescue in Georgia

The New Neo Posted on by

Not the Babylon Bee.

Not the Onion.

Just 2020, continued:

The Carter Center will make history by monitoring – for the first time ever – an American election process.

Former President Jimmy Carter’s Democracy Program has monitored elections in struggling democratic nations around the globe. But due to what they call a lack of trust in the election process, the program will be monitoring Georgia’s recount…

Both Jake Evans [Carter Center Democracy Program Director] and David Carroll [Republican member of Georgia’s election task force] hope the work done over the next few days will put voter’s minds at ease that the election in Georgia was fair, fraud-free, and accurate.

I don’t think this involvement of the Carter Center will be especially reassuring to most Republicans.

On a more general note:

The chairman of the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) stated that he believes there is evidence of voter fraud and other alleged irregularities.

In a recent interview, FEC Chairman Trey Trainor said reports of fraud in some battleground states are credible “otherwise they would allow the [poll] observers to go in,” referring to reports of some polling areas refusing to allow GOP observers to check on the process on Election Day and the days after…

In the interview, he agreed with Trump’s campaign lawsuits, while saying that questionable actions by elections officials in several states could make the election illegitimate.

Trainor, an appointee of President Donald Trump, noted that state laws allow those observers to be there, and “if they’re not,” then it’s an “illegitimate election.”

“Our whole political system is based upon transparency to avoid the appearance of corruption,” he said the interview while alleging that Pennsylvania and other states have not been transparent. “I do believe that there is voter fraud taking place in these places,” he added.

Trainor makes a point about the appearance of corruption that I’ve tried to make for a while – that whatever happened, there was increased opportunity for fraud inherent in the rules changes supposedly caused by COVID, and there was in addition the appearance of fraud inherent in some of the behavior of election officials that evening. Both of those things were destructive in and of themselves, even without fraud. This election – and any election, really – needed to have obvious safeguards that would make the process beyond reasonable suspicion. It did not.

That has caused tremendous trouble. A Biden win would have been bad enough, but if it had been the result of a process that seemed obviously fair and transparent, people would have at least accepted that it was the will of the people. This election combines the worst of both worlds: a Biden win, and widespread and justified suspicion about that win. Whether there was enough fraud to have caused the win, I doubt we’ll ever know. But the suspicion is a poison as well, and I doubt it’s ever going to go away.

Nor was this suspicion caused by Donald Trump. I began to worry many months ago, as soon as I began to hear about all the rules accommodations for COVID. It was apparent to me that security was going to be very much compromised, and that there probably would be chaos and doubt. Make no mistake about it, either: had the results been flipped, and had Biden lost in the exact manner that Trump lost, it would be the left shrieking “FRAUD!” at the top of their lungs.

Now the Democrats are saying that questioning the results of this election is anti-democratic (small d). That’s rich, coming from a group that staged a clandestine four-year multi-faceted coup against the duly-elected president from the opposing party.

Fauci: our very own little tyrant

The New Neo Posted on by

Dr. Fauci chides America:

“I was talking with my U.K. colleagues who are saying the U.K. is similar to where we are now, because each of our countries have that independent spirit,” he said on stage. “I can understand that, but now is the time to do what you’re told.”

Now is the time? You and your fellows have been telling America what to do since March. Americans aren’t children, and you’re not their dad.

As for what we’ve been told – I seem to recall that we were told there would be a 2-week shutdown just to “flatten the curve.” Wasn’t that about 8 months ago? We know a lot more about COVID now. Death rates are down even though positive tests are up. It’s not clear that lockdowns have helped. Disease has always been with us and is not going away, and there is no way to protect everyone forever.

As C. S. Lewis wrote:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Fauci’s not alone, of course. The list of Democratic politicians who seem intent on controlling others is long.

Truth: “What Killed Michael Brown?”

The New Neo Posted on by

“Why is it so hard to see the truth?”

Because it contradicts the narrative. Because propaganda works. Because a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its boots on. I’ve cued up the following video for a 5-minute segment illustrating this:

That’s the story of our time, and the thing that can and perhaps will destroy us: the way truth gets obliterated by the power-hungry.

On a different but related issue, when I see that Barack Obama has suggested that Trump’s supporters were racists who were “spooked” by a black man being president, it reminds me of what a smooth, suave, and pernicious viper Obama is, injecting poisonous accusations into the body politic while simultaneously acting as though he’s an Olympian above the fray. No other president has ever been such a beneficiary of identity politics and no other has used it as he has (although I await Kamala Harris playing the double or triple identity politics game): as a way to get ahead as he disses the opposition as racists. That’s one of the first things I ever noticed about him during his 2008 campaign, and it set off hypocrisy alarm bells.

Here’s what he (or his ghostwriter, but I think it’s Obama himself) wrote in his latest memoir/autobiography:

“It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted,” Obama writes in the book titled “A Promised Land,” according to CNN. “Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started pedaling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.”

Actually, being born outside the country has nothing to do with being black. It was used against McCain, as well as other people. And I don’t recall Trump using that argument in his 2016 campaign; it predated it by quite a bit, and in September of 2016 he explicitly stated that Obama was born in the US.

However, in Obama’s eyes Obama is the driver of all phenomena. And it’s true that his administration – not his race – helped drive people to support Trump. Trump was largely a reaction to eight years of Obama’s policies of ignoring and hurting people in the rust belt, disastrous foreign policy, allowing increasing illegal immigration, and supporting globalism even if it hurt America.

And Obama’s accusation isn’t even logical. The same people who elected Obama twice with decisive margins suddenly became racist?

Another thing that Obama does here that’s exceptionally subtle is his word choice – his use of the word “spooked.” It’s not a common word and it’s not the way Obama usually talks or writes, but I think he chose it because “spook” used to be (and for all I know still is) a slang pejorative for “black person.” You may think I’m over-analyzing, but I have observed in the past that Obama chooses his words very very carefully.

Obama. The gift that keeps on giving.

Update on election fraud allegations

The New Neo Posted on by

There are so many election fraud allegations that it’s impossible to keep up, and I’ve decided that I’m not going to write about them in any detail today because I have no way at present to sort the wheat from the chaff. I will write more if things become clearer, of course.

But a great many people are posting links in the comments to all sorts of sites that are attempting to keep track of the allegations and to discuss them. As I said, I have no idea what’s true and what’s bogus, what’s convincing and what’s iffy, in the links. But here are some of the comments that offer the links: this, this, this, and this.

ADDENDUM:

Jonathan Turley weighs in on counting the jelly beans. I’ve long had respect for Turley, and my respect only increases on reading what he is saying about the election fraud allegations.

More James Madison

The New Neo Posted on by

Another quote to ponder from James Madison:

…[O]n a candid examination of history, we shall find that turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced factions and commotions, which, in republics, have, more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism. If we go over the whole history of ancient and modern republics, we shall find their destruction to have generally resulted from those causes.

The Founders were very aware of the tendency of majorities to stomp on the rights of minorities. We tend to think of “minorities” as meaning minority ethnic, racial, sexual, or religious groups. But that’s not what Madison meant. He meant any party or group that is out of power and up against a majority determined to keep it that way and take away some of its rights.

That’s why we’re a republic and not a democracy. The Democrats’ left flank – which is very large these days – is determined to make us a democracy, however, in the sense of abolishing the filibuster so that a bare majority can do its will, and in terms of abolishing the Electoral College.

For most of the 20th Century it used to be that major legislation that affected people’s lives – such as Obamacare – was not passed by razor-thin margins. Either one party had an overwhelming majority that really did constitute a mandate, or if the majority wasn’t so huge then both parties knew that it was good if both majority and minority parties were in some sort of basic agreement about any large overhaul in the system. Civil Rights, Social Security, Medicare, all had significant bipartisan approval.

But now, the Democrats are willing to exercise a tyranny of the majority even when the country is divided quite equally. The present Democrat majority is barely that. They know they are poised on the edge of losing that majority in the future, and it’s threatening, and so they want to seize power and consolidate it and extend it while they can, in any way they can. Obviously, if there was significant cheating in the election, that would be one way. But even without that, there are the court-packing proposals, support for illegal immigration and ultimate citizenship, and plans to give DC and Puerto Rico statehood. It’s all part of the same plan and the same goal, a path to permanent power not through persuasion but through other means.

Long long long ago, I used to think that the names of the parties – Democrats and Republicans – were somewhat arbitrary. They are not.

The GOWCP

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s the Grand Old Working Class Party now:

After the 2020 election, Republicans need to rebrand their party as the champions of working-class voters and steer away from its traditional embrace of big business, Sen. Marco Rubio said in an interview with Axios.

Why it matters: Rubio told me he is leaving the door open for a 2024 presidential run — so his comments are some of the earliest signals of how the GOP contenders may try to acknowledge President Trump’s successes while finding their own path.

“The future of the party is based on a multiethnic, multiracial working class coalition,” said Rubio…

Rubio said Republicans have long believed in and supported the free market, “but the free market exists to serve our people. Our people don’t exist to serve the free market.”…

He added that working class Americans [are] “very suspicious, quite frankly, dismissive of elites at every level. And obviously that’s a powerful sentiment.”

What to make of this?

(1) Rubio thinks Trump has reshaped the Republican Party and given it a clear direction.
(2) Rubio would like to run for president in 2024.

Rubio is an interesting politician – at least, to me. He has a habit of annoying the Republican base by being too cooperative with Democrats, particularly on immigration – at least, he was in the past. But I’ve long felt he’s got some pluses that make him attractive as a politician. The first is that he’s actually pretty smart and can speak quite well. The second is that he’s young and the third is that he’s Hispanic. Hispanics may be a new strength for the Republican Party.

Ted Cruz – whom I prefer – has the same characteristics but is smarter and without the baggage of compromise. But Cruz is (or used to be) personally off-putting to a lot of people. I was not one of them; I’m a Cruz fan. But I recognize that some people just plain don’t like him.

Neither Cruz nor Rubio has forsaken Trump at this point, either. I saw a clip of Cruz saying that Trump has every right to challenge irregularities in the election (can’t find it at the moment), and here’s Rubio on it:

“At the core of our republic, its legitimacy comes from people’s confidence in the elections,” Rubio, a Republican, told Fox News host Sean Hannity Tuesday evening. “Right now, you got half this country that has doubts about the veracity of this election.”…

Rubio appeared to back Trump’s push for recounts in the 2020 election, saying that both Democrats and Republicans “should be welcoming of having this process be open and transparent.”

“That’s why the process that exists in the law, there’s a process in the law that exists, after the election, before the results are certified,” Rubio said.

“That process has to be allowed to move forward. Otherwise, we’re going to have a result here that half the country will harbor significant doubts about.”

Why am I talking about 2024? Well, why not? It’s a very depressing time right now. I’m well aware – very aware – that if massive fraud is really occurring in elections (as may be the case), it really doesn’t matter who runs. I don’t need to be reminded of that.

But I also know that I don’t see the future and I need to also focus on things that don’t bring me down. I try to have a balance here, and in addition that means that I sometimes talk about frivolous things, or history, or art, or the deeper questions of life, or any number of non-political topics.

Biden AWOL…

The New Neo Posted on by

…on Veterans Day.

CORRECTION: Some readers have called my attention to the fact that the post by Ace that I linked to above seems to have missed an appearance that Biden did make on Veterans Day, to a Korean war memorial in Philadelphia. However, reading Biden’s remarks there, I have to say they are about as self-aggrandizing and mean-spirited as expected, and he doesn’t fail to slyly hint at one of the lies he repeated during his campaign, that Trump dissed the troops:

…[A]t the Korean War Memorial near Penn’s Landing. Municipal Court President Judge Patrick Dugan introduced Mrs. Biden as “first lady.”…

Mr. Biden used the holiday as an opportunity to advance the inevitability of his inauguration on Jan. 20, despite the Trump campaign’s ongoing legal challenges in several states.

“This Veterans Day, I feel the full weight of the honor and the responsibility that has been entrusted to me by the American people as the next president, and I vow to honor our country’s sacred obligation,” he said in a statement.

The Democrat also made a thinly veiled reference to pre-election accusations by anonymous Trump opponents that the president doesn’t respect the sacrifice of military service members. Mr. Trump and numerous allies have disputed those reports.

“To all of our proud veterans, know that I will be a commander in chief who respects your sacrifice, understands your service, and who will never betray the values you fought so bravely to defend,” Mr. Biden said. “I will never treat you or your families with anything less than the honor you deserve.”

What a nice guy and gracious healer, that Biden.

A historical note on mourning a country

The New Neo Posted on by

Blogger and commenter David Foster writes:

I’ve been remembering something written by the British general Edward Spears, describing his feelings in the aftermath of Munich:

“Like most people, I have had my private sorrows, but there is no loss that can compare with the agony of losing one’s country, and that is what some of us felt when England accepted Munich. All we believed in seemed to have lost substance.

“The life of each of us has roots without which it must wither; these derive sustenance from the soil of our native land, its thoughts, its way of life, its magnificent history; the lineage of the British race is our inspiration. The past tells us what the future should be. When we threw the Czechs to the Nazi wolves, it seemed to me as if the beacon lit centuries ago, and ever since lighting our way, had suddenly gone out, and I could not see ahead.”

Yet it was only two years after Munich that Britain demonstrated its magnificent resistance to Nazi conquest. Maybe there is hope for a similar turnaround in the USA?

I sure hope so.

I was saying to someone the other day that I’ve had plenty of disappointments and sorrows in my life. But at least they only affected me and were mostly important only to me, however sharp the pain. For many years I never felt the pain of a beloved country slipping away, and yet I feel some of that now. It’s not a new feeling, either, but it’s intensified in the last year.

I don’t like what we’ve been learning lately about how far things have gone in the US, but if this is the way it is, then we needed to know about it:

Consider what we have learned about the leaders of the country in the last four years.

We learned that they would do everything in their power to destroy a president who takes them on: delegitimizing his election; baselessly demonizing and slandering him as a Nazi, racist, and bigot; lying perpetually through media conduits to undermine and smear him; pulling documents off his desk to subvert him; concocting false narratives meant to portray him as a traitor to justify spying on him and his confidantes; waging legal and political jihads aimed at toppling him; weaponizing national security, intelligence, and law-enforcement apparatuses to punish him and like-minded dissenters from the ruling class orthodoxy; impeaching him over his desires to root out political corruption; threatening to wear wires in a bid to entrap and remove him under the 25th Amendment; claiming obstruction of justice over rightful decisions to fire subordinates as he sees fit; illegally leaking information about the most sensitive of subjects concerning his policies while simultaneously invoking state secrecy to prevent the revelation of systematic ruling class corruption and criminality; and often engaging in outright insubordination…

We learned that our courts—up to the highest court in the land—would hold such a president to a different standard than other presidents…

Everyone knows about chicanery in Democrat machine-run districts. But never has there been anything like what transpired at the apex of the perpetual coup on November 3rd. In the middle of an election night on which the president made historic gains with blacks and Hispanics and romped in the two bellwether states of Florida and Ohio; in which his Republican colleagues stunned pollsters by dominating Democrats in toss-up and even Democrat-favored races; in which the president was up by large margins in every major battleground state, suddenly, without explanation, the counting stopped.

Were the machines kicking into gear to conjure up the votes needed to stop the catastrophe of the president winning re-election? Certainly such things had been done before in isolation, but in the urban centers of several states all at once? Could a fix of this magnitude really be in?

Much more at the link.

Whether a “fix of this magnitude” actually happened, the sad thing is that the forces arrayed against Trump have already done so many clandestine and destructive things that half of America think it’s very believable that if the Trump opposition could have engineered such a fix they would have had no hesitation whatsoever in doing so.