Tag: politics

Closing down corruption

Even prior to his ascendance, the God-Emperor Ascendant is cleaning up corruption in America by putting the Clinton Machine out of business:

The Clinton Foundation’s long list of wealthy donors and foreign government contributors during the 2016 elections provoked critics to allege conflicts of interests. Clinton partisans defended the organization’s charitable work, and dismissed claims that it served as a means for the Clintons to sell off access, market themselves on the paid speech circuit, and elevate their brand as Hillary Clinton campaigned for the presidency.

But as soon as Clinton lost the election, many of the criticisms directed toward the Clinton Foundation were reaffirmed. Foreign governments began pulling out of annual donations, signaling the organization’s clout was predicated on donor access to the Clintons, rather than its philanthropic work. In November, the Australian government confirmed it “has not renewed any of its partnerships with the scandal-plagued Clinton Foundation, effectively ending 10 years of taxpayer-funded contributions worth more than $88 million.” The government of Norway also drastically reduced their annual donations, which reached $20 million a year in 2015.

On January 12, the Clinton Foundation received more bad news: a WARN notice was filed with the New York Department of Labor. The main office of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City would be closing, laying off 22 employees. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) “offers protection to workers, their families and communities by requiring employers to provide notice 60 days in advance of covered plant closings and covered mass layoffs. This notice must be provided to either affected workers or their representatives (e.g., a labor union); to the State dislocated worker unit; and to the appropriate unit of local government.” The reason for the filing was stated as the “discontinuation of the Clinton Global Initative,” after CGI previously announced layoffs leading up to the general election.

There is no more value in the Clinton Foundation. The Clintons have nothing left to sell now that their 16 years of national power and influence have come to an end. However, that doesn’t mean their nefarious activities have ended, as there appear to be an awful lot of loose ends lying about that require cleaning up now, given the growing number of mysterious deaths and disappearances of individuals connected to the foundation in some way.

The Trump administration’s investigative efforts are likely to prove more than a little illuminating in the next year or two. And despite all the people are worrying about attempts being made on the God-Emperor Ascendant’s life, I would expect that it is the Clintons who have considerably more to fear in that regard. Evil has a habit of callously casting aside its servants who are no longer useful to it.

The Politics of the Possible

Classicist and historian VDH attempts to make sense of the Trumpist ideology, such as it is:

Tradition

Trumpism promotes traditionalism. Trump showcases “Merry Christmas!” because his parents did. He believes in dressing formally and being addressed as Mr. Trump. And he insists that his children be well-behaved and polite.

You might object that Trump is thrice-married, Petronian in his tastes, and ethically sloppy or worse in his own business dealings. No matter: Trump seeks a return to normalcy all the more. His personal excesses apparently spur his impulses for traditional norms.

Perhaps Trump is like many Baby Boomers as they enter their final decades: They look back at their parents and grandparents, and wonder how they put up with their offspring — and see how far this generation has fallen short of their forebears’ ideals, which in turn sparks a desire for a return to normalcy in the wayward. Deists were believers in the abstract who otherwise shunned a living Christianity yet thought that active religion had social value for others. Similarly, Trump is a non-practicing moralist who believes traditional morality can restore structure and guidance to society.

So Trump is foul-mouthed but wants a return of decorum; he has been conniving but thinks his own recklessness is not necessarily a model for the nation.




National Greatness 

Nationalism is another Trump axiom — the deliberate antithesis to the progressive and Socratic idea of being “a citizen of the world.” In Trump’s mind, the U.S. is a paradise thanks to its exceptional values and the hard work of past generations; the mess elsewhere (to the degree Trump worries about it) is due to human failing that is not America’s fault. Trump laments self-inflicted misery abroad but feels that he and his country are not culpable for it, and, other than Good Samarian disaster or famine relief, we cannot do too much about it in the long term.

If Mexico wants good jobs or Europe seeks to re-arm, then they can first make their own necessary adjustments to give them what they need without necessarily involving the U.S., whose first obligation is to make sure that its own citizens are well, secure, and employed. It seems that in Trump’s view, America’s poor and forgotten have claims on this country’s attention that far outweigh those of the illegal immigrant or the globe-trotting internationalist; the lathe worker in Des Moines and the real estate broker in Manhattan, by virtue of being American, deserve more of Washington’s attention than international bureaucrats or foreign royals. The least American is preferable to the greatest foreigner.

To the Left, this is xenophobic, nativist, and Peronist; in the Trump mind, it is a long-overdue pushback against 21st-centurty globalism. Good borders make good neighbors; illegal immigrants who arrive by breaking the law will certainly keep breaking the law to stay. Americans cannot pick and choose which American laws to follow; why would they allow foreigners to do what they themselves cannot and should not do?

I would describe Trump’s approach to governance, which is not an ideology proper, but rather an attitude more akin to conservatism, as the politics of the possible. Do what you can. Don’t worry about what you can’t. And always keep in mind that the best people, the very best, can accomplish more than anyone else thinks.

The God-Emperor Ascendant is the rare combination of ambition and optimism with pragmatism. It is, as we are beginning to see, a potent combination. And I, for one, will not be at all surprised if, eight years from now, he leaves the White House and enters the history books being widely regarded as a better and more popular president than Ronald Reagan.

That may sound absurd, but note that Trump is already showing signs of being much better at team-building, delegating, and holding his subordinates to high expectations than any president of the modern era.

The Deep State’s war

Against Donald Trump and democracy in America:

FOR MONTHS, the CIA, with unprecedented clarity, overtly threw its weight behind Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and sought to defeat Donald Trump. In August, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell announced his endorsement of Clinton in the New York Times and claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” The CIA and NSA director under George W. Bush, Gen. Michael Hayden, also endorsed Clinton, and went to the Washington Post to warn, in the week before the election, that “Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin,” adding that Trump is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”

It is not hard to understand why the CIA preferred Clinton over Trump. Clinton was critical of Obama for restraining the CIA’s proxy war in Syria and was eager to expand that war, while Trump denounced it. Clinton clearly wanted a harder line than Obama took against the CIA’s long-standing foes in Moscow, while Trump wanted improved relations and greater cooperation. In general, Clinton defended and intended to extend the decadeslong international military order on which the CIA and Pentagon’s preeminence depends, while Trump — through a still-uncertain mix of instability and extremist conviction — posed a threat to it.

Whatever one’s views are on those debates, it is the democratic framework — the presidential election, the confirmation process, congressional leaders, judicial proceedings, citizen activism and protest, civil disobedience — that should determine how they are resolved. All of those policy disputes were debated out in the open; the public heard them; and Trump won. Nobody should crave the rule of Deep State overlords.

Yet craving Deep State rule is exactly what prominent Democratic operatives and media figures are doing. Any doubt about that is now dispelled. Just last week, Chuck Schumer issued a warning to Trump, telling Rachel Maddow that Trump was being “really dumb” by challenging the unelected intelligence community because of all the ways they possess to destroy those who dare to stand up to them:

And last night, many Democrats openly embraced and celebrated what was, so plainly, an attempt by the Deep State to sabotage an elected official who had defied it: ironically, its own form of blackmail.

Greenwald warns about what will happen if the Deep State’s claims turn out to be, not only unverified, but false. “Many people will conclude, with Trump’s encouragement, that large media outlets and anti-Trump factions inside the government are deploying “Fake News” to destroy him. In the eyes of many people, that will forever discredit — render impotent — future journalistic exposés that are based on actual, corroborated wrongdoing.”

The example he chose – Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s trip to Prague – has already been shown to be false. So, what Greenwald should have said is that many people will correctly conclude that the media and the Deep State are utilizing Fake News to attack the God-Emperor Ascendant, and that they are doing so in vain.

The power of the bully pulpit

Trump has a powerful weapon to wield against corporate America’s free trade mythology:

Some U.S. companies are reviewing potential mergers while others are rethinking job cuts or looking at their manufacturing operations in China for fear of being cast as “anti-American” by President-elect Donald Trump, according to Wall Street bankers, company executives and crisis management consultants.

Having seen some of America’s largest companies, including General Motors Co, Lockheed Martin Corp and United Technologies Corp, bluntly and publicly rebuked by Trump on Twitter, many others are worried they may be his next target – especially if they have significant overseas manufacturing, have had U.S. job cuts or price increases for consumers.

“Any business that leaves our country for another country, fires its employees, builds a new factory or plant in the other country, and then thinks it will sell its product back into the U.S. without retribution or consequence is WRONG!” Trump, who assumes office on Jan. 20, tweeted in December.

Trump campaigned on an “America First” anti-globalization platform that promised the return of thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs to economically depressed areas.

That nationalist rhetoric and Trump’s willingness to use his Twitter account as a cudgel has so rattled some companies that they are putting on hold mergers and acquisitions that may involve significant job cuts or moving production or tax domicile abroad, out of fear that such deals could be seen as “unpatriotic”, several top Wall Street bankers said.

This is excellent news. It also shows how perilously thin the corporate case for free trade is.

Build. The. Wall.

The House Republicans get on board with alacrity, after having the God-Emperor Ascendant put the fear of himself into them.

Republicans on Capitol Hill say they don’t need to wait for Mexico to make good on President-elect Donald Trump’s central campaign promise: building a southern border wall.

In fact, they are happy to underwrite the wall themselves, at a potential cost of many billions of dollars.

The GOP’s willingness to fund Trump’s border wall with taxpayer money could put the party’s deeply held desire to rein in government spending in conflict with its long-standing goal of cracking down on illegal immigration and toughening border security. Nonetheless, many Republicans do not see an inherent conflict.

“It would be a proposal that would cost billions of dollars to get done, but if it’s an appropriate priority for our country, it’s worth spending that kind of money,” said Rep. Luke Messer (R-Ind.), chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee.

It’s more pathetic than amusing to see the media affect to be concerned about the federal government spending between $8 and 20 billion on shutting down illegal immigration from Central and South America after they were cheerleading Obama’s $787 billion in economic stimulus.

The irony is that there will arguably be more genuine economic stimulus created by building the wall than there was from Obama’s vastly larger income redistribution efforts.

He did not enjoy the smell of heresy

The God-Emperor Ascendant puts the fear of himself into the House Republicans:

The Trump effect has landed forcefully on Capitol Hill.

Less than two hours after President-elect Donald Trump criticized House Republicans — in a tweet, of course — for trying to gut an ethics investigative unit on the first day of business in the new Congress, those plans lay in shambles in the Republican conference’s meeting room…. By aiming his social-media fire hose on fellow Republicans — even as he assembles a Cabinet filled with billionaires and insiders — Trump made clear that he intends to continue giving voice to the anti-establishment outsiders who propelled him through the Republican primaries against much more seasoned politicians and to an electoral-college win against Democrat Hillary Clinton.

That may give Trump leverage over those members of the Republican conference who have claimed the “outsider” mantle for the past six years, a period when the most conservative Republicans have gained stature back home by flouting leadership, whether it was John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) as speaker or Ryan for the past 15 months.

These Republicans regularly turned their backs on party leadership and claimed ideological purity in their carefully crafted districts that were bastions of like-minded conservatives. They operated on the assumption that the only likely political penalty was a primary challenge from the right.

Now, their party’s leader wields a Twitter account with 18.5 million followers. As he prepares to enter the Oval Office in little more than two weeks, Trump is far more popular in their districts than they are. He employs as his chief strategist the former leader of Breitbart News, a conservative media outlet that has included among its top targets the skewering of Republicans not deemed suitably conservative.

As a result, the first day of the 115th Congress served as a sort of beta test of how some Republicans will react when Trump sics his media power on them. If the most conservative flank tries to buck Trump on a pricey infrastructure deal, how will they handle the heat from Trump’s Twitter feed? If moderate Republicans try to block his moves on health care, will they withstand the heat if Trump goes to Breitbart to attack them by name?

On Tuesday the answer came fast: Run for cover.

It is good to see Donald Trump putting the bully back in the bully pulpit. Someone needs to keep the corrupt bastards in line.

Want to get re-elected, Congressman? Then you’d damn well better play ball.

All their base

In which we are reliably informed that their base, such as it is, are now belong to us. A rhetorical strategy courtesy of the Evil Legion of Evil’s Xcruciator, which, uncharacteristically, does not involve wood, nails, or hammers.

Ordinarily, which is to say ordinarily when dealing with a sane enemy, it would be considered unwise to do him a small injury, or to motivate him to greater efforts. And, were we still dealing with the old mainstream Democratic Party, especially the party as it was before the Dixiecrats became Republicans, it would be a mistake to provoke them in minor and non-ruinous ways. Happily or unhappily, that party is deader than chivalry. What’s left are mostly the Trigglypuffs, along with the genocidal lunatics – like the aforementioned incestuous child molester, Lena Dunham – who want straight white men extinct, reinforced by the left-wing professorial freakshow, and egged on by myriad self-righteous and unutterably stupid assholes, molesting innocent women and their families, on public conveyances, when said women have had the bad judgment to be fathered by men the assholes don’t like.

Oh, yes, yes, there are, no doubt, some sane men and women hovering around the top echelons of the Democratic Party. But if they’re sane, they’re equally corrupt, venomous spiders, dripping with poison, at the center of left wing insanity. However, those spiders aren’t really in control of the movement anymore. Nobody is. Instead, the left is largely a bunch of self-willed, albeit unintelligent, bombs, just like Trigglypuff, waiting to go off at the slightest emotional jar.

And we – yes, we right wing knuckle-draggers – control those bombs because we can emotionally jar them. Hence, to paraphrase, ‘somebody set up them the bomb.’


Take Off Every Zig…

where “zig” is equal to “act , to include speech, perpetrated by the right that causes Social Justice Warriors to emotionally explode.”

Now think about that, for a bit. As I began, quoting Jean Raspail, the left is humorless and grim. They cannot take a joke. Indeed, they have only one joke: “He’s stupid,” as they have only one insult, “you’re stupid.” (Why is that? Well…it’s because they’re rather stupid, really. Exceptions are just that, exceptional.) We can provoke them at will, easily, any time we like.

Moreover, the more we do provoke them, for the next four years, provided we do so with humor, hence the more we can get them to act like the fascisti they are, the more likely it is that the Democrats cannot return to power, because social justice is now at the core of their base, so much the core, in fact, that they cannot repudiate it. White men? Hell, white people? Pretty much gone now, and apparently not broadly welcome to return.

That’s how we got Trump elected, really, that working class whites – and not inconsequential numbers of high quality blacks and Hispanics, too, be it noted – got tired of being ignored, except to be disadvantaged, and tired of being insulted. That’s why we’re in control of both House and Senate. That’s why we have a fairly hefty majority of state governorships. And that, o, most blessedly, is why we, not the left, are going to set the immediate tone for the Supreme Court and quite possibly create a supermajority within it that will last generations

But to make absolutely sure of that, to save the country, we need to keep the left out of power not merely through 2020, but all the way to 2024 and maybe beyond.

To that end I propose the following highly amusing program. I am going to drop a line to every right wing pundit I can think of, from Ann Coulter to Rush Limbaugh, referencing this column and suggesting that we should greet the ascension of Donald Trump to the oval office, this 20th of January, by flooding the internet, the airwaves, and the legacy media with the old but still fun meme:


All Your Base Are Belong To Us.

Make it so.

How Putin influenced the US election

The Saker explains how Vladimir Putin really did influence the recent US presidential election:

I will dare to speculate that Russia did play a role in the election of Trump. No, not by hacking emails or by recruiting Ron Paul (!!!) as an agent of Russian propaganda, but by openly and firmly confronting the USA on all fronts and showing that Russia would not bend her knee before the AngloZionist Empire. As I have written many times, Russia has been preparing for war for years now and while Russians were (and still are) afraid of war, they are also ready and willing to fight it if forced to do so. In his latest press conference Putin specifically referred to the will of the Russian people as a key element in Russia’s ability to defeat any aggressor when he said,

We are stronger than any potential aggressor. I have no problem repeating it. I also said why we are stronger. This has to do with the effort to modernise the Russian Armed Forces, as well as the history and geography of our country, and the current state of Russian society

and he is absolutely right. Sure, Hillary was probably stupid enough to try to impose a no-fly zone over Syria, but the 200 or so generals and admirals who expressed their support for Trump probably understood what that kind of folly would entail. Furthermore, it appears that quite a few Americans are sympathetic to Russia and Putin himself. Again, in his latest press conference Putin referred to this and made some very interesting comments:

I do not take support for the Russian President among a large part of Republican voters as support for me personally, but rather see it in this case as an indication that a substantial part of the American people share similar views with us on the world’s organisation, what we ought to be doing, and the common threats and challenges we are facing. It is good that there are people who sympathise with our views on traditional values because this forms a good foundation on which to build relations between two such powerful countries as Russia and the United States, build them on the basis of our peoples’ mutual sympathy. (…) It seems to me that Reagan would be happy to see his party’s people winning everywhere, and would welcome the victory of the newly elected President so adept at catching the public mood, and who took precisely this direction and pressed onwards to the very end, even when no one except us believed he could win.

Putin puts it down to values, common values, between the Russian and the American people.

Personal sidebar: for whatever this is worth, I regularly interact with Americans who support Putin on the grounds that “he stands for American values unlike the SOBs in Washington”.

But how did the Americans become aware of what values Putin and Russia stood for if not for the ceaseless efforts of Putin himself and the alternative media to convey these values to the general public? I think that by OPENLY denouncing the total hypocrisy of the AngloZionist Empire and by OPENLY offering a different civilizational model, Putin and Russia did have an impact on the public opinion in the West. To put it simply: Russia has scored an ideological victory over the AngloZionist imperialists. In other words, the Russian policy of standing firm against the Empire while openly challenging it on its ideological foundation was the correct one and it probably did have an impact upon the outcome of the election in the USA.

It wasn’t just the Democrats

In fairness, Obama left America in a weaker, more untenable state too:

The top candidates to lead the Democratic National Committee are positioning their campaigns as a repudiation of what they see as the political legacy of President Barack Obama.

Though they rarely mention the president by name or address his policies, Labor Secretary Tom Perez and Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison have sent a clear message that Mr. Obama has left the party in a weakened state.

Messers. Perez and Ellison—along with state chairmen Jaime Harrison of South Carolina and Ray Buckley of New Hampshire, who are also candidates for chairman of the DNC—are seeking a mandate to reverse Obama-era tactics that cut funding and attention to local parties and left Democrats with far less power in Congress, governorships and state legislatures than when his presidency began.

Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War. George W. Bush defeated Afghanistan and Iraq, although he blew the occupation. Even George Bush oversaw the fall of the Berlin Wall. Obama managed to lose a proxy war in Syria, turn Libya into a Somali-style failed state, and abetted the invasions of Europe and the USA.

I’m not saying he was the worst president ever; that disgrace probably has to go to LBJ considering that he was responsible for Vietnam, the Great Society, and the 1965 Immigration Act. But he wasn’t even mediocre.

Feature, not bug

Dr. Helen observes that female Democrats are the most insular when it comes to politics:

What I find interesting here is that Republican women are the least likely to unfriend someone at 8% meaning that they are more tolerant of other points of view. But then, a Republican woman is generally someone more clearly likely to buck the trend and herd mentality as the majority of women are Democrats. Maybe right-leaning women are more autonomous and don’t need a crowd of people supporting and propping them up constantly.

I have noticed that in general, female Democrats have a harder time when someone disagrees with them and some can get very angry and hurl personal insults or dismiss the dissenter from their group. They seem very much like the group in Mean Girls who treat others with disdain in order to prop themselves up.

I find it easier to simply refuse to be friends with female Democrats in the first place. I don’t tolerate vapid stupidity very well. And if I want lectures, I’ll return to college.