The Borg of Uncle Sam...

I grew up in the shadow of World War II. It had been over for almost 30 years by the time I started school, but nonetheless WW II was probably the most talked about subject in my history classes throughout. But the funny thing is, as close as it was, it seemed like it was ancient history.  It was finished. The evil Nazis were vanquished and the world had moved on. America and her allies had won and there were new enemies to slay.

While too young to understand Vietnam when it was raging, by high school I had a better grasp of world events and we were living on Guantanamo Bay, down in Cuba.  Although today it’s more well known for its prison facilities, at the time it was a U.S. Navy training / support station and the enemy was the Soviets and Fidel Castro. 

In the late 80’s after college, I was stationed with the Army in West Germany and our biggest alerts were usually related to the East Germans and they killed an American officer while I was there.  I don’t remember all the details but the Americans said he was on an approved inspection mission and the East Germans said he was spying.

Throughout these decades, I always knew that America was on the right side of history.  It was not that I’d been brainwashed, but it always seemed to me that an objective analysis of the circumstances, from WW II to Korea to Vietnam to the Cold War, America was the good guy, trying to do what’s right.  It’s a funny thing about the “good guy” framework, however, that everybody, even the guys who we know are the bad guys, think they’re the good guys!

Nor is it that I never questioned anything.  In college (of course) I had professors who said the US was the bad guy in Vietnam and that the Soviets only built missiles to defend themselves against the imperialist Americans. I disagreed but my words fell on deaf ears.    

So now we are here 35 years since the collapse of our last superpower enemy and a quarter century from 9/11, and I’m starting to wonder if America’s still the good guy. 

Some time ago it dawned on me that for most of my life I had given the government the benefit of the doubt.  Indeed, while imperfect and often inefficient and ineffective on a wide variety of policies, my default position for most of my life had been that the government was, at the end of the day, working for the American people.

Today, sadly, my default position is literally the opposite. 

In college I read Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lindon Johnson and according to it LBJ was a deeply egotistical, power hungry son of a bitch who would sell his mother to get power. While I think that’s clearly true, it seems that once in office he was genuinely interested in helping people and solving America’s problems. While he was a feckless buffoon as it relates to Vietnam, in domestic matters he wanted to help solve long standing problems, and that intention is not diminished by the fact that his programs were stunning failures.

That’s the way it is sometimes, people in government make mistakes. We all know that. But what has happened over the last two decades is a much different animal. Beginning with Barack Obama using the IRS to shut down Tea Party groups and right up until the moment someone in the White House used Joe Biden’s autopen to give pardons to half the Democrat Party and their swamp comrades, the American government has transformed from a virtuous, if frequently stumbling, vehicle for safely navigating the country through the chaos of life into an autonomous borg that largely operates without effective constraint and almost solely for the purpose of perpetuating itself. 

Biologists frequently say that the fundamental nature of life is to propagate the species, and that seems to be the path the borg of American government has taken. In the 21^st century we’ve seen an amalgamation of the Democrat party and the bureaucratic state, with a bastardization of both.  Maybe no better example exists than the Department of Education.  The education of children is easily one of the most important things a society can do to help perpetuate its culture and civilization, and the DOE spends $280 billion a year on it. Sadly, of that number, less than $70 billion actually goes to educating children.  The rest goes to bureaucracy, consultants, NGOs and ultimately, back into the pockets of Democrat politicians. This would be a crime even if schools were properly educating children, but they’re not.  Across the country you have failing schools where kids can’t do simple math, easily the most basic skill one should take from school. But you know what they are learning?  How to be LGBT.

This, like so much of the rest of government is far beyond incompetence. It’s criminal. It’s ceased to be a vehicle for ensuring the freedom of American citizens and promoting the interests of the United States.  It’s literally become the opposite. From funding prosecutors who release violent criminals into American communities and funding leftist thefts of elections while quashing of free speech internationally, to funding the invasion of our country and undermining the Bill of Rights, the American government has become the enemy within. 

If nothing else, Donald Trump and DOGE should be applauded for exposing what so many of us felt for so long but could never quite put our fingers on. 

Somewhat like learning that there is no Santa Claus, in the back of my mind I’m a bit wistful for that feeling of inner peace I had when I used to think of the country and the government as a single inherently good entity. While I think the former still is good, the latter, not so much, and I was late to the party in internalizing the idea of a difference between the two. For me Uncle Sam was America and the government combined.  Sadly, the Democrats weren’t under that illusion, and their recognizing the dichotomy long ago gave them decades to brainwash their constituents and hide the inner workings of their machine in plain site, behind countless official looking government seals and compassionate sounding NGOs.

Despite what the Democrat / bureaucrat borg has wrought, I firmly believe America remains a great, if imperfect nation and I remain convinced that taken as a whole throughout most of her 250 years, the county and the government have been mostly on the right side of history.  To the degree that that’s no longer true for the government, I’m glad we’re at a point where much of its malfeasance and malevolence is being exposed. It will take a long time and a lot of courage on the part of Republican politicians to fix this situation, but at least it’s being exposed before it’s too late. We’ll see in the next two years if the GOP has the courage necessary to actually set a course for bringing government back under the control of the citizens. Rand Paul, Mike Lee & Thomas Massie have their work cut out for themselves… Hopefully they’ll get some help along the way. 

Hillary Clinton: Where George Orwell Meets the Borg...

A few months ago, with his usual hyperbole Donald Trump boasted that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and his supporters would still vote for him. Sadly, I think he’s probably right. What’s becoming more apparent every day however is that Hillary Clinton could probably make the same boast with equal accuracy.

Why do I say that? Well, the first point is that Clinton is the nominee at all. Given the disaster Libya has become, given the events of Benghazi in 2012 and her proven lies about it, given the fact that ISIS is a direct result of the Obama Administration’s exit from Iraq – during her tenure – one has to wonder how she even made it past the first set of primaries. How is it that there was no other candidate who could come even close to beating her? While the cards were in fact stacked in her favor, while Bernie Sanders appealed to a small segment of the Democrat party, elsewhere there was never any real clamor for another candidate. Ask yourself, if Benghazi had been a GOP operation, would the Secretary of State overseeing it have been the GOP nominee four years later? Can you imagine the withering attacks he or she would have endured from the press? No chance they would have survived past March. Can you imagine the grilling a GOP Sec of State would take if he told the parents of one of the dead a lie just moments before telling her family the truth, then turned around and lied to the nation? Of course… but Clinton had to face none of that.

Next, her email problems have been in the air for years. It’s obvious to anyone other than the willingly blind that she set up that server for the specific purpose of hiding her correspondence from the prying eyes of Congress and pesky reporters with the FOI requests. And as has now been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, she lied to Congress and the American people and maybe even the FBI about her handling of Top Secret information. How is it possible that supporters feel that someone who has such little regard for American secrets should be in charge of the entire American intelligence apparatus? The security apparatus? The justice apparatus? Can you imagine the press coverage if a Republican was responsible for a breach that may have caused the death of an Iranian scientist helping the United States? With Clinton, little more than crickets.

How about the Russian Reset? Clinton famously kicked off the Russian Reset which was supposed to begin a new cooperative friendship between the US and Russia. Since then Russia has been anything but friendly. They’ve hacked American government computers, used gas as a weapon to intimidate Europe, they’ve threatened the Baltics and they’ve been harassing American diplomats across Europe. And don’t forget, a year after she left office our new Russian friends invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea, That certainly seems like she built a strong foundation of friendship.

And finally then there’s the Clinton Foundation, that billion dollar vehicle largely funded by groups – read Wall Street banks and Middle Eastern governments – who are ostensibly anathema to her basic “principles” of support for the middle class and poor against the rich and support for gay rights. The fact that the foundation seems to be little more than a vehicle for enriching the Clintons, and is now under investigation by the FBI, New York, Washington and Little Rock seems to bother no one on the left.

Getting back to the shooting of someone on 5th Avenue. Hillary Clinton is not Donald Trump. While they both may be lying, manipulative Democrats, that’s not the point. He sits at the head of a cult of personality that animates thousands of people to show up for his rallies. She is at the head of a borg where the hundreds of people who attend her rallies look as if they are punching the clock and can’t wait for the end of day whistle. If he were to die the air in the Trump movement would dissipate quickly and the GOP would find itself struggling to find a replacement who could carry the party to victory. If, on the other hand, Hillary Clinton were to die the Democrats would simply push her corpse to the side, take down the generic Clinton logo and put in her place the next functionary and things would move forward as if nothing had happened.

And that’s the point. Hillary Clinton is not inspiring anyone. She is taking her turn. She is the opposition of anything that is proffered by the GOP, regardless of who they trot out. (You may think their demonizing is Trump specific… It’s not. Remember what they did to Mitt Romney.) Like the mind numbed audience in Apple’s debut commercial in 1984… or the zombies in book itself, Democrats step in and vote for whoever is on the ticket, regardless of who that person is. And in this case of it’s Hillary Clinton. It’ doesn’t really matter what she’s done, what she’s “accomplished’ or what she stands for – if anything – the only thing that matters is that she’s not the Republican. If there was video of Clinton shooting the guy on 5th Avenue could she really still get elected and would the robot Democrats vote for her anyway? If the guy was wearing a Trump shirt I’m pretty sure they would. One has to wonder what the playing field would look like if the GOP had nominated a real conservative to oppose the borg...