A Senate of Benedict Arnolds...

Benedict Arnold was a well-respected and courageous officer in the American Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. He fought in half a dozen battles and was central to winning the critical Battle of Saratoga in 1777, where he suffered a leg injury that sidelined him for the next two years.

They say that idle hands are the devil’s workshop, and that appears to apply to legs as well. Over the next two years, Arnold’s inherent victim complex blossomed. Others were, he suggested, getting credit for his actions or getting promoted when he deserved such.

In 1779, Arnold would take a step that would change his life: He married Peggy Shippen, a member of a powerful loyalist family in Philadelphia. Eventually, his jealousy would get the best of him, and he contracted to betray the Americans. By at least as early as July of that year, he was giving the British information on American troop strengths, movements, and munition locations.

George Washington knew none of this and trusted Arnold and put him in charge of West Point in August 1780. One of the most important posts in the country, it was the spot from which the Americans commanded the Hudson River. Less than two weeks after receiving his command, Arnold agreed to a plan, in exchange for $20,000 ($3,500,000 today), to surrender the post to the British in September.

The surrender never occurred, however, because Arnold’s British contact, Major John André, was captured along with the plans for the betrayal. André was hanged, and Arnold escaped to join the British. The British immediately commissioned him as a brigadier general in their army, but most soldiers considered him dishonorable, and many refused to follow him.

Following the war, Arnold would spend most of the rest of his life in London, where the king liked him, but many British citizens and military men despised him. In America, his name has become synonymous with treachery.

Although Arnold’s ultimate plan never came to fruition, had it done so, it could have changed the outcome of the war. Washington said of the plan that “Such an event must have given the American cause a dangerous, if not a fatal wound.”

And that is the crux of why betrayal is so dangerous. It’s one thing to understand that your enemy seeks your destruction. It’s another thing altogether when one of your own, one upon whom you’re counting on to man the ramparts, turns and lets the enemy in. It might not be fatal to your endeavor, but it could be and most certainly will endanger the mission.

Sylvester Stallone recently called Donald Trump the new George Washington. That’s not quite true, but like Washington, Trump is trying to carve out of an enemy-infested wilderness a great nation seeking freedom and prosperity. Also, like Washington, Trump is faced with numerous people who are theoretically on his side while, in reality, aligning with the enemy.

And who is this enemy? The Swamp. The Borg. Basically, the government that controls virtually every element of American life, from baby formula to school curriculum to college funding to healthcare to retirement, not to mention banking and justice and speech…if you object.

Ostensibly, Trump should have a mandate given that he won the popular vote and the Electoral College, gave the GOP a Senate majority, and kept the majority in the House. The first test of that mandate came recently and it didn’t go particularly well.

In the Senate, with Mitch McConnell leaving his leadership role, there were three competitors to replace him: Rick Scott of Florida, John Thune of South Dakota, and John Cornyn of Texas. Hardcore MAGA firebrand Mike Lee or bomb-thrower Rand Paul weren’t even considered. Of the three considered, two are virtual Democrats, with the Conservative Review giving Cornyn a Liberty Score of 54% and Thune an abysmal 51%, while Scott scored a respectable 86%.

Both Cornyn and Thune are, at their core anti-Trump, while Scott has been a staunch supporter of the president. Thune, who said after January 6, “What former President Trump did to undermine faith in our election system and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power is inexcusable,” is seen as K Street’s favorite and endorsed Tim Scott in the GOP primary. In 2016, the immigration dove and gun control fan Cornyn ridiculed Trump’s border wall, was booed at the Texas GOP convention in 2022, and, in 2023 said Trump couldn’t win as his time had passed.

In a shameful last act, McConnell set a secret vote, and Thune came out on top. The fact that the Senate GOP dispatched an aggressively MAGA leader and instead elected someone who’s basically a Democrat tells you that Senate GOPers don’t care about what the American people are looking for.

What’s more, at the same time, in a closely split Senate, Trump’s pick for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz withdrew after it became clear there would not be 50 Republicans to confirmed. 

The Swamp, of course, is not just the Senate. With Trump’s picks of Pete Hegseth for Defense, RFK Jr. for HHS, Tuli Gabbard for DNI, and Tom Homan as Border Czar, larger Washington is reacting with horror and fear. Employees at HHS are threatening to quit, Justice Department lawyers are lawyering up and “freaking out“ while DoD employees are “alarmed“ and governors are promising not to assist in deportations.

But those fears, which are exactly what are necessary to begin trimming the bloat from government, only exist because of Trump’s picks, and those picks (and Trump) will only succeed if the Senate approves his nominees. And that’s a problem.

During his first term, Trump’s picks were approved at a rate far slower than Obama’s or Bush’s. With a McConnell clone running the Senate, there’s concern of a repeat. While the Senate is by design supposed to be a check on the tyranny of the masses, it’s rare that a president must battle his own party to do his job.

Obama had a similar mandate in 2008, and Democrats gave him everything he wanted and more. But Democrats are a core part of the Swamp while Trump is seeking to battle it.

And there’s the rub…

Democrats are the Swamp, and so too is the bureaucracy. But sadly, much of the GOP is, as well.

Trump has his work cut out for him in this uphill battle he’s taken on. But if there’s anything to be gleaned from his picks so far, it’s that, unlike in 2016, this time he knows what he’s up against and is planning to take the fight to the Swamp with bare fists and brass knuckles if necessary, and it will be.

If Trump continues to assemble a team more interested in solving America’s problems than in being feted by the elites, he just might triumph over the Benedict Arnolds who populate the establishment GOP, those whose primary goal in life seems to be to go along to get along, accumulating ever more power and money along the way.

 

Donald Trump, Tiberius Gracchus and a Canary in a Coalmine...

Donald Trump’s indictment makes one wonder if the members of the Democrat party have ever picked up a history book, walked by one in a library, or accidentally heard an episode of the History of Rome podcast. I doubt it because if they had, they’d know that Rome didn’t transition from a republic to an empire overnight, and they’d be familiar with the modern iteration of the George Santayana adage: Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.

By the time Caesar became dictator in 49 BC, the Republic was already gone in everything but name only. The Republic’s collapse had been put in motion 80 years before with the murder of Tiberius Gracchus.

Gracchus was a populist Plebeian tribune, essentially the equivalent of being a member of our House of Representatives. Citizens loved him, and the aristocratic Senate hated him. His assassination points the way to Caesar:

"[T]he oligarchy had introduced violence into the political system with the murder of Tiberius Gracchus and over the years the use of violence became increasingly acceptable as various political disputes in Rome led to more and more bloody discord."

With Gracchus’s death, violence became an increasingly common political weapon in Rome, with Sulla’s purges early in the 1st century BC as the clearest example. Sulla executed 9,000 rival Marian partisan supporters, without regard for age or sex.

Three decades later, Caesar would take control, only to lose his life at the hands of a cabal of his establishment rivals. This widespread political violence only came to an end (temporary as it might be) when his adopted son, Augustus, become emperor. Tellingly, however, Augustus achieved that peace only after executing thousands of his political enemies.

Rome devolved from a republic in which domestic politics were decided mostly by words and relatively objective laws, to a dictatorship where laws were anything but objective, and the emperor could take life and property on a whim.

The late Roman Republic had the equivalent of our “Swamp,” which it called the Senate. While ostensibly there were balancing powers of influence, such as the assemblies, two Consuls (a split executive office with a term of one year) and, occasionally, the appointment of a temporary Dictator, the reality is that the Senate, made up of the richest and most powerful citizens, ran the Republic. Even when one of the assemblies or one of the Consuls seemed to be ascendant, it was the senators calling most of the shots through their relationships with the state officials, familial connections to this or that general, and their control of the purse strings.

So, you have a body of rich and powerful citizens having ostensibly limited power through the visible levers of government, but actually exercising real power through the connections, relationships, and shared ideology of the apparatchiks in the bureaucracy, the opinion makers, and those who indoctrinate the youth who always act as the frontline shock troops. Sound familiar?

Things have changed a lot in 2,000 years, but the nature of man…not so much. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. As with most things today, political changes happen faster than they did in the past.

It took 100 years—from Gracchus’s emergence on the Roman stage until Augustus’s ascendance—for Rome to transform from a republic to an empire. It has taken less than 20 years since Barack Obama promised to “fundamentally transform” America for the country to change from a functioning but imperfect republic into a farce of a country characterized by a banana-republic-level tyranny.

With a complicit bureaucracy, Obama used the IRS to target political opponents, the Justice Department to coerce banks into blacklisting businesses he didn’t like, and Obamacare to give government unprecedented control over Americans’ health decisions while doubling the cost. He unconstitutionally opened the immigration spigot that has now become a torrent.

Within six months of taking office, Obama would set the tone for an administration that would set race relations back 50 years. His “evolution“ on gay marriage would give cover to the spineless Supreme Court to impose that travesty on the country and lay the ground for the fascist LBTQ hellscape America endures today. And finally, he weakened two of the most foundational elements of American society: The military and residential communities.

Obama set in motion a new set of rules in America, and Trump’s indictment, the Soviet style attack on J6 attendees, and the prosecution of Douglass Mackey combine to demonstrate exactly what those new rules are: Thou shalt not oppose the Democrat party, thou shalt not speak badly of or mock the Democrat party or its minions, thou shalt not push back against the regulatory state, and thou shalt not express traditional American values.

These sham “prosecutions” are really persecution. They are nothing more than the Democrats’ regulatory state wrapping itself around American citizens’ necks like the Burmese Pythons killing most native species in the Everglades. The indictment of a former president and current presidential candidate on such a weak and preposterous theory as this one puts the lie to the idea that the Constitution limits our government. This is nothing less than the established “swamp” inventing new legal theories while ignoring existing law to crush a political opponent. That foretells the end of the Republic.

Our Republic has survived for 230 years because most Americans believe in our Constitution and respect the laws that emanate from it. But the Constitution is nothing more than a piece of paper… it’s not a gun, it’s not an army, it’s not police state stormtroopers. It’s a piece of paper that states how the government should operate, limits that government’s power, and guarantees the citizens’ various inherent liberties and freedoms.

For most of our history, the Constitution’s words guided how our nation operated. Citizens had two ways to change the way the country was governed: voting and amending the Constitution. Today, however, neither works. The former has been undermined by a Democrat party that steals elections under the cover of night and calls you a conspiracy nut when you notice. The latter isn’t even a consideration because the Democrat party and the apparatchiks running the regulatory and security states are no longer constrained by its words.

America has become a tyranny where the people in power no longer feel the need to seek validation from the citizens. They decide on the outcome and manipulate the numbers to produce the result without even a fig leaf hiding their disdain for citizens. Whether it was Bernie Sanders in 2016, Donald Trump in 2020, or Kari Lake in 2022, the Democrat party and its entrenched government comrades have decided they no longer need to subject themselves to the will of the citizenry and, if anyone objects, they use the judiciary to crush that person.

America has been loosed from the anchor of the Constitution and the rule of law that kept our citizens free for two centuries. While the blood of the regime’s enemies may not yet be flowing in the streets, history very clearly tells us that, unless we change what’s happening, it will be. The question is, are there enough Americans who are familiar with history and willing to pull us out of our national death spiral before that terrible end is upon us? How Americans respond to Donald Trump’s persecution is the canary in the coal mine that will likely answer that question.

Follow me on Twitter at:  ImperfectUSA

The Cowardly GOP Grifters - Feigning Leadership and Losing America

Last week Tucker Carlson showcased the fact that the GOP is doing its best to lose November’s election.

He showed a clip of the Mitch McConnell admitting that the GOP would likely not take the Senate. McConnell and the rest of leadership don’t want to win. Carlson rightly suggested if the GOP really wanted to win, they’d run on crime and immigration.  While the economy is reportedly voter’s number one issue, in reality it’s what goes on in their neighborhoods and on their streets that matter.  If Americans don’t feel safe walking down their streets or in their homes or if they sit in the drive-thru lines because they’re scared to go into a restaurant or store, nothing else matters… not the economy, abortion, gender rights, or Ukraine. 

But the GOP doesn’t care.  They’re complaining about Biden’s spending, bemoaning government overreach and sanctioning Putin. Those issues aren’t going to return the GOP to power.  But Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and Ronna McDaniel don’t care about returning to power.  Their lives don’t change if the GOP doesn’t take back the Congress. They’ll still rule their little fiefdoms, still be invited to Georgetown cocktail parties and be feted by lobbyists, and of course they’ll still be on Sunday morning shows to feign outrage for the latest Democrat policy.

For these grifters the only difference between winning and losing in November is having to actually work for the American people… something they’re loathe to do.

But for the average American, the difference between winning and losing in November is literally life and death, lawlessness or civil society.

The world wouldn’t change overnight on the 8^th, but what could happen is that the people who control the purse strings, who are supposed to actually make the laws could change. Just like in 1994.

And that’s a big deal because the people running America today are the same people who have been running America’s biggest cities into the ground for decades.  And every American, whether they live in the San Francisco, Manhattan or Kalamazoo, MI recognizes that America’s coming apart at the seams.  From not being able to go a day without seeing another video of a pack of thugs beating a cab driver in the street or attacking an employee in a restaurant to watching a seemingly endless parade of homeless people punching random strangers, Americans are weary.  From staring with disbelief as a gang of hoodlums ransack a convenience store with impunity to watching video after video of people cussing at or otherwise attacking the police, Americans are watching the collapse of our society.

And this is the environment where Mitch McConnell whines about the quality of the GOP candidates.  The problem isn’t Dr. Oz or Eric Schmitt or Herschel Walker, it’s that the GOP leadership that is not doing its job. Where is Newt Gingrich when we need him?  The reality is, this election has been tailor made for the GOP, but that’s not the way it’s shaping up because McConnell, McCarthy, McDaniel and their puppeteer, the hack Frank Luntz – who happens to be McCarthy’s roommate or landlord or whatever – have decided they don’t want to actually save America, they’d rather sit back in the comfort of their minority position and pretend to care while enjoying the perks of “leadership”.

America needs warriors willing to brave the slings and arrows of the chattering classes, the leftist media, the Washington establishment and, most of all, the fascist NGO influencers who employ mobs on the streets to intimidate citizens and spineless CEOs and coerce into submission anyone who doesn’t agree with their agendas. 

If the GOP really wanted to win in November, we’d see a new ad every single day showcasing the violence going on in our streets along with pictures of some thug who’s just assaulted a random senior as he’s released without bail by a George Soros funded district attorney.  We’d see videos of illegals storming the border.  At the end of every single ad would be a simple tagline:  “If you want more of this, please vote for my Democrat opponent...  If you want someone who’s going to do something about crime and the quality of American life, vote for me.” (Helpfully I've created the nearby video to give him an idea of what it might look like... )

It’s that simple.  There are myriad problems caused by the Democrats, but those issues can’t be addressed without majorities, and none of them will flip Congress in November. But images of blood in the streets will.  A daily total of national Fentanyl deaths will.  Images of career criminals released on bail after having pummeled some teenager into unconsciousness will, and stories of illegal immigrants overwhelming communities will.  Imagine if Dr. Oz ran daily ads with videos showcasing Philadelphia’s violence rather than his clownish grocery store disaster?  No one in Pennsylvania cares about the price of guacamole, but they care about getting shot or stabbed in their own neighborhoods.

Not that I expect the GOP leadership to create such a Contract with America Deux. They’re cowards and grifters.  Such a campaign would require backbone against the predictable cries of “racism” that would emerge because most of the videos involve young black hoodlums and thugs. They would be branded racists by the race pimps and the professional victimization industry. 

Those attacks would come as surely as night follows day.  But so what?  It just happens to be the case that most of the crimes we see involve black perps freed from the justice system in the name of “equity”.  If there are similar videos of white perps they should be shown too.  The reality is, if you’re a victim of murder or rape it doesn’t matter what the criminal looks like.  Is a dead black child any more or less dead because his attacker was black or white?  No. Crime is off the charts not because the pigment of anyone’s skin, but because of the policies of the Democrat party. 

The GOP needs to understand their constituency is not the criminal class of any race.  Their constituency is the average American of every race.  It’s Americans who want to send their kids to school without them having to step over junkies or human feces.  It’s the average American who wants to go to work without fearing getting shot or robbed before making it home. 

The rule of law and responsibility for one’s actions are foundations of a civilized society. Without them there is no civilized society. That’s what we’re experiencing with Democrats in charge, and it seems like the GOP leadership is OK with that. We, however, are not.  This is the hill to die on, this is hill upon which America will either recover or slide into the abyss of chaos and tyranny…

We cannot depend on the current GOP “leaders” to fight this fight. This is going to have to come from the candidates themselves and some new Gingrich character to nationalize this election and help push the feckless GOP across the finish line. McConnell may not be capable of actually leading the country out of this morass, but at least with a GOP majority in November the collapse into a dystopian nightmare can be slowed until people of character can replace him. But being in the majority is the first step, and that will take candidates with the courage to stand up and fight for the average American, regardless of the invective that would surely be headed their way…

2011: A Republican Opportunity to Define the Debate

Republicans are poised to take control of the House in November and with a little luck may well pick up the Senate too. The last time this situation occurred was November 1994 when Newt Gingrich and the Republicans picked up 54 seats and took the House for the first time in 40 years. They also picked up 8 seats in the Senate, enough to take back that body as well. As a result of that shift, Bill Clinton was forced to pivot to the center, abandon some of his more liberal designs, and as a consequence he won a second term in office.

Many people expect a similar outcome from the 2010 elections. Conventional wisdom holds that when faced with a split or Republican legislature, President Obama will have no choice but to rein in some of his more ambitious attempts to “transform America”. In doing so he will set himself up for reelection as the forced moderation will lay the groundwork for a (relative) wave of prosperity that voters will attribute to him.

That might be plausible if 2010 were anything like 1994… but it’s not. On the most basic level, the last two years have been nothing short of an economic disaster. Not so much the continued meltdown of the housing market or even the two point increase in the unemployment rate. No, the disaster that has befallen the country is entirely manmade, and that man is Barack Obama. By passing ObamaCare, dramatically increasing federal regulation of – and intervention in – the economy, and by laying the groundwork for higher taxes, President Obama has removed the one element that businesses need to begin investing in the future, hiring and spurring economic growth: certainty of the playing field they are competing on. Without knowing what the future holds in terms of regulation or taxes, they can’t build a business, period.

The other thing that differentiates 2010 from 1994 is that Bill Clinton had the luxury of a multi billion dollar “Peace Dividend” and a nascent Internet that was beginning to transform much of the economy. That “Peace Dividend” allowed President Clinton to significantly reduce defense expenditures and shift much of the remainder into the domestic market as bases across Europe were shuttered and troops and equipment returned home, putting dollars to work in Ft. Lee, Virginia or Ft. Collins, Colorado rather than Heyford, UK or Berlin, Germany. Simultaneously the advent of the Internet was beginning to have a significant impact on American business and consumers, both in reality and in optimism. From communications to retail to the building of the Internet infrastructure, the Internet was beginning to spur the economy the way the railroads did 150 years before. At the end of the day the outlook in 2010 is far cloudier and darker than it was in 1994.

The yoke the President has placed around the necks of citizens and businesses is simply too heavy a burden for a slight adjustment of course to fix. A little moderation will not turn around the economy or the public’s state of mind. Dramatic change is necessary and the process could be wrenching. Not that voters will necessarily know where the blame should lay given the mainstream media’s vested interest in keeping the Democrats and Obama in power. Nonetheless if Republicans want to regain the White House in 2012 and build a working majority in Congress, they are going to have to demonstrate bold leadership and make a clear argument for what they want to accomplish.

They will get their chance starting in January. Rather than muddle through and just stop President Obama from doing further damage to the economy and the Nation, the Republicans should instead take advantage of the somewhat unprecedented attention that Americans are giving to governance in general and the economy in particular to clarify what they stand for. They should put forth bills as if a Republican were sitting in the Oval Office, fiscally responsible bills that clearly demonstrate their priorities. President Obama would no doubt veto them, but doing so would lead to a discussion of the merits of the policies. Republicans should welcome such a discussion… just ask Paul Ryan.

Republicans can make their case by borrowing from the Democratic playbook. Democrats are experts at the art of using numbers to define fairness: Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and many others used skewed data to demonstrate that banks provide home loans to blacks or low income borrowers at a lower frequency or higher interest rate than white or wealthy borrowers and therefore must be discriminating against blacks or the poor. Their remedy was, naturally, government intervention. Using that same model, Republicans should highlight the actual fact that federal employees earn on average twice what private sector employees do. The federal government must therefore be practicing discrimination against the private sector. The Republican remedy for this should be to cut by half the personnel budgets for all federal agencies (save Defense and Homeland Security) and they should pass a bill mandating such. Let President Obama take to the teleprompter and make the case that federal employees deserve to be paid twice as much as their civilian brethren when unemployment is at 10% for the nation, 16% for blacks and 20% for youth.

Fundamentally, Republicans should (regardless of whether they control one house or two) vow to only pass bills that demonstrate fiscal discipline and foster pro growth policies. Their budget bill should cut all discretionary funding back to 2004 or 2006 levels and refuse to pass anything that exceeds those levels. They should pass legislation rescinding ObamaCare and bills that explicitly limit the scope of agencies such as the EPA, the FCC and others, and they should slash the budgets of regulation heavy Departments such as Education and Energy. President Obama would no doubt veto virtually every one of those bills, and as the White House suggested on Saturday, that might result in a shut down of the government like 1995.

But 2011 is not 1995 and Americas will no longer allow themselves to be so easily hoodwinked. Whereas in 1995 the electorate looked askance at the government shutdown and largely blamed Newt Gingrich for it, in 2011 after two years in the death grip of the Democrats, Americans may indeed welcome a government shutdown as an opportunity to debate the very nature of government itself. That is a debate Republicans can win if they stand by their conservative principles and let men like Paul Ryan, Jim DeMint and Marco Rubio make the case to the American electorate. They may not win all of the battles, but by fighting the good fight they can demonstrate to the American electorate that when they go to the polls in 2012 there is a very clear alternative to a reheated “Hope and Change” agenda.