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GOPe: Win Small and Go Home
Well, that didn’t feel good. Is anyone else’s teats sore from all the money milking? I was snookered again to hope and care that there was a political movement building. But the tsunami was a gentle lapping with some structural improvements (Florida) but a whole lot of “maybes” and “almost theres”.
Will Nancy be overthrown? Most assuredly but the only question is whether it will be by Kevin McCarthy or Adam Schiff?
Will Chuck take his seat and defer to McConnell? Maybe the Rs will get to 51, but much past that is not looking likely.
Why?! Why can’t we get a reasonable government again? Is this the government we’ve earned or is this the permanent government of the uni-Party?
Have the political witches and warlocks perfected their toxic recipe, where everything is a grift and the rubes are persuaded that “they” are still in charge? “Political season is coming a close — just in time for political season..”
The political pros do not want a blowout. Blowouts are bad for business. Yes, you do want the occasional long bombs. Exciting plays to keep the fans entertained (sorry, soccer lovers). But don’t run up the score. Don’t let anyone feel safe to go home or turn off the TV. Keep the game tight; we’ve got merchandise to sell.
Published in General
The best thing that can be said about the Republican Party is that it isn’t the Democrat Party. That’s all.
In the late 1990s I read a great book called Max Karant: My Flights & Fights. Karant was a legend in the general aviation field as an advocate for private pilots. He worked through the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA), whose motto is “Your freedom to fly.”
As the editor of the AOPA Pilot, in the 1970s Karant pushed back against the overwhelming takeover of the skies by the Federal Aviation Association (FAA), which the AOPA believed was pretty much doing the bidding of the new commercial airlines industry.
The story of the private pilots versus the centralized government is a classic tug-of-war story. Karant won some major battles. One persuasive point that he made in his writing and speeches was that ultimately it is the pilot who is responsible for flying his or her plane safely. He equated flying to driving a boat in that the pilot and boat captain are each completely responsible for surveying the scene and steering the plane or boat around other planes and boats.
As I was reading about his work, it occurred to me that driving cars has a similar history. It used to be fun to drive in the late nineteenth century. But then the imposition of laws and rules and regulations over time eventually made it miserable for everyone. But it happened so slowly that successive generations of people simply adjusted and got used to it. Each new generation of drivers could not remember what the freedom the previous generation enjoyed felt like. They had never experienced it.
This is what has happened in our politics. The split between the Democrats and Republicans is about centralized government control. Rush Limbaugh said one day in the weeks leading up to the passage of the Affordable Care Acts that if they passed, the character of America would be forever changed. And so it has.
These last elections have not been about the particular candidates but rather, about what I call in my head “the bluing of America.” :) It’s a terrible tragedy. Today’s young voters have no idea what it feels like to have some of the freedoms we older voters have enjoyed in our lifetime.
It will take some time for the waters of that ‘Red Wave’ to receed but I’m really interested in what the hell just happened.
I’m guilty of believing the hype of the pollsters and pundits on our side. I think there’s some systemic cheating/bending rules now in certain metro areas (Milwaukee & Dane County)- was it enough for those results? I don’t think so. When Biden and the Dems started talking about “not having results for days”, I felt an unease but was still confident.
I’d prefer DeSantis over Trump and wonder how much of what we witnessed was to get rid of him that way, I certainly think McConnell is capable of that. For that matter, did you see McCarthy out there that much? That “Commitment to America!” or whatever it was, was some pretty weak/late sauce.
Need time to examine this but it stinks.
I watched this election to see if the country could be redeemed. It can’t. We are two different countries with incompatible ideologies. States must reassert their sovereignty and push back against the federal government or they will be swallowed up. At some point, we must discuss the value of a 50 state union if it is majority voters who will enable Marxism.
Power is gained and maintained by coalitions. The current coalition in power (corporations, commies, government employees, and spy agencies) is not going to be displaced until a new coalition is formed. Unfortunately, those in power have created a self-licking ice-cream cone that is able to use their power to increase their power. Senator-elect Fetterman is proof that money and power will gather money and power.
The mail-in ballot gambit when combined with the massive Dem GOTV machine is really paying off for them. It gives them a very high floor of bankable votes in certain jurisdictions. It’s tough to overcome.
And another thought since I have time to post. We are cruising down I95 into the mouth of a Cat 1, and no, we are not storm chasing…
I am mad at people who are blaming Trump, both for being hated and for promoting what they call sorry candidates. They don’t get it. There is no way Fetterman was more qualified than Oz. In blue states, they vote to win the seat, not for a quality candidate. They vote against us. Even a McConnell pick lost. I do not like the NT “nanny nanny boo boo” stomping on Trump.
They can blame Trump’s personality to excuse their hatred but there is nothing about Trump’s character that is worse than Biden’s or Fetterman’s or Warnick’s or…. It is our ideology they hate, and they hate us, too. It isn’t just random bots and kooks on Twitter. It is displayed by their candidates, their pundits, the media, your neighbors on Nextdoor, etc. So some of you think DeSantis is the answer? He is more conservative than Trump. They will hate him more than they hate Trump.
We also need to quit blaming Trump for bad decisions by some of our voters.
If Dems put in place rules and schemes that prevent us from winning, that aim to attain single party power, then we need to start looking at “the great divorce.”
Stephen Kruiser’s take: The Morning Briefing: We’re Done–American Voters Are Idiots.
The “Great Divorce” countdown clock has started ticking.
I was thinking that one of the aspects that is pushing us into a strait jacketed society is this “run off (ranked) primary voting” situation.
In Calif, in June we have an open list of people to vote from, and that includes candidates from parties other than D or R. I am unsure how many other states now employ “designer voting” situations.
Before it was adopted, the run off primary voting situation was presented by the Democrat Party as a way to ensure that opposition to the current state of things would be more easily challenged.
But in reality what has occurred is that only 2 candidates for the US Senate and for US congressional districts are presented for the public to vote on in November. The same thing occurs for the state senate and state legislative representative offices.
In Australia this run off candidate situation was so bad that some guy who had garnered less than 2 percent of the vote ended up on the ballot and achieving a major political office. (I forget who it was and what his position ended up being.)
But it so inflamed the public they went back to regular voting rather than designer voting.
My hope is that happens here.
I think one decent explanation for Ketterman’s win in PA is that so many people are now doing mail in ballots, and the average voter mails their ballot in sooner rather than later.
So by the time the debate between Oz and Ketterman occurred, 600,000 ballots had already been received at the election central counting stations. This meant that Oz had an awful lot of catching up to do.
Of course there was also massive cheating in PA (once again.)
I can shake my fists at the awful dishonesty of the Dems for bringing this about in 2020 and again yesterday.
But the sad dismal truth is that the Cheat to Win scenario did not arrive here overnight.
No the dismal truth is that the people working hard in the 2004-2005 equivalent of True the Vote tried to have leaders in both political parties understand the significance of the cheating that had gone on in 2004.
That if we did not want to become a nation where a citizen’s ballot meant far less than master minded plots to let machines count the vote, and future plots that could devise equally nefarious methods such a mail in ballots to people who didn’t exist, then steps needed to be taken sooner rather than later.
The Republicans didn’t want to hear this in 2004 as they wanted their guys Cheney and Rumsfeld to continue to drain our economy of its treasury of monies and blood inside the endless war in Iraq.
The Dem leaders weren’t interested as they were already using cheating to garner control over Calif, NY state and Illinois.
So now we are miles down inside a hole we have allowed to get deeper and deeper each year.
I have no way of figuring out how we dig ourselves out. Especially as the media is favoring the side most recently involved in the massive cheating.
This is the uncomfortable truth. The Fetterman election is proof-positive. No coherent human being could think Fetterman is qualified to represent a state in the most powerful ruling body on Earth, even if we consider Oz as the weak candidate he is. Someone posed the appropriate question to Oprah: Would you hire him? The silence was deafening.
The country is lost…not necessarily because of the leaders but the electorate that continues to elect them. I want to blame PA, and maybe I can. But how do you convince yourself that Fetterman should be 1 of 2 people to represent you in the Senate? Is it stupidity or ideological brainwashing? Is that a distinction without a difference?
I think Red Herring is right – in reality it has little to do with Trump. He is a convenient Talisman. All the talk of diversity is delusional. If you favor freedom of thought; freedom for individualism; freedom for traditional family values; that truth actually exists; you are not welcome.
They. Hate. Us.
Period.
Sundance has an excellent piece pointing out that the modern Dems go for collecting the ballots, not persuading the voters. Explains why the Democrats have basically stopped debates and other methods of persuasion, because so long as they are organized and can harvest (or manufacture) ballots, they don’t need voters.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/11/09/big-picture-2020-midterm-elections-highlights-distinct-difference-between-ballots-and-votes/
If you can’t be free and prosperous with them, then be free and prosperous without them
That’s a really good assessment. I’m frustrated that more people aren’t recognizing this. Republicans overperformed in states with less mail-in voting (Texas and Florida) and underperformed where mail-in voting was more expansive and less controlled. People want to blame Trump or Dobbs or McConnell. This is all like losing a football game 35-28 after giving up 21 points on punt returns. “We weren’t aggressive enough on defense. If only we had blitzed more.”