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The Dismal Choice, Ver. 3.0
So, gentle readers, here we are again.
With apologies for my extended absence from Ricochet, as I did four and eight years ago, I return to offer my thoughts on Tuesday’s election. And even as I write that Election Day is Tuesday, I am gripped by the fear that the accompanying sturm und drang will likely extend days, weeks, or even months beyond Tuesday, and if Donald Trump should ultimately prevail we can expect four of the sturm-iest and drang-iest years we’ve seen since, well, his first term. One shudders at the thought.
I’ll vote for him anyway.
As was my experience four and eight years ago, I will cast my vote not without a measure of trepidation. My misgivings stem not from any fears that Mr. Trump will end democracy or throw his detractors into internment camps or any of the tyrannical measures envisioned by the cast of shrieking halfwits on MSNBC. Rather, like four and eight years ago, it’s again vexing to confront the fact that in a nation of more than 330 million people, it is these two who have emerged to compete for the presidency. Surely we can do better.
But, sadly, not this year. So, if one is not a hardened partisan on either side, one must hold his nose and conjecture as to which candidate will leave the country in a better condition in four years, by which time, we pray, the system will have corrected itself and produced more suitable aspirants to the job.
Once again, while fully aware of Mr. Trump’s deficiencies, I choose him over Ms. Harris, whose own deficiencies make her even less qualified to be president.
Recall that in Harris’s previous run for president, her campaign was so anemic that, to no one’s sorrow, she dropped out of the race in early December 2019, weeks before the Iowa caucuses. And even after maneuvering to be named as Joe Biden’s running mate and assuming the vice presidency, so poorly was she regarded, even among Democrats, that she was labeled as Biden’s “insurance policy” against impeachment or 25th Amendment scheming.
And yet, as the current election drew near, when Joe Biden’s senility could no longer be concealed from the public, when his decline became undeniable even among his allies, when he was cajoled or threatened or somehow persuaded to relinquish his quest for a second term, his mediocrity of a vice president was thrust forward and rebranded as the second coming of Cicero. Viewing the process has been rather like seeing a Ford Pinto given a glossy red paint job and renamed a Ferrari. It wouldn’t take many laps of a Formula 1 race before people came to realize it doesn’t belong.
As a Californian, I have followed Harris’s career for some time. She has always struck me as a dim bulb, though this, sadly, is hardly a disqualification for high office in either party. (Watch C-SPAN for even an hour if you doubt this.) But while her dimness hasn’t impeded her ascent in politics, what I find most off-putting about her is her pairing of a middling intellect with an unctuous, dripping self-regard, to a degree exceeding even that which is found so often among senators that one must suspect it is a prerequisite for the job. (Writing less charitably of the vice president for NRO three weeks ago, Charles C.W. Cooke labeled her an idiot, the evidence for which premise has only accumulated since.)
While the election and its aftermath may be dismaying to contemplate, what is perhaps even more so is witnessing the utter degradation of the American news media, once populated by people we assumed to lean left while giving sufficient thought to their own credibility that they maintained some measure of objectivity. Alas, no longer. Those outlets we call legacy or mainstream media have gone all in for Kamala Harris, deluding themselves—and attempting to delude you—into believing the red Pinto limping around the track really is a Ferrari.
The examples are far too numerous to list, but a recent, incandescently glowing example was CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell, who packed so many distortions into the opening of her Oct. 30 broadcast that one must admire, in a perverse sense, the Soviet-style brazenness of it. President Biden’s calling Trump supporters “garbage” was inadvertent, you see, and Trump is graceless for declining to accept Biden’s comically lame attempt to conjure up his magical, exculpatory apostrophe.
For any of you who even now remain undecided on how to vote, I recommend the method I used to land, however reluctantly, with Team Trump: I made one of those Venn diagrams of which Ms. Harris has expressed such fondness. My political wish list includes a secure border, protection for children before and after birth, support for law enforcement, reliability for our allies (most especially Israel), and instilling fear in our adversaries. When I asked myself which candidate was more likely to share these goals, the answer was clear. It was Donald Trump, after all, who as president gave us a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, moved the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and put a warhead on Qasem Soleimani’s forehead, to all of which I can only say, “Huzzah.” No Democrat, least of all Kamala Harris, would have even considered any of these steps.
I give Harris credit for her peculiar style of oratory, one that allows a listener to take any utterance from her, be it a sentence, a paragraph, or an entire speech, then rearrange the words in any order one chooses to find the meaning hasn’t changed, which is of course to say there is no meaning. Consider also Harris’s inability to answer the most basic, foreseeable questions from her friends in the media, even the second, third or fourth time they’re asked. If I have to hear about her “middle class” upbringing and the “hopes, dreams, and aspirations of the American people” and “in terms of” this or that and “what I call an opportunity economy” for four years, I fear I’ll go berserk. As far as I can determine, she has never had an interesting thought or said an interesting thing in her entire life.
Yes, Mr. Trump is a deeply flawed candidate, but to oppose him the Democrats have offered us a rara avis: a candidate with less intellectual agility than even Joe Biden and less personal charm than even Hillary Clinton. There may be a bit too much P.T. Barnum in Mr. Trump, but if there’s going to be a circus, I’ll vote for the ringmaster over the clown every time.
Published in General
Talk about saving the best line for last.
Do you know Yarob?
Nice!
Please consider writing some more posts before taking another leave of absence.
Yarob admires this well-argued and nicely written piece but disagrees with its conclusion. A vote for Trump, no matter how reluctantly cast, conveys to the Republican party that its nomination of a loathsome con man of repellent character for the position of president is acceptable. It is not. We survived Clinton, Obama, and Biden and will survive Harris if she’s elected, but we may not survive the dangerously unstable, egotistical, and narcissistic Trump. The ignorant, lazy, incompetent, cruel, corrupt, vindictive, lying, selfish, solipsistic, disloyal, vendor-stiffing, wife-betraying, woman-assaulting, war-dead-insulting, disabled-veteran-avoiding, loathsome fraud and con man is dangerous in ways that Harris is not.
“No more Trumps” is the message we must send, and the way to send it is not to vote for him.
Perhaps this is all true. He still knew enough in 2017-2020 to lead us to the greatest prosperity we have enjoyed since 1988. I will take him with his faults any day over a Commie, whose transformations will not be undoable.
I’d wager that throughout our history most voters had no idea what was the personality or suitability of various presidential candidates. For many of the men who have served as presidents we have only the impressions of others left through letters and the effects of policies. Traitors, buffoons, milquetoasts, incompetents, we’ve had them all—and we’re miraculously still here.
We also survived four years of Trump. Why would we not survive four more? And while we can agree there should be no more Trumps, he is sui generis. Win or lose, there won’t be another candidate like him because there is no one like him. Even so, we can expect any Republican candidate running in ’28 to be labeled as just like or worse than Trump, regardless of how mild he may be. Recall that Romney, McCain, and both Bushes were smeared as extremists by the left when they were running, yet today they are hailed in the same quarters as icons of reason.
Kamala has been pretty good at not answering questions about her policies. Did you know that she grew up middle-class and understands the impact of inflation? But if one puts together a list of goals she had let slip over the months, it’s pretty scary. How about, naturalizing 20M+ illegals, expanding the SCOTUS to thirteen to “restore balance”, more restrictions on gun ownership, taxing unrealized capital gains, government implementations of more “equity” initiatives, and so on? Will we survive? Maybe, but we won’t thrive.
Yes, I’m sure a second Trump presidency will come to be regarded as a golden age of governance, what with RFK Jr. saying Trump has assured him of role in White House, international trade wars, and the like. What could go wrong?
There is no God.
Have to disagree with you on that one. Pretty high batting average on those things we disagree on.
In railing against the mainstream media in the O.P., I neglected to mention a book, published in September, in which the case is made by 42 writers, myself among them. Against the Corporate Media: Forty-Two Ways the Press Hates You came out before the fourth estate beclowned itself in the service of the Kamala Harris campaign, but perhaps some future edition will include this sad chapter.
Quibble. DJT is a deeply flawed person (like most). As a candidate, he’s awesome. As a president, his first term I’d rate in the top two of my lifetime. With luck, I’ll weigh in on his 2nd term in four years.
You might be confident of survival, but I’ll quibble with the “we” in the bolded comment. I’ll hazard that those in the military, those in law enforcement, and those being forced to live in crime-ridden areas forced to take in illegal immigrants, are not feeling the same level of confidence.
The sentence and the logic still work. Your final lines could be edited as well to apply with equal force to any others you’ve been willing to tolerate. You do no one any good to catastrophize another Trump presidency.
Really well-written post, Jack!
Thank you!
This makes me insane. I just heard two lawyers explaining that every single illegal that declared asylum cannot be kicked out of the country without a court hearing on the asylum. 92% of them are lying about asylum.
Biden had to have a black woman. I think the second choice was Val Demmings but she was too smart for him. Kamala Harris is so stupid and lazy.
It’s such a scary slope. Start with the none too bright Obama who says, “I need a running mate dumber than me.” Then that person needs a running mate dumber than him, who then picks a running mate dumber than her.
How would things have played out differently if Obama had selected Bill Richardson, rumored to have been on the short list, instead?
Kamala Harris could have stayed at Senator as long as she wanted with 92% staff turnover. She wouldn’t have to read anything or any briefing books. She was there because of the machine in California. Legislators say stupid things all of the time and generally they aren’t that accountable. POTUS is vastly different.
Forget about Guam, a Democrat in the People’s Republic of California could say that CALIFORNIA would flip over if there weren’t enough illegals to hold it down, and still get re-elected.
Indeed, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Maxine Waters has actually SAID that.
Kamala as president? Just imagine her up against Vladimir Putin, without a Teleprompter. She is so stupid, she literally can’t conjure up a complete sentence without a prompter. In inviting an invasion over our southern border, I think she and Biden should be tried for treason (giving aid and comfort/taxpayer dollars to the enemy).
Putin? Nuts. Giorgia Meloni would slap her around and take her lunch money.
But… but… but… Orange Man Bad!
Chick Fight!! That would be awesome.
JD Vance actually said that about Ronald Reagan and allowing all of the illegals amnesty in the 80s. That’s what flipped California.
People on the right need to just shut up about worshiping Reagan and wishing things were like they were back in the day.
It’s terrible. Every one of those guys that got a court date for an asylum claim has to go through a court date. You can’t just kick them out.
Except I meant physically flip over, like what’s-his-face said about Guam.
IIRC, that was Hank Johnson. Although it seems like his antenna doesn’t bring in many stations, he said it was a joke and that people just didn’t get the humor.