OK, so now what? The DEI veep will run? Somebody else entirely? Dusting off Hillary, maybe?
Category: Uncategorized
The Romney Lesson
It’s entertaining to remember that Romney was accused during his campaign of all the same things Trump is being accused of now. In fact, every Republican candidate is always accused of wanting to bring back slavery, creating concentration camps, being a fascist, and doing some unspecified terrible things to “binders full of women.” In fact, the absolute evisceration by the media of the mild-mannered, extremely moderate Romney and a depiction of him as puppy-torturing, woman-hating, slavery-loving fascist is what tipped the majority of Republican voters towards welcoming Trump several years later. If you will be accused of being Satan no matter what you do and lose into the bargain, why not choose the most outrageous option and win?
This is the #1 problem of Democrats. They need you to embrace the outer edges of every fashionable lunacy, and if you hold back a millimeter, they’ll brand you as worse than Hitler. The no-border people recognize no boundaries in anything, including rhetoric.
Romney for Democrats
This is actually an excellent plan. Democrats are such a mess that a moderate Republican would be much better than anybody the Dems can nominate from among their own. Romney is not ancient, he doesn’t screech and bug out his eyes, he speaks in complete, grammatically correct sentences, he’s not a DEI pick, he’s polite, he has a normal family life. He also tugs on the heartstrings of people who realize that going with him in 2012 instead of Obama would have been the right thing to do.
Unconvincing Talking Points
A new email from the Biden campaign just dropped:
It’s kind of really funny that rounding up millions of people in detention camps appears way after the abolition of the Department of Education, a tax cut and overtime payments. You’d think that if anybody really considered the imprisonment of millions in concentration camps a possibility, they’d bring it up a bit earlier than the deeply tedious point about the Department of Education
How to Be a Hero
We were driving from the mall today, and on the way there was one of those huge construction cranes by the side of the highway. On the very top it had a gigantic banner with the words, “Trump. A true American hero.”
Can you imagine a banner saying “Biden. A true American hero”? Or Kamala Harris, or Newsom?
The answer is clear. It’s also clear that any of them could have become an American hero by simply stating something true like “men can’t get pregnant” or “BLM’s leadership embezzled the money good-hearted people donated” or “murals to George Floyd are nonsensical” or “giving puberty blockers to children is a terrible idea” or “lockdowns during COVID were a big mistake” or “we need a dramatic decrease in immigration numbers”, etc.
It’s easy to be a figure of intense fascination these days if one’s ready to state something obvious that suddenly became verboten 3 minutes ago.
An Old Lie about Trump
I cannot believe we are still on this ludicrous lie about injecting bleach. It’s been years, and nobody found a better criticism of Trump than this fabrication?
Whoever runs Biden’s Twitter account is being counterproductive because nobody save for the hyperpartisan Dems would like this.
It never stops surprising me how limp-wristed and silly the criticisms of Trump are. There is so much stuff to criticize him for but nobody ever talks about it, concentrating on the easily disprovable lies about “very fine people”, Mexican rapists, injected bleach, dictatorship / fascism, and a mocked disabled journalist. It’s never anything else. Never anything of substance.
Unappeasement Wins
Yes, it was a quiet retreat after Ukraine destroyed pretty much the entirety of the Russian Black Sea fleet.
Russia never escalates after getting drubbed. It only escalates after being coddled and appeased. Which is why the US policy that has been dedicated to appeasement since George W Bush is producing terrible results.
No Email
An incoming graduate student wrote me an email to say he can’t write me an email because he can’t find my email address in the system.
And how is your week going?
Has Christianity Reproduced Europe?
I think that there’s a potential of a very good question here but maybe it should be expressed more precisely.
I won’t speak to the Congo or the Philippines because I know absolutely nothing about those places. But I don’t understand what is meant by Christianity failing to produce Europe in Mexico. How did it fail? If you were speaking to a Mexican and a Spaniard, aside from some differences in vocabulary and accent, what major differences would you notice?
I routinely have Spanish and Mexican students together in my classroom, and the differences are what I said, pronunciation and some words. But in everything else, these are clearly people of an extraordinary cultural closeness.
Spain reproduced itself exceptionally well in the New World. So well, in fact, that it’s almost funny to observe how identically the transatlantic world of Hispanidad struggled with democracy, coups, and dictatorships well after the rest of Western Europe / the Americas calmed down and figured out democracy. The difficulty with accepting modernity and capitalism, the eternal love affair with socialism, the enduring love of the Baroque in art, again, well after the rest of the world moved on from it. The similarities are endless. Gosh, even the siesta, the bulls, the soccer, the plaza, the café culture, the viejitos verdes, the compadrazgo, the sociability practices – I could go on and on.
The methods Spain used to reproduce itself in its American colonies are fascinating. Actually, one of my most successful public lectures is about that. It was a concerted, purposeful plan of action conducted precisely through the Christian institutions of Spain. And it succeeded completely. If you want to observe this through a contrast, look at the British presence in India. India remained India, a very distinctive civilization that ate the British influence for breakfast. That’s why I teach a course called “Intro to the Hispanic Civilization” and easily discuss Spain, Mexico, Paraguay, and Cuba together but nobody would teach “Intro to the Anglophone civilization” and discuss the UK and India as part of the same culture.
The issue of why some colonial powers reproduce themselves in the colonies and others don’t is of great interest but Spain is, without a doubt, one of the most successful in this respect.
It’s OK to Criticize Addicts
I’m no fan of JD Vance’s, as we well know, but this is a very bizarre statement. If anybody is entitled to criticize drug addicts, it’s a person whose childhood was destroyed by a vicious, disgusting addict parent. Vance’s mother is scum (read his autobiography before you start arguing). So is Hunter Biden. If they were childless, nobody would care but these terrible individuals fed their own children to their whim to indulge.
Of course, Hunter Biden is mega rich and could have purchased the best psych assistance on the planet, so he’s a worse kind of scum than Vance’s mom. But this is the shade of excrement kind of distinction.
We’ve all completely lost it and now treat drug addicts like poor victims and people who criticize their horrid actions as evildoers.
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