Hey Xi! Maybe Your President-for-life Notion is Rubbish

Golly. Who could have seen this coming? The New York Times (H/T Powerline) says that China's President Xi has declared an emergency. A year ago, wrote the Times,

Mr. Xi triumphed at China’s national legislature, abolishing a term limit on his presidency, opening the way for another decade or longer as both president and party leader, and shaking up the government to become a more compliant tool of party power.

But now,

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, abruptly summoned hundreds of officials to Beijing recently, forcing some to reschedule long-planned local assemblies. The meeting seemed orchestrated to convey anxious urgency. The Communist Party, Mr. Xi told the officials, faces major risks on all fronts and must batten down the hatches.

Funny, isn't it, that a politician's solution for all problems is more politics.

“The central leadership’s assessment of risks to China has officially expanded from the economy to every sphere,” [Beijing analyst] Mr. Wu said. “This year will put policing and security to the forefront.”

Ain't it amazing, that the tough Chinese  government needs to get tougher? Who could have seen that coming?

It's an endless problem. Politicians put themselves in charge of the economy, and screw the economy up. And then they have to give the economy political shock therapy to deal with the problems they have created, and bring "policing and security to the forefront."

Hello President Xi. You make yourself President-for-life, head of a monopoly single-party state, where all direction comes from the top. And then you start a Belt and Road colonialist policy, lending money to developing countries for port expansions, etc. And then you have an economic policy that frankly steals foreign technology etc. And then foreign countries start to penalize you for your predatory policy. Well, hey, Mr. President: Things are likely to get into a bit of a mess. And all the time you have maintained your vice-grip on political power, so you really don't have a clue about the manifold injustices that your hegemonic and dominatory rule has created.

What could go wrong?

The situation in the West is illustrative. Here we have had a kind of soft dictatorship where the so-called Progressive movement has run the administrative state for about 100 years. All the best minds, etc. Except that the natives are restless. Because the wheels are starting to fall off all the brilliant centralized administrative solutions that the best minds conjured up for us.

The reason is obvious. The best minds conjured up government programs -- to deliver pensions, health care, and education -- that they could comprehend and codify into legislation, and sell to the voters, and administer and control.

Notice what is missing. Things that the best minds could not comprehend, or did not approve. Things that are too complicated and changeable to be codified into legislation. Things that the voters would like but don't want to pay for. Things that would benefit people but which were not thought of in the original legislation. Things that are not of interest to the best minds. Things that reduce the power and influence of the best minds. Things that are going to cost existing program beneficiaries because of mistakes made in the original legislation and in subsequent administrative regulation. Failure to project program costs and benefits. Failure to modify the program to reflect unanticipated costs and benefits.

The point is that all the Things that I have suggested in the paragraph above are very difficult to do right in politics and government. The reason is simple. It is very difficult to do anything complicated or change or adjust anything in politics and government. Indeed, one of the purposes of government is to set up important things and make it very difficult to change them. Because some things -- such as the presumption of innocence in criminal law-- should be very difficult to change.

But here is the thing. The notable thing about the Great Enrichment, an increase in per capita income of 3,000 percent in the last 200 years, is that it features staggering waves of economic change, completely unanticipated change that took even the best minds -- especially the best minds -- by surprise, when old ways of doing things were radically changed. If government had been in charge of all this economic change it probably would never have happened,  not without remarkable political convulsion.

Please, stop and think for a moment. Imagine politicians and activists being in charge of the textile revolution: whatabout the handloom weavers? The railway revolution: whatabout the hostlers at the coaching inns? The illuminating oil revolution; whatabout the sperm-whale hunters and the candle makers? The electric revolution: whatabout the lamplighters? And so on. The point is that any politician worth his salt, whether democratic or totalitarian, would think it his job to save the jobs of the whatabouts. And he would have helped to organize the whatabouts into whatabout coalitions to provide them with lots of lovely subsidies and retraining and government handouts.  And where would the Great Enrichment be then poor thing? I will tell you. Venezuela.

And if the politician -- say President Xi -- was a far-sighted leader of his country and had committed it to a menu of top-down prestige projects, whatabout if he turned out to be wrong?

The point is that almost every glorious plan for anything turns out to be riddled with mistakes and unanticipated problems. These problems need to be solved if the plan is to succeed and to benefit anyone. But politics and government are the system of one more Big Push. This is because they are, in the first instance, a human project for defending the border. And the obvious strategy for defending the border is that, if you seem to be failing, you pour in more young males. The only problem is that almost everything else in the world is not suitable for the one more Big Push treatment. It needs the people on the sharp end with the authority and the responsibility to fix things on the fly.

So when President Xi calls for a Big Push, putting "policing and security to the forefront," he is probably wrong. Not that that will hurt him. He is President-for-life. But his one more Big Push will probably hurt the long-suffering Chinese people.

Politics is about power, and the one thing that political people do not understand is that almost everything in this world is not best organized and solved by politics.

Yes, Why Fake Hate Crimes?

Why so many fake hate crimes? I mean, really! Why go out and manufacture an incident of evil white crackers hating on a helpless person of color?

Jonah Goldberg makes the obvious point that real victims of hate, like Jews in Nazi Germany, aren't going to be faking hate crimes. Nor blacks in the Jim Crow South. Because that would be "incredibly stupid."

Actually, I think Jonah misses the point. If you are a Jew complaining about some local yokel brownshirt, what do you think is going to happen to you? You think the local Gauleiter is going to invite you in for a friendly Kaffee? Or if you are a black complaining about the local KKK Kleagle? Are you Krazy?

When there is real oppression, and real targeting of a marginalized group, you as an ordinary person are going to keep a low profile. The last thing you want to do is to draw attention to yourself. You hope that, by being invisible, the regime thugs will not notice you and you will get to live another day. Moreover, you will instinctively know that the most likely outcome of your fake hate crime will be to make things worse for your regime-targeted group. The regime may wish to make an example of you. Or, as Stalin's thugs used to tell people, you will disappear and no one will even know your name. That is how the world works when you are a genuine victim of regime-sponsored hate.

That is why the activist culture and its "peaceful protest" is also fake. In the modern West well-born activists are pampered and lionized by the regime and the regime media. Of course they are, because they are advancing the ruling-class's agenda. White nationalists, Brexiteers, and German AfD activists need not apply. They know they will be made to appear in the worst light.

That is the first problem with fake hate. The lefty fakers knows -- even if unconsciously -- that the local regime thugs are not going to descend on them when they go public with a fake incident. And they know, like Jussie Smollett, that the local police are going to put on their kid gloves and treat the fakery as genuine, because if they make a wrong step every lefty activist in town is going to jump all over them. Everybody knows that the worst thing in America is to brush off an accusation of hate by a Person of Color. Indeed, the lefty faker knows that, with a little bit of luck he may become a media darling and get sympathetically interviewed on TV. Every faker knows that, at least initially, he/she will get sympathetic treatment from government officials and media.

The second problem with fake hate is that discrimination against all the little darlings of the left -- racial, gender, and all the rest -- is actually illegal, and is vigorously enforced by government law enforcement. People are social animals; they know which actions are approved of by society and which actions are disapproved. Only really exceptional -- and really crazy -- people go up against the status quo and against regime power.

The third problem with fake hate is that there is no organized political faction that wants to undo the civil-rights revolution. This means that the overwhelming majority of people just go about their business and interact with other people according to established norms. They are just not going to be making trouble for themselves. Put it this way. There is no equivalent on the right of AntiFa, which is a genuine street-thug group and seems to be funded and supported by the usual left-wing establishment funders. If there were a right-wing version of AntiFa it would be roundly condemned by all respectable regime supporters and its funders would be expelled from polite society.

No, the fact that is staring us right in the face is that the civil-rights movement has succeeded beyond all imaginings, and there is literally nothing left for activists or for government to do. But every year brings up another crop of well-born activists that desperately yearn for a moral crusade and battlements of injustice to storm.

Hey, I know lefties. How about you start protesting the injustices of socialism, and all the failed government programs that hang around our necks? How about education reform that empowers parents rather than activists? How about health-care reform that de-cartelizes and de-credentializes the health care industry?

Somehow, all the activists of the world want to increase government power, with them at the controls, rather than decrease government power. What is with these people?

And what is with their willing dupes, that keep coming up with obviously fake hate crimes?

We Must Bring the Past Back to Life

I was down in the Peoples Republic of Fremont, Seattle -- where we Seattle-ites have our statue of Lenin -- and I went by Ophelia's Books, because Lady Marjorie had given me a gift card.

Truth is, I had put off going to Ophelia's for months, because Fremont, but I found that it was not a hopeless lefty tract store, but an excellent little used-books store. I got a book about Trollope's later novels, and also The Death of the Past by J.H. Plumb.

Really, it was another proof of God's existence, because I have been needing to encounter such a book for months, if not years.

The book argues that the old kind of history, that is really an ideological justification of the current ruling class, has gone away because now we have professional historians that are dedicated to telling us how it really was, as opposed to how glorious our rulers are and how they are descended directly from Moses or Achilles.

The book was written in about 1968, from a series of lectures that Plumb, a Cambridge don, had given in NewYork. It was, I propose, about the last moment that anyone could talk about the end of history as regime apologetics.

Plumb was the son of a factory worker in Leicester, England, but went to a "grammar school," a kind of school in Britain that was famous for plucking talent out of the masses and giving it an education and that was murdered by lefties in the Sixties. But Plumb was a faithful lefty all his life. In his book he celebrates how the Enlightenment substituted facts and research for the naked special pleading of history down the ages. But, he admitted, something was lost when the narrative of where we came from gets abandoned for facts, facts, facts.

To say that the past has died, I think, misses the point. The past was deliberately murdered,  and murdered by chaps like Plumb, who sneered at Macaulay for spicing up the Enlightenment faith in  "progress" with Whig history and jingoism.

In doing so he provided the bulk of the British nation with a usable past, by which they could ease their consciences in the present and look with optimism towards the future.

But the professional historian will have none of that:

Crude ideological interpretations, Marxist or nationalist, conservative or liberal, religious or agnostic, providential or progressive, cyclical or linear, are a violation of his discipline and an offence to his knowledge.

Many conservatives take a parallel view, when we talk about our "facts and logic" as opposed to liberal "emotion." We imagine that we are the reality guys, and the left is the fantasy department.

How is that strategy working out? The fact is that, since 1968, the left has seized control of the past and murdered the old narratives of Christianity and of nation. And that is why I wrote in 2016 that my "gentlemanly conservatism" was dead.

Now the left dominates the landscape with its narrative of good and evil: the good and noble activist that is engaged in a life and death struggle with the racist sexist homophobes in order to lead the helpless victims of racism and the patriarchy and hate to the Promised Land.

If professional history has a role today, under the unjust rule of the left, it is to fill in the blanks to prove just how oppressive and unjust the old religious, white, oppressive patriarchy was. Indeed everyone in the academy knows that they had better echo the ruling class narrative about activists and victims, or else.

Notice how the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax fits into this culture. The activism/victim culture is hungry for tales of hate, and young heads full of mush are only too glad to supply them.

It is noticeable to me that Plumb's history of the world ends with Marx and Darwin. There is nothing about Nietzsche, or Freud and Jung, or the quantum mechanical revolution in physics. That makes him ill-equipped to deal with the modern world in which the certainty of Newtonian mechanics is replaced by the uncertainty principle, and the facts, facts, facts, of Gradgrind are replaced by the notion of Jordan B. Peterson that you see facts through the lens of your values. Or the notion that the primary function of the brain is to filter out all the non-essential signals coming in and only notice the important stuff. You hope.

The future belongs to those that own the past, just as George Orwell said:

Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.

So we cannot let the past die;  we cannot let  the left murder our past. We must revive our narrative of the past, and it must be a narrative that takes the narrative of the left head on and demolishes it.

Of course, I realize, most of my writing is precisely about that. My reductive Three Peoples theory is a narrative about the present world as a natural and cooperative combination of creative people, responsible people, and subordinate people that directly takes on the left's narrative of conflict and oppression. My Great Reaction maxim is an attempt to marginalize the left's narrative by stating that socialism is neo-slavery, the welfare state is neo-feudalism, and identity politics is neo-tribalism.

In taking up Jung I am embracing a narrative that the experience of the past through archetypes is programmed into our unconscious, and that a narrative about the past is the most natural thing in the world. Indeed, the whole notion of the unconscious is a narrative that says that the past lives in us a lot more than we think.

In taking up Nietzsche I am advancing the narrative that the creative life is a lot more than the crude and narrow option of creating new and just political order, as the left thinks, but an incredible difficult hero's journey of stumbling around in the unconscious on the border between order and chaos hoping for inspiration.

And Plumb's The Death of the Past helps me see the desperate crudity of the left's oppression narrative: the insulting idea that America is a cesspool of racism, and sexism and hate, the America that legislated special status for non-whites, non-males, and non-heteros. Really, what planet are you living on, lefties?

The truth is that our lefty friends are living a lie. We might adapt the old nursery rhyme:

The south wind doth blow
And we shan't have snow
So what will th'activist do then, poor thing? 

This is not the worst of times; it is the best of times. But unless it is the worst of times our lefty friends have nothing to do: no-one to blame, no victims to lead, no injustice to protest.

Except the many injustices that lefties themselves have visited upon the innocent deplorables of this land. 

Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop on Russia-Collusion

OK, so the smoke signals say that the Mueller probe will not be coming out with a smoking gun that will put President Trump away for good. The latest I have heard is that Mueller will make a confidential report to the new Attorney General Barr and nothing to see here.

On the other hand, the Pelosi Democrats seem to want to be able to harass the president with House impeachment investigations all the way to the 2020 presidential elections.

So I am thinking about what President Trump and his White House are planning to do after the Special Prosecutor Mueller winds up his investigation. As they say, Trump is like a cobra: he always strikes back. But how?

Here is what strikes me. It has been pretty obvious now for weeks that 1) the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign in "collusion" with the Clinton campaign and 2) the DOJ and FBI conspired to gin up a pretext, first to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president, and second to sicc a Special Prosecutor on him to see what he could find.

I would think that the Donald Trump we know and love would want to raise the roof on all this. So why hasn't he?

I suspect that the reason is that he doesn't want to raise the roof until the Mueller report is in the can.

But it seems to me that the president has every reason to fight back against a monstrous abuse of federal government power.

For me, Trump would have two reasons to fight back. The first reason is a defensive reason, where Trump says to Our Nance that if you House Democrats want to spend the next two years investigating me then I am going to spend the next two years prosecuting Hillary Clinton -- oh and the various liars like Brennan and Clapper. The second reason is an offensive reason, where Trump spends a lot of time in the 2020 election campaign accusing Democrats and the Deep State of epic levels of corruption, therefore vote for Trump who is the only guy in the room willing to take on the slimy Deep State.

Notice that the defensive option would be private, a quiet word to Our Nance that it just isn't going to be a good idea to sicc her lefty idiots on the president. The offensive option would be public, but it wouldn't work to start on it now, because the media would wrap it in a blanket and refuse to report on it. Republicans only get their narrative out during an election campaign when they are using paid media to communicate with the American people. So the president would not want to start on his offensive campaign until next year.

I mean, the two scandals are perhaps the most egregious abuse of federal government power in my lifetime. Are we going to brush the whole thing under the rug? Are the American people not to be allowed to give their judgment on the whole thing?

Like I say. I am waiting for the other shoe to drop on the 2016 election shenanigans.

OK, So Bernie and Donald are Both Corporatists...

One thing that the failure of gentlemanly conservatism has taught me is that there are only about five people in America that believe in the classical liberal position, that is,

the... regime of property rights, free enterprise, free trade, individual rights, and a worldview based on well-ordered liberty emphasizing cooperation within and between nations.

I guess that Kevin Williamson would be one of the five.

But then, what do you say, if you are an elected politician, to the average sorts of people that believe that the job of the government is to protect them?

Do you say to the people of Rust Belt America, well, chum, everything goes in cycles, and so your lifetime jobs in big manufacturing corporations were never going to last forever. And so, chum, you'd better suck it in, take your losses, and move on?

You don't, because the role of a politician, whether an elected politician of the 21st century or an absolute monarch of the 18th century, is to protect your people. Otherwise you are just a tax-sucking parasite.

So, it makes complete sense that both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are singing the same song, though admittedly to different tunes. Even if that scandalizes Kevin Williamson, who hates both the lyrics and the tunes. If you are running for elective office you are not going to get elected on the platform of promising to enhance "the well-ordered liberty emphasizing cooperation within and between nations."

What "Trump and Sanders — and, to a considerable degree, figures such as Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez" — believe in Kevin calls corporatism,

the subordination of private business interests to the “national interest,” something formally short of the Marxist-Leninist model of outright appropriation of the means of production but functionally similar to it.

Well, they would think that, because they are running to be president of the government of the United States -- the head of the apparatus of force and coercion in this land -- and thus naturally promise to protect its citizens from the Winds of Change using the means at hand.

Now it is my belief that 97 percent of the ways in which governments promise to protect their citizens are pure horse-pucky. But put yourself in the position of the politician running for election. You just aren't going to get elected by telling everyone to cool it, believe in the Great Enrichment, and wait for the next round of prosperity to roll in.

No, the internal logic of politics requires the candidates to promise a quasi-military campaign to lead the nation forward to peace and prosperity. That is why the Democrats are all climbing on board the Green New Deal. It promises a quasi-military campaign to save the US from the just-around-the-corner calamity of climate change. That is why Donald Trump ran on the platform of Make America Great Again. The Democrats' slogan promises to save us from an existential peril; Trump's slogan evokes the image of a quasi-military campaign to restore America to its former glories.

I would go so far as to say that if you are a politician and are not running on a platform to reenergize the nation and lead it forward to the Promised Land, you really don't understand elective politics.

Now, if you are a politician with half a brain you know that all the horse-pucky about glorious victories is rubbish. What matters is "regime of property rights, free enterprise, free trade, individual rights, and a worldview based on well-ordered liberty emphasizing cooperation within and between nations."

But how are you going to explain that, e.g., to the followers of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who literally know nothing? What if the redoubtable AOC herself literally knows nothing? Is the agenda of Bernie and Warren and AOC better than Trump's? Do they really understand the facts of life, or do they believe the horse-pucky?

What we know about Trump is that, in the event, he has negotiated trade deals that don't seem to be outright protectionism, but do seem to renegotiate things a bit in our national interest. And by lowering tax rates -- especially on  corporations -- and throwing out a bunch of regulations the president seems to have kicked the economy into high gear, which some may say amounts to governing with "worldview based on well-ordered liberty emphasizing cooperation within and between nations."

In other words, Trump ran as an unapologetic nationalist and protectionist, but seems to have government almost as a classical liberal. Who predicted that?

On the other hand it may well be that his policies, which have raised wage rates in the US, and his browbeating of the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low, and his failure to rein in spending, may unleash a bout of inflation which will inevitably lead to higher interest rates and a recession. Right now it is about ten years since the trough of the last recession, which is about the record for an uninterrupted economic expansion.

So it may be that the Democrats, despite their Medicare For All and free college for all and Green New Deal will govern like President Trump and, despite the rhetoric, encourage "well-ordered liberty."

But my money says that the Democrats really believe their rhetoric. Or at least they had better, because their party base has been carefully taught to believe all the horse-pucky about glorious administrative government programs and Green New Deals, whereas nobody in America's education system is teaching MAGA hat-wearers how to be more effective activists for racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Just saying.

Socialism is About One Thing Only

This word from the nation's leading political philosopher:

We know that socialism is not about justice, it’s not about equality, it’s not about lifting up the poor.  Socialism is about one thing only: power for the ruling class. (Applause.) And the more power they get, the more they crave.  They want to run healthcare, run transportation and finance, run energy, education — run everything.

They want the power to decide who wins and who loses, who’s up and who’s down, what’s true and what’s false, and even who lives and who dies. 

Wanna know who wrote that? I dunno: some speechwriter. But President Trump spoke it at Florida International University in Miami, Florida, yesterday February 18, 2019.

Of course the president made these remarks in respect of Venezuela -- before an audience of mostly Latin Americans -- and you can imagine that the cheering Latin Americans from Venezuela, from Cuba, and from Cuba in his audience would have rather firm views about socialism.

But I think that the president is also noticing that the Democrats are regressing towards socialism, and why not dig 'em in the ribs. That's what all the kids are being carefully taught in the schools and universities, so it stands to reason that America is Ready for Socialism.

Unless they really aren't, once you explain the whole procedure to them. I was reading a day or so ago that Americans are all in favor of Medicare For All until you explain the details to them.

I gotta say, I love  the president going all Ronnie Reagan and making Reaganesque -- or even Thatcheresque -- speeches about socialism.

Someone has to do it.

And the reason is exactly as the president said in his speech:

Socialism is about one thing only: power for the ruling class. (Applause.) 

Gee, I wish that *I* had come up with that line. It applies, liberals, to chaps like you. If you are a well-educated professional then chances are that you get to dabble your toe in the ruling-class power game. As a university professor. As a research scientist. As a government adviser. Nice work if you can get it.

If you wonder why the educated class seems to be friendly towards socialism that is the reason. There is money for the educated professional willing to hire out for government.

Actually, we should be compassionate towards the educated. If you get advanced degrees it does not necessarily translate into money and status. And after you have made the substantial investment in an advanced education you are looking for a payoff that, at least, will pay off the substantial investment you have made.

In the old days, of course, universities were mostly churning out priests for the state's established church. Then the Germans invented the research university to churn out research that would beef up the German state and help it fight against France. In our own day the university and the educated understand exactly that their job is to support the ruling class in all its endeavors, from the courts to the science supporting the war on climate change to the social science needed to support the far-flung activities of the administrative state.

And it makes sense that a chap like me that never got beyond a Bachelors in Civil Engineering and never really had an interest in power, corporate or otherwise, should be a Trumpist deplorable. Your deplorable is a guy that just wants to be left alone to get on with his life. He is not that interested in money, not that interested in power, not that interested in status.

But if you are educated, and you are interested in money, or power, or status, then you are likely to be attracted to the doings of big government. You could, of course, become a businessman, or an artist, or a writer, or invent some other creative project.

But you will probably choose government, because the other routes to fame and fortune require imagination. Government is just force; we all understand that. No imagination needed.

Yay President Trump! Keep up that socialism talk, pal. I love it!

NYC Amazon Fail Shows Divide in Democratic Party

Amazon's recent decision not to build an office in New York City illustrates the fundamental divide in  the Democratic Party.

There is the old feudal wing, -- represented by  Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) and Mayor Bill di Blasio (D) -- where the feudal lords look after their serfs by bringing home the bacon, what used to be called Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. Then there is the priestly wing -- represented by the saintly Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) -- which is on a divine quest to bend the arc of history towards justice by propitiating the progressive gods, that is to say by activism and the peaceful protest. For her, Amazon is the incarnation of the Foul Fiend.

Of course, for a chap like me, both approaches are rubbish. The taxes and regulations in a great  metropolis should not be so high that the politicians have to sweeten the pot with tax abatements and subsidies. Still, I understand that politics it is all about the hustle. Making politics into a religion is of course a recipe for disaster and 100 million deaths, because moral questions are not negotiable like economic questions. But I get that politics and religion have mixed it up forever.

Still, it is comforting for me that the Democrats are divided like this, between the feudal wing and the priestly wing. It creates a space in the middle where deplorables can roam.

To me, the feudal barons are playing a zero-sum game of privilege and tribute. Play the game with us, they tell Big Business, and we will protect you from the mob. Vote for us, they tell their subordinate voters, and we will deliver the Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. Only, of course, the magic of capitalism is its constant churning, its creative destruction. So the idea that the feudal lords are providing jobs, jobs, jobs, rather than the robber barons is baloney. What is needed is the next generation of business startups to great new industries by innovation that will lead in time to jobs, jobs, jobs, for the feudal retainers.

The activist priests, on the other hand, are worse. Really, we should consider the priestly SJWs as a kind of death cult -- 100 million dead, don't forget -- that are leading their peaceful protesters to economic Armageddon. As Stalin, Mao once did, and now Maduro is doing. But, of course, the college-educated whites that are devotees of the progressive left are not worrying about economic issues like the feudal retainers that respond to the old cry of jobs, jobs, jobs. They are educated and expect that the world will always provide for them; they do not experience life as a existential struggle to put food on the table.

History doesn't repeat itself, they say, but it rhymes. The last lefty enthusiasm here in the United States was  the Sixties, when the radical Baby Boomer children of liberal parents thought they were going to fundamentally transform America. Only the American people elected Richard Nixon, to the disbelief of the special people.

The solution to the monstrosity of the Nixon presidency was, of course, impeachment on a phoney-baloney pretext that persuaded the Goldwaters and the Scotts of the 1974 US Senate to drive down Pennsylvania Avenue and tell Richard Nixon that he had to go. But I don't think that the old game is going to work this time. Just saying.

If history rhymes again we will see Donald Trump reelected and the usual suspects desolated  by another epidemic of Post Election Stress Disorder.

Strange, isn't it, that an epidemic of PESD only occurs after a Democratic loss. Why is that?