Close window | View original article
It's that time of year when we consider all the things we are thankful for - and if there's one thing for which we are thankful most of all, it's the sheer pleasure of the fact that this year, it is really not that hard to come up with a weighty list! It wasn't too long ago that we really had to strain to see past the troubles of the day to reach the appropriate state of gratitude.
But for a while at least, those days of gloom are over. We have a great many causes of thankfulness in the Year of Our Lord 2018:
The Republicans increased their majority in the US senate. With RINO Senators Flake and McCain gone, this will make it a lot easier for Mr. Trump to continue his yeoman work of cleaning up our ridiculously leftist "justice" system by appointing conservative judges. Given that he backed Judge Kavanaugh and got him through regardless of lyin' liberal smears, Mr. Trump ought to be able to get a lot more judges through - and even more staunchly conservative ones - over the next two years.
The Kavanaugh affair, miracle of miracles, also seems to have given the erstwhile terminally-wimpy Republicans a spine! Thanks to Mr. Trump, they may finally learn how to put up their dukes and really fight. Perhaps someday we'll even have to retire their so-justly-earned moniker of the Stupid Party.
Various hearings about the notion that Mr. Trump might have conspired with the Russians to affect the election have instead showed that the FBI, the NSA, and the CIA all abused the process of getting national security warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. We've shown how this sort of Democrat chicanery goes back to 1960 and has continued down to the present day.
The more Mueller investigates, the more facts come out that look horrible for the denizens of the Swamp. The Democrats will kill any investigation of Democrats in the House, but the Senate can soldier on. And if past performance is any judge, the Congressional Dems will be so insane with blood lust over finding a smoking-gun list of unpaid Trump parking tickets that they won't even notice their Inspector Javerts bulldozing the swamp they all live in.
In a truly historic shock, we find ourselves surprisingly grateful that Nancy Pelosi is likely to be speaker of the House of Representatives. As with most liberals, we dislike many of her ideas, but she is one of the very best at herding legislation through the House. There are certain legislative matters such as a budget that really ought to get through the House - even if it's a bad one, as it surely will be, it would be beneficial to the body politic to have things done in proper form for once so that blame can be correctly assigned.
We've been amused to read about what a cliff-hanger her Speakership vote will be - 17 Democrats, or is it 19, say they won't vote for Ms. P, but they don't have anyone who's willing to take her on publicly. No matter how much they dislike her, there's an old saying, "You can't beat anybody with nobody."
Although she doesn't seem to engage in Arkancide, Ms. P. is a past master at politically knifing anyone who opposes her. That makes it hazardous for any potential Democrat standard-bearer to make a formal request for support.
It's made even more perilous because Mr. Trump has told the entire world that he will ask his Republicans to support her if she needs help. His having shown that he's willing to deal with her, his offer of Republican support makes opposing her even risker than it already was. One wonders what they promised each other?
Assuming that all the incoming progressive representatives mean what they said while campaigning, however, getting anything through the House without including language requiring that Mr. Trump be hung by his thumbs and that all wealth of the 1% be confiscated summarily will be a task for an expert. If Ms. Pelosi can pull it off, our political systems might be slightly more healthy and the ultra-left-wing of the Democratic party will be even more incandescent with lunatic rage than they already are.
And if she can't, and the system stalls out amid a intra-Democrat gunfight, we have every confidence that Mr. Trump will come up with a sidesplittingly irreverent nickname for the incompetent Congressional Democrats and their leadership. With any other Republican at the helm, we'd be bemoaning the inevitable tidal wave of "bipartisanship," which always means Democrats getting what they want - but Trump has shown such an amazing ability to make lemonade from lemons and wrongfoot his opponents, that it's hard to avoid the heady feeling that we can't lose.
Although Senator Elizabeth "Lieawatha" Warren, the 1/1024 native of South America, won re-election in Massachusetts, she received significantly fewer votes than Charlie Baker, the "Republican" governor. This doesn't make her look like a champion vote-getter. The progressive voter initiative she championed, which would have led to a huge increase in medical costs, went down 70% to 30%. On top of that, all of the progressive candidates for whom she campaigned went down to defeat. That means she has far fewer chits to call in for the 2020 election than she had expected.
She also proved that if a liberal does something silly enough, even the MSM will criticize. The sheer unadulterated ludicrousness of her claim to be a "woman of color" was ridiculed everywhere - except for the Boston Globe, which made the absurd claim that "checking the box" by lying about her racial heritage hadn't benefited her at all.
That's provably ridiculous. As the Washington Examiner put it,
That box checking, as critics call it, likely played a role in her Harvard hiring especially when her background is compared to those of the other near-100 Harvard Law School professors and assistant professors, according to an analysis of law schools the professors attended. Most graduated from Harvard, and all from the nation's top 10. Warren [the only "woman of color" teaching at Harvard at the time - ed] graduated from Rutgers University in Newark, ranked 82nd by Top-Law-Schools.com.
If Ms. Warren doesn't change her affiliation to the Monster Raving Loony Party, the Dems will get even more of that kind of reputation than they already have.
We've explained previously how glad we are that Mr. Trump has moved the Overton Window by making it possible to talk frankly about illegal immigration, Islamic terrorism, and many other trenchant topics. Not every such attempt succeeds the first time: he tried to get traction on vote fraud by setting up a voter analysis commission after winning in 2018. That didn't go anywhere even though Hilary's winning all 6 coin tosses which won her the Iowa caucus against Bernie stank to high heaven.
This time, voter fraud in Florida was obvious enough that it would be hard for anyone to deny that it exists. Republicans are also looking into irregularities in Arizona. In another gift to the forces of reason, Democrats from Hillary on down are claiming that the Georgia vote was rigged in favor of the Republican. While this is of course false, it certainly will persuade some number of liberal voters that election fraud is real, which is all to the good.
The various well-publicized shenanigans and ill-thought-through propaganda may move the Overton Window enough that we can have a serious bipartisan talk about eliminating vote fraud, or at least making it a lot harder. If not, we might wind up with the Window in a place where the American people can see sordid election malfeasance for what it is: a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat Swamp Party.
We rejoiced as Democrats lost more than 1,000 elected offices during Mr. Obama's 8 years in the White House. Although they've come back a bit, all four of the best-known candidates for whom Mr. Obama campaigned lost.
As Allahpundit put it, "Barack Obama: Delivering big for the Republican Party every four years since 2010. The only thing he's more effective at selling than GOP candidates in midterms is guns." May new sales records be set in both markets!
The electoral dust having started to settle, both Ohio and Florida will have Republican governors. It would be hard for Mr. Trump to win in 2020 without carrying both of these states; having friendly governors will make it more likely that he will win them.
Republican governance is particularly important in Florida where crooked Democrats pulled out all the stops to refine their cheating methods in advance of 2020. Although the Democrats are flinging accusations of racism at anyone who criticizes the way the vote count went and the MSM has ignored the stories as much as possible, it's hard to deny the statements of people who testified about ballots being willfully changed after the deadline.
We sincerely hope that the governor-elect will put cleaning up the Florida voting cesspool at the top of his to-do list - preferably including the issuance of orange jumpsuits as widely and as noisily as feasible. And, we're thankful that we have cause to entertain such hopes.
This intellectual luminary became the darling of progressives everywhere when she defeated a long-term Democrat House member in the New York primaries; she now draws a lot more water than anyone could have imagined. When she said, "We can take back all three 'chambers of government' - the presidency, Senate, and House" we thought that this malapropism would disappear down memory lane along with Obama's 57 states. Her many moronic remarks indicate that she learned nothing whatsoever while getting a degree in economics from Boston University, but if nobody ever hears about them because the MSM covers for her, did they actually happen?
To our amazement, Hot Air reports that her latest fount of wisdom touched off a total flame war between conservatives who assert that her IQ is comparable to her age vs. liberals who believe that she's the second coming of Barack Hussein Obama - with the laudable result that the furor is too big too ignore, so America gets to hear her stupidity in living color.
Righties and lefties have been swinging at each other over it all day; many Esteemed Pundits have weighed in with takes about the reaction. ... All of which can only mean one thing: She's already one of the biggest stars in the Democratic Party, more so than even news junkies may realize.
If she means what she's been saying since she won her primary, whomever becomes Speaker of the House will have an interesting job. Ms. Pelosi will find herself presented with an unedifying choice: does she want Ms. Cortez on the outside pissing in, or on the inside pissing on herself? As the old toast has it, "Confusion to our enemies!"
We hate watching huge fires destroy hundreds of California homes as their record-breaking fire season goes on, and on and on and on while everybody wails about the wrong cause. As is his wont, Mr. Trump tweeted out the truth:
There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!
California politicians say climate change makes forests drier. The real problem is that a century or so ago, Californians decided not to let forest fires burn freely as in the past. Later on, environmentalists effectively banned logging, which leaves mature trees to die and rot into kindling instead of being harvested and turned into housing.
Letting fires burn freely when touched off by lightning or by faulty electric cables causes small fires which get rid of brush. Fighting fires limits the burn which lets the brush pile up. When the woods finally light off, nothing can stop the fire.
This has been known for decades, but nobody outside of obscure think tanks would admit it widely until Mr. Trump moved the Overton Window yet again. We hear that a few Californians are actually talking about rethinking forest management which might include doing some logging.
Mr. Trump's implicit threat to cut off the money which Californians spend cleaning up the mess they've made seems to have really touched a nerve. We can understand their dismay at being slapped away from the candy jar, but why should the rest of the taxpaying states fund their repeated ineptitude? Again, thanks to Mr. Trump for pointing this out.
Although we deplore the lefty bias of the big Internet firms Google, Facebook, Twitter, and You Tube, we rejoice that the Internet in general and Twitter in particular give Mr. Trump a way to get his message to the public regardless of the MSM being totally stuck on a liberal point of view. As seems to be an endemic problem of the Left, the leftist tyrants who rule the tech world showed their hand before they quite had the power to make it stick. We don't know what the end result will be, but it won't be a communication dominance by the left - too many people know that's their goal and will work to find another way.
Back in 2010, we wrote "Being Thankful for the Left Coast" which expressed appreciation for the bad fiscal and societal examples that the State of California was setting for the rest of us. Since then, they've driven home the utter folly of progressive policies. San Francisco, a spectacularly beautiful city from a safe distance, now has so many homeless people sleeping in the streets that strollers encounter human feces and used drug paraphernalia in many parts of town. There seems to be nothing constructive that the city or any other California city can do about this no matter how much money they spend.
As one would expect, many Californians are leaving the state, and the "leave" faction will soon be augmented by those whose homes were burned out when the entire town of Paradise was incinerated. They won't be able to rebuild given the stricter building codes and environmental regulations that were put in place after their ex-homes were built.
Unfortunately, few Californians seem to learn. As they've fled to saner states over the decades since Reagan left, they've taken their bad voting habits with them and turned neighboring states from red to purple to blue as they go. Must their refusal to learn the lessons of reality take the entire nation down?
'nuff said about the up-side of that. Pass the popcorn!
It's pretty clear that the source of most of our thanksgiving this political season comes, ultimately, from Mr. Trump and the violent shaking he has been giving to all our institutions. Losing a bunch of House seats at a midterm election is quite conventional - Democrat Speaker Tip O'Neil picked up a number of seats in President Reagan's first midterm, no surprise that the same has happened to President Trump in a far harsher environment.
What's remarkable and rare is that Mr. Trump increased his strength in the Senate where he can continue draining the judicial swamp. Overall, we feel thankful for the time he's bought us, and are glad we supported him nearly from the beginning. Being right is almost as pleasant as winning!
Overeat in peace!