Category: Personal
It All Falls Apart

It All Falls Apart

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Do you remember the last time we saw helicopters evacuating embassy personnel and civilians following a U.S. overseas collapse? If you said April 29-30, 1975, upon the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Army, you’d show you have a sense of history. Something that seems to not be in the portfolio of this country’s current shadow government or its top figurehead leadership in the form of Joe Biden.

Watching the events of the past few days, on top of the seven months that preceded them, we — even the skeptics and rationalizers — can have no doubt but that things are totally out of control and falling apart at an accelerating and alarming rate. On every key front we are seeing the abdication of responsible and competent leadership, and in every area where the country expects its government to keep it safe and secure — its primary duty — it has been failed.

I outlined specifics of these failures in an earlier piece where I explained why we are so fucked. I posted that piece less than three weeks ago, and its dire account now seems almost optimistic in comparison to what we’ve witnessed in recent days. One hopes these events might serve as a wake-up call to the country — even the corrupt mass media, who were complicit in putting us into the jeopardy we’re now in, have been critical of the so-called Administration’s catastrophic handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal — but it seems those holding the power are loathe to surrender even a millimeter of that power and are intent on blustering and lying their way through the mess — messes — they created. Worse, who is supposed to answer the wake-up call when one party, holding a deaf ear to the phone, controls the White House and both houses of Congress? The fox is guarding the hen house, and the rest of us are the hens.

On Monday we finally heard from Jell-O Joe, after days of silence while he went on “vacation,” and despite his empty claim that “the buck stops with me,” he preceded to blame everyone except himself for the Afghan disaster. If you haven’t already heard it, and you have a strong stomach, you can read the text of his blame game here.

“So what’s happened?” Biden blathered, as he went through his litany of blame. “Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight.”

Never mind that all of what went down was 100 percent predictable, and predicted, and Biden and his feckless advisers and the Pentagon and the State Department took absolutely no precautions to put in place a contingency plan that would have allowed a withdrawal that didn’t turn into a total rout and disgrace for our country. There is equally little argument that can be made that most of the last 20 years in Afghanistan wasn’t something of a circle jerk of errors, with one bogus and misleading statement of success after another coming out of the Pentagon and from four administrations of both parties, once more bringing back memories of Vietnam.

Former UN Envoy to Afghanistan Peter Galbraith over the weekend laid much of the blame for the rapid collapse of the Afghan military and government on the toleration of widespread corruption in the country over two decades by the U.S. and its allies. Much of the trillion dollars the U.S. poured into Afghanistan went into politicians’ and war lords’ pockets, with loose or absent controls on the part of our DoD and State Department.

Back to where we started on Sept. 11, 2001

A country is great only to the extent its leaders are great. We are a country in disgrace, and don’t for a moment think that hasn’t been noted by the Chinese and the Russians, not to mention the plotters of terror around the globe. Which highlights yet another lie, a most dangerous one, Biden uttered Monday.

“We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago,” he said, “with clear goals: Get those who attacked us on September 11th, 2001, and make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again. We did that. We severely degraded al Qaeda in Afghanistan.”

One after another, knowledgeable intel analysts and operatives, all with on-the-ground experience in Afghanistan, filled the airwaves today with their assessment that al Qaeda is already taking root in Afghanistan, that it never went away. And now with their brothers in arms and spirit once more in control of the country, they will have a clear way forward to reestablish their jumping-off point for launching attacks against the U.S. and other Western countries. Even the leading apologist for the left, the New York Times, has a piece called “Disaster in Afghanistan Will Follow Us Home.” You don’t have to be a genius or intel analyst to figure that out. You just have to not be Joe Biden.

Two quotes from former top officials in Democratic administrations really have it right. Bob Gates, former Defense Secretary in the Obama Administration, said — and has since stood by his statement — that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” And Leon Panetta, another Defense Secretary and CIA chief under Obama and Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton, said, ““He is president of the United States. He is going to have to take responsibility.” Going on to compare the loss of Afghanistan to the Bay of Pigs fiasco of 1961, Panetta said that JFK, unlike Biden, “took responsibility for what took place.”

Or, if you prefer, Jell-O Joe’s old boss, Barack Obama, perhaps put it most succinctly: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

When Biden says “And here’s what I believe to my core . . . ” you know that is just blather because Biden has no core. Over the 40-umpteen years of his undistinguished career, he has shown time and time again how he’ll blow with whatever wind is blowing, say anything he thinks will advance him, lie when that’s convenient, and just make things up as he goes along, all the while with his hand in the till. And now that he mostly dwells in La-La Land, the existence of a core to him is an even more preposterous concept. Jell-O Joe has as much of a core as the bowl of flavored gelatin “Dr.” Jill and his other handlers feed him when he’s not sucking on an ice cream cone.

And when the toadies in the Pentagon and State Department — more focused on things like “white rage” and Critical Race Theory than the nation’s security — spout nonsense, they are no better and also have to bear responsibility for this calamity. Just as one pathetic example, when Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Kabul wouldn’t fall from Friday to Monday, he was right — it fell from Friday to Sunday. If these incompetents, Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, not to mention Biden himself and those pulling his strings, are not immediately fired, there is no hope to look forward to, and the only light at the end of the tunnel is that of an oncoming locomotive. Of course, for your answer, just look at the poison pill that was put into the vice presidency, the useless and frightening Kamala Harris, to make any move to apply the 25th Amendment to Biden an unattractive option.

To those who didn’t like Donald Trump’s tweets so voted against him: Are you happy now?

One wishes for the grownups to come back and put an end to this clown show.

A return to the 1970s. Only worse.

It seems no matter how far a country gets from its dismal past, it is always in danger of sliding back into it. Many of us who lived through the 1970s and all its dismal aspects — Vietnam, gas lines and dependence on OPEC, loss of faith in our political leaders, the Mariel Boatlift, raging inflation, raging crime, the Iranian takeover of our embassy, the degradation of our military, and our loss of prestige on the world stage — recognize how every element of the 1970s is back, in one form or another, most on steroids.

The country has become a dumpster fire of crises. We cited in our post of July 29 the range of crises — all induced by this Administration — the country is facing:

+ The catastrophe on the Southwest Border

+ Spiraling crime in big cities across the country, most Democratic ruled for decades

+ Our feckless foreign policy, Afghanistan being the most acute and visible example of that

+ Deliberate undoing of our long-sought energy independence

+ Rapidly rising inflation

+ Confusing and troubling mixed-messaging on COVID.

Now we have our latest version of the fall of Saigon. What is going on on our no longer existent Southwest Border makes the Mariel Boatlift look like absolutely nothing. Our military is chasing political correctness and a “woke” agenda while our adversaries gloat and plot. Our students fall further and further behind in their educational prowess, some not even being able to read and write in cursive or otherwise, and with entire states removing academic requirements for graduation (they’re “racist,” the benighted morons of Oregon say). And now, after the past week, what ally or client state or individual who assists us would have any faith in our word or commitments to protect them?

In an act almost as shocking as what has happened in Kabul, on August 11 Biden asked OPEC — the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which include Iran and Venezuela — to increase its production to help control rising fuel costs. This is the same Biden who, by a stroke of the pen, canceled the Keystone XL Pipeline, while greenlighting Russia’s Nord Stream 2 Pipeline, and reinstated controls that took America from energy independence, which President Trump helped usher in for the first time in 62 years, back to being dependent on oil from sworn adversaries and some of the most volatile areas on earth.

You may recall how we railed against OPEC in the 1970s for the deleterious effect it had on the country. Now Biden bows at its feet.

If you were like me, you might have fallen out of your chair when you heard this. It’s like our enemies have taken over power in the country — which really they have, since these people are intent on what they say is “fundamentally changing the country,” which are code words for destroying our way of life — and up has become down and down has become up.

Jimmy Carter might have been arguably the worst president of our lifetime. Until this president. Now, it’s no contest, and things truly are falling part. It is not a notional question: Can we survive this Administration? I’m not confident, and less so by the day.

U.S. Embassy Kabul, Afghanistan, August 15, 2021, photo by AP/Rahmat Gul. Used under Fair Use.

Dumpster Fire, photo by Ben Watts, Free Stock Photos. Used with permission.

This piece also appears on Substack. Please subscribe here, and there.
Why I’ve Moved From Medium to Substack

Why I’ve Moved From Medium to Substack

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That’s the long and the short of it: I’ve moved to Substack with my writing and have given up on Medium. I’ll tell you why.

From the time I started my blogs more than four years ago, I co-published most of my posts on Medium. I was attracted by the possibility of a large, pre-existing audience, and the reach offered by Medium. What I didn’t anticipate, and perhaps should have, is the inherent bias that exists within Medium and most of its readers and writers.

It seems that unless one is a raving leftist spouting utter nonsense, one gets few readers, few followers, still fewer comments or claps, and Medium doesn’t promote your work. I tried to convince myself, repeatedly, that good writing and well researched pieces that spoke truth to power would overcome the prejudice. I have a journalistic background where accurate and ethical reporting earned people’s respect. I anticipated the same at Medium. And was repeatedly disappointed. While I value the readers who appreciated my work over the years, they were few and far between.

The one piece I put up that got a huge readership, more than 44,000 views so far— mostly from China, as it turned out — has a title, The Melon-Breasted Girl, that makes it seem like a sex piece (it isn’t, really, but is a reality-based short story). If anyone doubts that sex sells, sex pieces, along with the leftist jive, are some of the most widely read and promoted pieces on the site.

I was recruited by one publication, which encouraged me. And then when I’d post things that didn’t fit their narrative, even though the allegations of fact I made in the pieces were thoroughly documented, they’d turn them down. I’m not about to change or sugar-coat my views nor rewrite history simply to please an editor, so I stopped sending my posts to them. At that point I pretty much gave up on Medium and posted fewer and fewer things there. And finally, more recently, I made up my mind and moved to Substack.

In one day, I received more views on Substack than I would get in a month or more on Medium. I’ve just begun at Substack, but I feel more of an openness there than I felt at Medium, which in large part drew me to it. I see people more closely aligned with my own views, which I rarely saw at Medium. I don’t expect everyone there will be of like mind, and that’s fine. That’s the whole idea of a free exchange of ideas, and having at least a level playing field. It’s what I expected at Medium, but never saw.

I’ve read that Medium is concerned about losing audience. Maybe if those who run the site realize that at least half, if not more, of the population doesn’t agree with the arcane ideas it promotes, or which most of its writers and readers hold, it might be able to turn that trend around. Reality, and not just ideology, has a way of making its presence known. I don’t claim to know all the reasons why Medium might be on a descending course and Substack ascending, but I have to believe that is part of it.

I’m not in this for the money, which has been paltry (to put it kindly) on Medium, and which (at least for now) I am not seeking on Substack. I feel strongly about things like journalistic ethics, freedom of expression, equal justice, rational economics, and domestic and foreign affairs policies that strengthen and work in my country’s interests and don’t kowtow to negative interests, no matter how virulent, internal or international. I sense that is a contrarian view on Medium, and not one that is ever going to obtain the respect it’s due. I am hopeful it will on Substack.

Anyway, before I kvetch any more and this turns into a rant, I’ll end it here. I welcome anyone who would like to visit my community on Substack, which is called Issues That Matter, to do so. They’re also welcome to visit my fiction blog, Stoned Cherry. I’d be even happier to receive comments to my posts, and for you to subscribe to any or all of these venues. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me, and that’s fine, too. I always welcome respectful and reasoned dissents.

In parting, I’m not going to quote Richard Nixon, and I don’t really care if anyone on Medium has me to kick around any more, or not. I wish all there well, and will offer the hope, as futile as it might be, that Medium eventually comes to its senses. We can hope, anyway, can’t we?

Photo by Jonathan Kemper, Unsplash. Used with permission.

Summer Solstice
That Time of Year Again: Thoughts on “the Longest Day in the World”

That Time of Year Again: Thoughts on “the Longest Day in the World”

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This piece initially appeared four years ago, on June 21, 2017, the Summer Solstice. Today, June 21, 2021, it is once more the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, and the actual solstice officially occurred at 3:32 a.m. UTC this morning/22:32 p.m. EDT last night. The time and other references and weather comments in the piece are as they were four years ago, when the post first appeared. I’m no longer living on the boat, and there have been other changes. This year it has been 52 years, more than half a century, since my father’s death, and yesterday was Father’s Day here in the U.S. I originally posted this piece on this blog, as an annual event, but last year decided to post it on my fiction blog, https://stonedcherry.com. This year, I’ll post it on both blogs. I hope you enjoy it.

It’s June 21, the day of the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s a day that holds various meanings for different peoples, and its significance goes back millennia. The solstice, whether summer or winter, officially took place at 12:24 a.m. U.S. Eastern Daylight Time this morning, or 04:24 UTC.

Just to set the record straight and dispel any questions about my scientific knowledge, I know it’s not the longest day in the world. It’s the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest day in the Southern Hemisphere. But we’ll get to this a bit later.

It’s been a mixed bag today here on the West Coast of Florida. We’ve been having a lot of rain, something we didn’t have much of over the winter, and the rainy times are interspersed with sunny breaks. Right now, as I look out the window of my boat, the sun is mostly out but I’m looking at the light through rain-drop spattered glass. At least we’re not getting the effects of Tropical Storm Cindy, which is much further west and at this moment dumping lots of water on the upper Gulf Coast.

In this country, the summer solstice marks the official beginning of summer, though in other places and other cultures it marks the middle of summer, as indicated by the name Midsummer Night, which can occur anywhere from the 20th to the 24th of June. And really it is midsummer, since the days, which have been lengthening since the equinox three months ago, now will start to grow shorter, the nights longer.

The sun has reached its apogee in this hemisphere, as it stands today directly over the Tropic of Cancer. I feel summer ending, we already are on the downhill side, the side that will take us through the hot coming months but already on the slide back into winter, the cold time of year. Just as in the Southern Hemisphere the days will begin to grow longer as the seasons move back to summer.

A year ago on this day I was in Alaska, where there never really was a night. Where I was, well below the Arctic Circle, the sun went down sometime around midnight, but there was a kind of twilight that lasted until the sun rose again a few hours later. Above the Arctic Circle on this day, the sun never sets, and it truly is the Land of the Midnight Sun.

My thoughts turn to other things on this day. Someone asked me the other day, which was Father’s Day in the U.S., what thoughts I had of my father on that Sunday. But really, I think of Father’s Day as a commercial holiday. I also remember the last Father’s Day I had with my father, and how my mother did her unwitting best to create conflict between me and my father. While I may wish a happy day to the fathers I know on Father’s Day, it is today, the day of the solstice, that I think of my father. June 21 was his birthday, which in most years coincides with the solstice. I was told as a child that it was the longest day of the year, which I translated in my own way into it being the longest day in the world, and I would go around telling everyone who would listen that it was.

“It’s the longest day in the world!” I’d exclaim each year on his birthday, from morning until night.

I think today of my father on this day, the 21st of June. Gone now, for nearly 48 years. And I think back to the day of his birth, June 21, 1913. One hundred and four years ago. Even had he not died young as he did, just 56 years old, it is hard to imagine that he would still be alive today had he not died when he did. A prolongation of the inevitable.

A factoid I learned earlier is that today is not the longest day in the history of the world, as one might imagine it to be given that the earth’s rotation on its axis generally was slowing. Rather, the longest day in the history of the world is believed to be June 21, 1912, and things like the earth’s tides and recession of the glaciers have caused a slight increase in the rate of the planet’s rotation since then. My father was born a year later, which arguably could have been the second or third longest day in the history of the world, if not the actual longest day in the world.

I wonder what it was like on that June day, the day of the solstice, the longest day of the year, the day my father was born, in Jersey City, New Jersey. Did his father and mother, his Italian parents, my grandparents that I never knew, know it was the solstice? Did they even know of the solstice? Regardless, I’m inclined to think they did not think of it, if for no other reason than that they had something else on their mind that day. And then I think of the things people from then knew and were taught and how many of those things have been lost today, in these encroaching new Dark Ages in which we find ourselves, and I have to wonder. Perhaps they knew, better than most people today know. Or care to know. And they did note the auspicious day on which their son was born.

I’ll think of my father again on July 27, the anniversary of his death, and by then even our summer, the summer as we define it, will be half over.

The solstices, like the equinoxes, serve as a kind of punctuation for me. I watch the ebb and the flow of the days, the seasons, the years, and they mark the passage of time, time that increasingly slips by way too quickly. All of life is punctuation, I think. Slowing. Stopping. Breaking things, even waves on the water, into different parts, different pieces, different rhythms and fugues and movements and phrases and sentences. It is through such punctuation that we mark our lives, mark our transit through summer and back into winter, from day into night, from life into death. Watching, as a reader of a story does, while the time of our lives flows past. When we lose that punctuation, everything blends into one big mass, and we feel lost in the current, flailing and drowning as we’re pulled inexorably along. At least I do.

Enjoy this song, which I found today amid my files, and with which I end this post, and enjoy the time that nature and life give us.

 

Click here if song doesn’t play.
Nothing to be Proud of

Nothing to be Proud of

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In October 2002, following the Chechen siege of the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow and the deaths of as many as 204 hostages and 40 Chechen terrorists when the Russian government pumped poison gas into the theater, my Albanian friend Laura called me. She was angry at how the siege was ended, with the deaths of many innocent people, and outraged at the Russian government’s attempt at claiming the use of the poison gas was necessary to end the siege and that the operation was “carried out brilliantly.”

What she said to me after that has stayed with me ever since. Paraphrasing her quote as best I can, she said, “There are things that are done wrong in the United States, too. But the United States fixes them, makes them right. That is the difference between America and Russia.”

At that moment, hearing those words, I never in my life had felt so proud of my country. That my friend, who had grown up under Communism, flourished under capitalism, and had experienced close up some of the inner workings – good and bad – of our government from when I had been posted to the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, had such a positive view of the United States, impressed and pleased me beyond what words could express.

Now, 18 years and some weeks later, in the aftermath of what has gone on in this country over the past four-plus years, and all the more in the aftermath of a scandalous Presidential election and the events leading up to it, I don’t think I’ve ever been more ashamed of this country. I am sorry to say, I think the country has become a parody of its former self, a sham, as fraudulent as the election we just went through, and we have nothing – nothing – to be proud of. Whatever values and strengths this country held before have been so run into the mire of corruption and shameless power grab that they are gone, and whether they ever can be recovered is very much an open question.

I’ve waited a week after the election to write anything about it, any kind of summation of what happened, what didn’t happen, and my response to it. But the election is just a symptom, a result, of a much greater sickness afflicting the nation. That sickness – and it’s not the coronavirus, it is an illness much more grave – is rampant, will remain rampant, regardless who finally is victorious in the election. Honestly, I have been so discouraged about this country and its prospects for the future, no matter how optimistic I try to be, I’ve had a hard time mustering the focus to write anything coherent. It’s even hard to find a starting point, there are so many things wrong in so many ways. I’ll make a stab at putting something out now.

A fraudulent election

I have no problem calling the recent Presidential election a fraud, just as I predicted it would be. I’m not talking about the numerous instances of voter fraud or electoral malfeasance that have occurred in a number of states. Those are bad and widespread enough to merit concern all by themselves, not that it’s the first time in U.S. history that they have gone on, and President Trump’s legal team is challenging some of those that could more likely determine the outcome of the election. No, I’m talking about the entire electoral process, which was designed to create chaos, doubt, and open the door to a Democratic power grab. But what would one expect of a party that dedicated itself over the past four years to the removal of a duly elected President and installed its presidential ticket through would can only be described as surreptitious back-room deals involving party elites and power brokers? Combined, it is the biggest political fraud ever perpetrated on the country.

As I’ve said before, Biden’s real running mate was the coronavirus, which was exploited to create this electoral debacle. There was no real reason why people couldn’t vote in person on Election Day, as has been the rule for a very long time in this country. But fears of the virus provided the perfect excuse for state after state to jump on the mail-in band wagon, setting the stage for the current mess. I had grave concerns about this, as did the President, and we both were right.

By declaring widespread mail-in (or, the bigger problem, mail-out) voting, the only outcome that could be predicted was a disastrous result, especially in states that had never done this before and were ill-equipped to run and manage a massive influx of mailed-in ballots. Those states had weak safeguards in place to avoid multiple voting, stolen votes, voting by dead people, and people who moved to other jurisdictions, not to mention weak processes and insufficient staffing to tabulate the ballots, but this was exactly what those who engineered this mess wanted. In the actual analysis, they have no respect for a fair vote but only sought power.

We now have several states still counting votes a week after the election, with no end in sight. To say this is Third World in nature insults Third World elections. I was an election observer on two different occasions in Albania, one of the poorest and least developed countries in Europe, especially in the 1990s, and even with written paper ballots the results were known the same night. The same in Algeria during my posting there, where results were known by the next day. What we have in this country now is a national disgrace, along with being a fraud, and every American should be ashamed of this travesty.

The accounts of electoral problems are legion. Poll watchers in Philadelphia and Detroit and elsewhere being denied access to observe the vote count, as they are everywhere permitted to do by statute. As many as 40,000 ballots suddenly showing up in one place, every single one of them for Joe Biden. Saddam Hussein would have been proud of such a result, as I’m sure Kim Jong-un would be, too. In Michigan we have a computer glitch that changed Trump votes to Biden votes, and that software was used in half the state’s counties, and in some 28 other states, too. Also in Michigan, poll workers being told to back-date ballots. Envelopes being separated from mailed-in ballots, eliminating the ability to check when they were mailed. And on and on and on.

President Trump has every right to challenge these problems, but he’s criticized just days into the process by the pro-Biden jackals in the mass media and is accused of not wanting to yield power. None of them criticized Al Gore who, in 2000, carried on for 37 days claiming to be President-elect when, in the end, George W. Bush was ruled to be the winner. And that fight involved just one county in one state. The current malfeasance stretches across a number of counties in at least a half-dozen states. So Trump is the bad guy, but Gore wasn’t? And why isn’t Biden calling for a proper outcome of the election, whatever it might be? Doesn’t the confidence of the American people in its electoral process matter enough? Instead, he claims victory.

Pennsylvania is the epicenter of the problems – just as I predicted it would be – and unfortunately Chief Justice John Roberts and the liberal members of the Supreme Court he sided with just about guaranteed it would be a mess. The U.S. Constitution, Article II Section 1, gives state legislatures the right to set electoral process in their states. When the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unilaterally changed the voting rules, it should have been an easy decision for the the U.S. high court to slap them back. Failing to do that and holding the case in abeyance, once Election Day rolled around it became a matter of putting the toothpaste back in the tube, and whether the mess in the Keystone State can be unraveled is very much in doubt at this point. There is even talk of canceling the entire electoral results in the state, it is such an intractable mess.

I’m also wondering why the Justice Department has not stepped in to some of the more egregious situations. It is the right of every American for their vote to be protected, and that includes protection from having the power of their vote stolen by electoral misdeeds and illegal votes cast. That falls to the Justice Department in the face of local officials, such as again in Philadelphia, openly flaunting court orders. Why the reticence to intervene?

All that said, I can feel good about my own state, Florida, in which more than 11 million votes were cast – almost the entire population of Pennsylvania – and results were known the same night. Whatever issues plagued the state in previous elections have been fixed, thanks in large part to Gov. Ron DeSantis. If Florida can fix it’s problems, so can other states. And it’s time for some sort of more coordinated approach to voter registration and the whole electoral process. As things stand, they’re an embarrassing and catastrophic hodge-podge.

The other issue that I think has to be raised for future elections is the whole question of early voting, not just mail-in voting. U.S. electoral law, in Chapter 2 of the U.S. Code, sets Election Day as the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November. Get it? Election Day. Not Election Season or Election Month or whatever. There is a real reason for having a single election day, with all votes to be cast on that day save for any cast by legitimate absentee ballot, with those counted on or by Election Day. Remember how that was? I do. And I voted in person on Election Day and, you know what, it went fine and I lived to tell about it. The whole virus thing was a sham and a fraud, and that it was allowed to be a factor in the election is yet another disgrace casting its shadow across the nation.

The Biggest Crisis: Media Corruption

I have been saying for years, long before the election of Donald Trump, that the biggest problem facing this country isn’t political but rather the bias and corruption in the mass media. In principle, political problems can be fixed (assuming, of course, a fair electoral process). But without honest and accurate information provided to the electorate, the entire process fails. As I’ve written, democracy dies in darkness, and that’s what we’re seeing right now.

How many American voters got to hear about the corruption and illegal activities of Joe Biden, or the Hunter Biden laptop and the emails it contains laying out the former Vice President’s abuse of power for private gain? Maybe 10 percent? Maybe fewer? Most of the national media – and by extension, local media – not only didn’t cover the story, but when it came up in passing they outright lied and said it was a product of Russian misinformation, which is demonstrably false. Backing up the “Blue Wall,” Twitter and Facebook blocked reports about the laptop and Biden corruption, froze accounts, and censored legitimate reports. Only the New York Post, Fox News, and some online sites with integrity reported the story. The British media carried it more than the American media did. If you didn’t have access to one of those outlets, you never heard about what might be the biggest scandal in political history of the past century (yes, bigger, by far, than Watergate).

Between the concerted cover-up of this story and an election that spread over weeks, the anti-Trump establishment kept the electorate in the dark to influence the outcome of the election. And this same corrupt media protected Biden, content for him to mostly stay in his Wilmington basement, ignoring the obvious signs of his growing dementia, and unwilling to ask him any questions beyond fluff. Who needs Russian or Chinese or Iranian intervention when we have CNN, MSNBC, the major networks, the print media, and Big Tech?

I am astounded when I hear some praising Biden’s “spectacular” campaign. What planet do these people live on? What campaign? It was the biggest non-campaign in American political history. And in reality, anyone with more than two functioning brain cells knows it’s not Biden who will be the real actor in the White House. It will be the largely unpopular Kamala Harris. And people question why I say the Dems depended on people being imbeciles for their victory.

For four years the media, the late night talk shows, and the chattering class spread lies and misinformation about Trump, and those lies and that misinformation echoes through the populace, building on itself. And it’s extended to everyone associated with Trump, to anyone who supports Trump, to anyone who votes for Trump. Being one of those maligned by these despicable characters, I am more than sick of the lies, the bullying, the slander, the threats, the ridicule, the browbeating, and all the rest. I am tired of being called a racist because I support Trump, tired of being called a racist for opposing Obama (that goes back 12 years). The media has cultivated nothing but division and hatred in the country. They have fostered violence. Anti-Trumpers, biolstered by these hateful lies, have threatened to kill (and have actually done so) Trump supporters. The media has this on its head. And it is shameful beyond words.

And now Biden and the Dems and the media say we should forgive and forget and let bygones be bygones? They’ve gone so far as to spread the lie that it is us who want to be forgiven. That is how delusional and dishonest these people are. And some, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are calling for taking names to punish those who worked for the Trump administration. Well, take note: I, and many tens of millions like me, don’t bargain with or submit to those who would steal our democracy from us and turn us into a one-party conformist state adhering in lock-step to a most radical leftist agenda. And I don’t make peace with haters and liars and frauds who refuse to acknowledge and repent of their hate, their lies, their fraud.

Now there are signs that even Fox News is being steered by top management away from being the one contrarian network one can count on to find out what is really happening in the country. I am reminded of how Putin, unhappy with the coverage of the Dubrovka Theater debacle by NTV, the last of Russia’s independent nationwide TV stations, forced a change of management there, effectively silencing dissent. If Fox News goes the same way, we are truly lost.

As the free flow of information is systematically strangled, so is our democracy strangled.

The Bigger Shame on the Nation

The even bigger shame will be all the actors who broke the law, lied under oath, fostered the Russia Hoax, and attempted to bring down a duly elected president in a brazen coup attempt. That it has taken so long to bring these people to justice is a travesty and a shame. Attorney General William Barr and Deputy AG John Durham had ample time to complete investigations and seek convictions. That they haven’t done so underscores my belief that this country has a two-tier justice system – if one can even still use the term “justice,” except in irony – and the likes of Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strozok, John Brennan, James Clapper, and, yes, Joe Biden, all of whom, and others, committed criminal acts worthy of prosecution, will be allowed to skate scot-free if Trump winds up losing the election.

There is something seriously wrong with our judicial process if so much time and resources can be poured into endless investigations with zero results. Or maybe that was the intent all along. Whichever, this is yet one more national scandal, as is the misuse of the FBI and the nation’s intel agencies for political purposes.

Adding insult to injury, some of these reprehensible characters, such as Brennan, already have been offered positions in the Biden transition team. The expectation is that the cover-up will be complete and all the misdeeds will just go away. And, mark my words, there will be prosecution efforts directed against Trump and others in his administration if Biden takes power. This has to be infuriating to anyone who cares about some semblance of justice.

In the final analysis, I think the country has failed itself. All of this was preventable, but decisions were made and actions taken, fostered by ill intent and the power of special interests over the course of decades, that have taken us down a path leading us away from core American values of fairness and honesty and accountability and transparency and justice. And I am left never more ashamed of my country and with nothing I can offer my friend Laura, or anyone else, to show we are better than any other corrupt country.

Featured image: Aggression, John Hain, Pixabay. Used with permission.
Disgrace, Gerd Altmann, Pixabay. Used with permission.
Black-backed Jackal, Geran de Klerk, Unsplash. Used with permission.
Hopeless, Gabriel, Unsplash. Used with permission.
The Future of America Lies in Your Hands: Vote!

The Future of America Lies in Your Hands: Vote!

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The choice for America hasn’t been more clear in more than a century and a half. Not since the election of 1860, which led to the victory of Abraham Lincoln, the subsequent Civil War, and the eventual end of slavery, has there been a more impactful election.

The choice can be stated in simple terms: If you’re willing to accept and be complicit in the biggest fraud ever attempted in American political history, then Joe Biden is your guy. If you want to continue the push toward a stronger America, toward sensible economic policies, and toward policies that recognize global realities and how strength promotes prospects of peace without kneeling to the country’s enemies, then Donald Trump is your guy.

I know, I know. You don’t like Trump’s tweets. You don’t like some of the off-the-cuff things he says. You don’t like the name-calling. I don’t either. But if superficial things like that influence you more than things like policies, confronting the political elites (of both parties), mental and physical competence, and not being taken in by bald-faced political fraud, then go ahead and vote for Biden. And don’t complain later when, on the outside chance that Biden wins, you see what you’ve actually voted for. And it won’t be peace or prosperity or togetherness or justice or any of those nice-sounding things. You’ll find how much you’ve been snookered.

If you’ve been following my blog postings over the past two-plus years, you would know why Joe Biden is an utterly unacceptable candidate for President. You would have seen accounts of his misdeeds – all since confirmed in recent revelations – and you would have seen the reasons why he has earned a criminal investigation on a number of counts. And you would have seen the duplicitous and hypocritical and deceitful tactics of the Democrats in Congress and their lackeys in the mass media.

Scary Stuff

If that isn’t enough to dissuade you from voting for Biden, you would have seen the evidence of the man’s ever-more-frequently obvious mental deterioration, rendering him unfit to hold the nation’s highest office. Despite his campaign handlers’ best efforts to keep him sequestered in his Wilmington basement, when Jell-O Joe is allowed out to speak to a smattering of supporters and neutered media representatives, he has taken to speaking – not just in his usual gaffes and misstatements – but in what can only be described as “tongues.”

Here is just one example of that. Listen to it yourself.

And another.

And lots more cited here.

And it’s not just mental. Listen to his labored breathing as he spouts gibberish here.

Scary? I think so. This is the man who would have his finger on the nuclear button. That should get anyone worried. Very worried, indeed.

The inescapable conclusion is that Biden’s supposed running mate, Kamala Harris, is the real candidate, and Jell-O Joe is just a placeholder. He’ll be in the Oval Office until his deteriorated mental state becomes impossible to any longer ignore, and then he’ll be eased out of office with Harris taking over officially. And meanwhile, both Biden and Harris, considered the most liberal member of the Senate, will be subservient to the will and insane policies of the likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren. Never mind that Harris couldn’t even muster enough support to make it as far as the primaries or that she is widely disliked, even despised, across the full range of the political spectrum. She, and the radical left, and the Dem power brokers, are whom you’ll really be voting for.

A Tale of Two Campaigns, A Tale of Two Americas

The photos above graphically illustrate the tale of two campaigns, and the two Americas they represent and appeal to. Both photos were taken at recent rallies in Georgia. The top image is the Trump rally held in Macon on Oct. 16, following earlier rallies, attended by tens of thousands of people, the same day in Fort Myers and Ocala, Florida. The bottom image is the Biden rally held in Warm Springs on Oct. 27. In contrast to the vibrant and raucous gathering of thousands of avid supporters – typical of all Trump rallies – we see a smattering of supposed Biden supporters, some of whom are actually reporters, isolated in 38 – count them, 38 – circles, to enforce social distancing, outside on the grass. Compared to a garden party, it looks more than silly. Later the same day, Biden attracted his largest crowd of his campaign, such as it has been, at a drive-in rally in Atlanta – 771 people in 365 cars.

This really is the choice put to voters: Which America do you support? A lively and growing and vibrant and courageous America, or an America afraid to even breathe, cowered into fear, locked down and looking forward to the “dark winter” promised by Biden? An America of hope, or an America of despair? An America where the individual is treasured, or one in which the individual is submerged and devalued and canceled in the dismal swamp of identity politics? An America of tolerance and fairness, or one in which venom and hatred and division are fostered by a corrupt political-media establishment? I know which one I’ll be voting for when I go the polls tomorrow. Do you?

I honestly have no idea how the election will turn out, which of those narratives America will choose. If you believe most of the polls – I don’t – Biden will win. Of course, those same polls said Hillary Clinton would win in 2016. So much for that theory. If you go by the enormous enthusiasm shown to Trump, whether in rallies or in the many impromptu displays like car and boat parades held around the country, contrasted with the lackluster showing of support for Biden, Trump has to take it. If you use such anecdotal approaches as I use, like my Yard Sign Theory, there will be places solidly for Trump and others solidly for Biden. Do the Trump yard signs outnumber the Biden ones? Based on my limited observations in different places, I’d give the nod to Trump.

Something like 90 million voters have already cast their votes, in mail-in, absentee, and early voting. I remain opposed to early voting in most cases since vital information, like what the Hunter Biden laptop contains, often comes in late in the game. I’ll go in person to my local polling place tomorrow and cast my vote, as I’ve been doing in most elections since my first vote when I was 18. I don’t know if we’ll know a winner by late Tuesday night. I suspect not. I suspect, unless there will be enough clear results in sufficient states to determine a clear winner, we may wait days, weeks, perhaps months to know who the winner is determined to be as Americans’ faith in their political institutions is further eroded. I hope that isn’t how things go, just as I hope there won’t be violence in the aftermath of the election, but I have my doubts about both. Many cities already are boarding up in anticipation of that violence.

In any case, I hope the sensibility of the country comes through and voters wind up picking the only acceptable candidate on the ballot. I hope they do that even if it takes having to grit their teeth and accept a candidate who is less than perfect. The alternative is too incomprehensible, too horrible, to even think about. And I hope that sensibility carries through down the ballot, too, to keep the Senate in Republican hands and to turn the House. The country doesn’t need more gridlock, nor does it need the one-party state the Dems have in mind for it.

And it’s not just the future of America that lies in the balance. In many respects, it’s the future of the world. I have had non-Americans writing to me to stress that point, and their concerns and fears mirror my own.

Readers of this blog probably know more about the issues and the opposing views of reality than most. Now go out and apply that knowledge and vote.

Featured image: Donald Trump in Omaha, Anna Reed, The World Herald; Joe Biden in Bristol Twp., Pennsylvania, Darryl Rule, LevittownNow.com. Both used under Fair Use.

Trump at campaign rally in Tucson, Rebecca Sasnett, Arizona Daily Star; Masked Joe Biden waves in Bristol Twp., Pennsylvania, Darryl Rule, LevittownNow.com. Both used under Fair Use.

Trump campaign rally in Macon, Ga., Getty Images; Biden campaign rally in Warm Springs, Ga., Independent Sentinel. Both used under Fair Use.