Friends, it's beginning to look like the Mueller team is getting mighty frustrated. Unable to pin "collusion" on anyone, they've decided to charge everyone and his brother his "lying" and some version of obstruction of justice. Gee, I wonder how many Clintonites ever "lied" for their boss? And how many will ever be prosecuted? We'll have to wait and see...
On this week's Newsmaker Show with Brian O'Neil, we talk about the Roger Stone arrest, the politics of the shutdown and the wall negotiations, the potential independent presidential candidacy of Howard Schultz, the historical importance of assassinations, the parallels between President Andrew Jackson and President Donald Trump, and more! Don't miss it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqgr-LsfST0&feature=youtu.be
Dr. Waddy: I listened: I agree with you that the hyberbolic nature of Roger Stone's arrest strongly suggests a double standard excepting Democrats (notably the Clinton's) from such ordeals. Is intimidation intended (I mean, picture any of us facing the legal and financial consequences of such an indictment)? I trust you are right in predicting the near present conclusion of the Mueller witch hunt (oh yeah, its a cliche, but it does apply).
ReplyDeleteIt is tantalizing to contemplate the consequences of the precipitous descent of the Dems into presumptuous Marxist insanity. Impeachment? Let them founder on those rocks! AOC (note the Presidential nomiker already afforded her by her so easily and recklessly inspired acolytes) has already motivated Dem party outrage with her youthful impetuousness (and that takes some doing). I'm reminded of the tawdry fate the "Clean for Gene" types in 1968 or the 1970's "Gang of Four" in China or of Essex in his absurd effort to rescue Elizabeth I from herself. They were summarily slapped down; now I would be ecstatic at the prospect of AOC achieving Bonapartehood and presently too, in order to lead her party into the abyss but she'll probably be chastised, with dispatch, by those Dems who think their long and laboriously sought totalitarian triumph within reach.
I still think the Dems will settle on a Biden very willing to clear the way for Socialist domination and an early radical successor enabled by him.
You are so very right that the Dems will betray the working class. They are so very obviously for taking from the productive and giving to the unproductive that it is laughable and lamentable too, that they have any credibility among union blue collar people.
Jackson was a man so hard that it is scarcely understandable in this age so very separated from his early frontier travails and his forceful reaction to them. Nonetheless, he extended the franchise and administered to the elite a needed lesson and caution.
The British, committed as they were to administering a united Indian entity which did not exist before their arrival, adopted a system of toleration of princely potentates provided they allowed the Brits what they thought their due. The overriding priority for the Brits was that their opponent in the "Great Game" of the 19th century, Imperial Russia, would certainly have supplanted them on the subcontinent of South Asia, seeking warm water ports and seemingly unlimited wealth. Certainly the Brits saw in that possibility the strangulation of their empire and their world leading prosperity but in its prevention they surely spared India the ordeal of Great Russian misrule. Surely evident in British rule was a policy of noninterference with anciently ingrained institutions like the caste system, coupled with a very gradual introduction of egalitarian and tolerant British democratic institutions which was acknowledged by a recent Indian Head of Government as an eventual benefit to India.
Brexit: The unrelenting undemocratic opposition to Brexit will probably result in a hard Brexit in which the British left invests all its hope for dysfunction leading to their investiture. They will be disappointed, I trust.
Hi Jack. It's virtually unthinkable that the "Mueller treatment" would be meted out to Democrats or Clintonites...or that the media would stand for it if it was. What amazes me is that establishment Republicans are willing to look the other way as justice is perverted. Presumably, it's because they don't like Trump, but they should realize that they could easily be next!
ReplyDeleteAOC's youthful indiscretions certainly give conservatives talking points, but we must recall how little attention these sorts of remarks receive in the mainstream media. The press is too busy bullying Catholic schoolchildren to bother with the very real threat of a Marxist takeover in the US. Ah, to be a liberal! How much we could get away with.
You still think it will be Biden? I think he'd be a strong contender, but assuming it boils down to Biden versus a true radical, my money would be on the radical, at least this year. I see little appetite for an old white guy among the party faithful.
You're right that the British ought to receive a lot of credit for modernizing India. They worked within the confines of Indian culture for most of the Raj, sure -- but it's hair-raising to imagine what India would be like absent British tutelage. Good point re: the Russians. If it wasn't them, maybe it would have been a combination of the Dutch, French, Portuguese, etc. Maybe there wouldn't be an "India", therefore, if it wasn't for the Brits...
I hope you're right about a hard Brexit, but the determination to avoid it is seemingly very great. My money is on delay or Theresa May's middle path...but maybe she will pivot to trying to make no-deal slightly less no-dealish?
D. Waddy: In my opinion only, it could have been no other than onerous Great Russian incursion into the subcontinent. Those Brits, they knew it and it was the reason for their legendary forays into Northern India and Afghanistan, the obvious invasion route from Russian Asia. When one considers what an extensive empire the 19th century Czars were able to amass (some of it, in the Maritime Pacific Province, at the expense of the increasingly prostrate Chinese empire), it makes one wonder what they would have done to India - could the Dutch, French and Portugese, all of whom had credible incursion into "India" have resisted the Russkies?
ReplyDeleteRe: Biden: I may be permanently effected by seeing Humphrey emerge from all the idealistic hugger mugger of 1968. It was 50 years ago I admit.
It's endlessly tantalizing to imagine what Russia could have become absent the Bolshevik detour... The sky's the limit!
ReplyDeleteI was thinking about that the other day: we could have had a President Hubert Humphrey!!! Can you imagine? A lot has changed since 1968, of course, not least of which is the selection process. I believe radicalism will be rewarded by the Dem base at this stage, simply because they're so angry, sanctimonious, and out of touch.
Dr. Waddy: The nomination of an overt radical is, appallingly, a plausible prospect. It could also be a disaster for the Dems. I wonder, frivolously: you must be 35 to be President but what about Vice President? Could AOC be a running mate? If the Dems think they may lose the House then probably not - in fact, in most cases, VERY probably not. A President Humphrey would, I think, have been mostly a reprise of LBJ. He would surely have pushed the "Great Society" to ever more unsupportable parameters, in order to appease the boomers and, faced with their intransigence and ingratitude, probably would have prosecuted the war much as Nixon did. A do gooder like him would have been unable to come to terms with the "liberal parents, radical children" syndrome and would have been disillusioned by it because of its disdain for his earlier and courageous efforts in the post war civil rights campaign. Hubert was not a viscerally tough man and he practiced a form of oratory comparable to Andrew Cuomo's - it bordered on windy theatrical dreck.
ReplyDeleteThe chaos which attended the inevitable and just withdrawal of the Brits from a subcontinent yet advanced by them in essential modern political and governmental soundness suggests what an India absent British stewardship would have been like. Sans such relatively benevolent organization it probably would have resembled Africa.
Russian rule, even non Bolshevik, would, because of their undemocratic tradition, have been onerous. Marxism would of course have been inhuman. For Russia itself, especially for the lives of those many millions ruined by the Bolshevik holocaust, 1914-1917 was an incalculable tragedy. Anything would have been better and even a still largely authoritarian regime could have fostered a much improved life in the 20th century. More than anything it is that which which causes me to be utterly intolerant of Marxists and their insipid apologists.
I agree, Jack -- almost anything would have been better than 70 years of communism, for the poor Russian people. Russia in fact achieved wondrous advances under communist misrule, so I have little doubt that Russia would today be immensely strong had cooler heads prevailed.
ReplyDeleteI doubt very much that AOC could be, or would be, anyone's running mate in 2020. My guess is rather the opposite: that we end up with a fairly radical nominee and a vanilla, establishment veep, to mitigate the horror... Look how close Bernie came in 2016, after all, and look how much more extreme the Dems are now.
BTW, I know NOTHING about Hubert Humphrey except his name, and that's bad enough!
Dr. Waddy: Humphrey was a nice person, who had been an early pioneer, at the 1948 Dem convention, in civil rights legislation. That took guts, with the old South still so assertive but Hubert was too much of a gentleman to be able to stand up to an earthy old boy like LBJ, who toyed with him horridly when Hubert was VP. "Oh", said "HHH","its too bad we weren't elected, we could have done so much good!" Yeh, that would have been the trouble.
ReplyDeleteHa! Well said. Do-gooders are the bane of our existence!
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: The very best of them do their good and let it speak for itself. Farther down the scale are the scolders like Mario Cuomo, who sought to shame his opposition into acknowledgment of a mean minded recalcitrance Mario thought was manifest and obvious,by definition, in all who disagreed with his undoubtable truth and justice. Farther down, his son, a man of ferocious contempt for any who doubt him and a determination to use the resources of government, paid for by all taxpayers, to prosecute that smug and vindictive dismissiveness forcefully. Finally, there are those, horridly rampant in the 20th century, blithe to use all manner of coercion to force compliance with their airily conceived notions of right and wrong. The burgeoning cadre of Dems seemingly shed of their aversion to frankness about the extemism which has driven them since the '60's, are firmly in that totalitarian camp. Let it be clear to all now !
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