Posse Incitatus

Theresa May's Brexit debacle

It is fascinating to see how many of the allegedly competent establishment politicians are in fact staggeringly incompetent.

Emmanuel Macron has managed to create persistent unrest in France.  Despite his earlier policy surrender, the popular anger shows no signs of abating.

Angela Merkel is Germany's first lame-duck Chancellor.  She's still clinging to office, but her abysmal electoral performance resulted in her resignation as the head of her party.  It's a pretty damning indictment that most of her final term in office will be as a "caretaker."

Then there's the UK.  The British are often the forerunner of popular movements, both good and bad.   Just as Thatcher's rise heralded the Reagan revolution, so Brexit anticipated the Trumpening.

But Theresa May has proven herself one of the most inept politicians in British history.  She inherited a solid majority which she pissed away and a botched snap-election.  She then negotiated a Brexit deal that was voted down by the largest margin in modern British electoral history.

The next step is likely a vote of confidence on her creaky minority government.  The Ulster Unionists who've been propping her up have been getting treated like crap and are likely to tell her to piss off.

This would lead to a bit by Labour to form a government, which will likely fail, bringing on a general election that would certain favor the Reds.

I've long since come to realize that sometimes people can't be saved from themselves.  A Corbin-led government would give the UK as much socialism as it could handle and wreak ruin on the nation, but maybe that's what the Brits need. 

Meanwhile, the fall of May's government would also free President Trump to declassify documents relating to the bogus RUSSIA investigation - a step he backed away from after the British and Aussies begged him to.  With May's government a smoking ruin, there's little reason for him to offer deference at this late date.

Each one of these three leaders - May, Macron, Merkel - were held up as the anti-Trump, the globalist alternative that would save the world from the horror of the deplorables taking control.

And yet, all of them have failed by any objective measure.  The nations now powering ahead are the ones who have heeded the call of their people to stand up for their nation rather than interests of their own elite class.

The political establishment has proven they are unworthy of any deference.  The sooner they are swept away entirely, the better.

The Dems have betrayed just about everything they ever believed

One of the interesting things about getting older is that personal memories stretch back into periods that are increasingly regarded as "history."

Of course we have lots of books and now even videos to document what was, but no written (or video) account can replicate the immediacy of seeing events as they happened.

I'm not an old man (yet), but already I feel like an age of the world has passed.  Yes, I was literally born in a previous century, but the political landscape is unrecognizable from what it was only a quarter century ago. 

The media blames this on radicalized Republicans, but in fact it's the Democrats who have now repudiated almost their entire party platform from my youth.  The GOP has made changes as well, but mostly these are in response to massive lurches from the opposition.

Once upon a time, there were these strange creatures called "pro-life Democrats," and they included prominent figures among them.  Bill Clinton famously said abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare."  Abortion was lawful, but a tragedy and people of good will should work hard so that it rarely if ever happened.

But now of course it's a great thing, and billion-dollar industry profits not only off of the wholesale murder of America's youth, but from the sales of the unborn corpses as well.  Hypocrites like Nancy Pelosi can hide behind the "seamless garment" mumbo-jumbo to defend their betrayal of the Catholic faith, but on what grounds does she excuse cannibalizing unborn children for spare parts?

Democrats used to be the party of the blue-collar working class.  Now they despise manual labor as a past time, and also the very masculinity that supports and sustains it.  The party that once ranged itself against Big Business is now a slave to it, beholden to dot-com billionaires who want endless streams of indentured low-wage servants to code their platforms and support their server farms.

The southern border was once a prime concern of the Democrats, and there's plenty of tape showing Bill Clinton, Chuck Schumer and other luminaries demanding stronger safeguards to protect American workers.

Now those same sentiments are "racist" or "immoral" and what America really needs is an endless flood of human trafficking, smuggled drugs and unskilled labor to drive down wages.

Free speech was something the Dems loved, but now they hate it.  The old ACLU was willing to sue on behalf on Nazis; the new ACLU thinks that "hate speech" shouldn't be protected.

Similarly, the Dems once supported due process for people accused of crimes.  Now they and their ACLU allies think it's more important to get convictions than defend the presumption of innocence.

I remember when John F. Kennedy was a symbol of religious integration, and his election as president was hailed as triumph over Protestant bigotry.  But now the Dems are the ones pushing anti-Catholic bigotry and suggesting that people of certain faiths are unsuitable for public office.

One of those suspect faiths is also Judaism.  The Democrat party is still the home for the vast majority of the Jewish electorate, but they can't sit along side anti-Semites indefinitely.  At some point the Jews will be expelled from the party, which will fully embrace anti-Israel policies it's currently flirting with.

I also can remember when Democrats shouted "keep government out of the bedroom!"  Now they want it there on a continual basis to document everything that could possibly happen.

In the 80s it was no one's business what consenting adults do, but now the very notion of whether women can consent at all is in play.

Democrat feminism went from "I am woman, hear me roar!" to "I'm a snowflake, and even the slightest pressure will cause me to knuckle under to patriarchy."  Hillary Clinton's bitter speech that GOP women vote the way their menfolk say they should was a total repudiation of Democrat feminism.  Indeed, one could make the case for repealing the Nineteenth Amendment simply by quoting modern feminists.

Ronald Reagan famously said that he didn't leave the Democrats; they were the ones who left him.

Compared to what has happened since my youth, the change he saw was incremental.  Other than the name, it's hard to recognize anything a Democrat of 1980 would have in common with one today.

 

The Dragon's empty nest

Amidst all the saber-rattling and supposed super-weapons just around the corner, it is worth noting that mainland China is best by enormous and complicated problems that deeply undercut its global ambitions.

Here at the Posse we've noted more than once that China's dependence on the export market to fuel its growth leaves it deeply vulnerable to a trade war.  The United States largely consumes its own product and having to on-shore more production may produce short-term disruption but actually will strengthen the US economy in the long run.

China, by contrast, remains largely dirt-poor and its convict laborers and peasants simply can't afford the counterfeit i-Phones they produce in such abundance.  Absent the Western world willing to play a sap, China's economy will crater.

But there's also the demographic side, and here Mark Steyn once again takes his familiar role by pointing out that China is getting old well before it's getting rich.

One thing I will add is that China's military leadership is well aware of these trends.  All industrial nations track available manpower in case they need full wartime mobilization.  The trends in China must be deeply alarming to its leadership - particularly since the Chinese way of war has historically been to drown the enemy in Chinese blood.  That blood's increasing hard to come by.

China still uses a draft and like all nations, calls up only a fraction of its available manpower.  However, like Russia, China's leaders have watched the potential pool of recruits drop each year for decades.  They know with absolute certainty that the number available for the 2020 call-up will be smaller than that in 2019, and that the classes of 2021, 2022, etc. will continue to dwindle.

This is why China is pushing so hard to take control of the Western Pacific.   It is also why I feared that the election of Hillary Clinton would continue the road to war started by the weakness of Barack Obama.  With China pushing hard against a visibly declining United States, there was a serious risk that China would go so far that even Hillary couldn't fold.  The publicly mooted strike against US carriers by a Chinese general or a strike on Guam or Alaska would rouse the public beyond the Democrat media's ability to contain it.

Indeed, Hillary would likely lash out in a panic, since being the first woman president would mean she had to be super-manly.  And thus the war would begin.

Trump's assertiveness allays my fears because it sends a clear warning that the US will respond.  This means that China's leaders will have to strike knowing full well that total war will be the result.   There is no ambiguity and thus far less chance of a miscalculation.

But China remains a source of instability, and we can only hope its leaders understand that a diminished China is better than a radioactive one.

Greenpeace turns to shipbreakers of Bangladesh to scrap flagship Rainbow Warrior

For a while I've been chronicling the rot among various (formerly) respected institutions.  Today's example (via Ace of Spades) is the story of how nominally environmentalist organization Greenpeace decided to dispose of its iconic flagship by using the infamous shipbreakers of Bangladesh.

Greenpeace apparently leaked the story in November, hoping to bury it and avoid bad publicity.  One might think that one of the premier environmental organizations doing something like this would be news, but one would be wrong.  Leftist journalists (and their editors) have their priorities.  They increasingly see themselves not as conveyors of information but rather gate-keepers whose job is to boost their cause and political interests.

One can read the lame excuses of Greenpeace at the link, but it's entirely insincere.

For a long time Greenpeace's core mission has been fund-raising with a little virtue-signalling thrown in.  Actual environmental improvement, sound conservation practices - these things are for the little people. 

Thus, when the Rainbow Warrior II had reached the end of its operational lifespan, the suits who run the organization wanted to get rid of the hulk as cheaply as possible.  That pointed to the hideously unsafe and environmentally toxic beaches of Bangladesh. 

Of course, one might think that since Greenpeace has specifically targeted this practice for condemnation, they'd have enough institutional self-awareness not to do it.  One might think that, but one would be wrong.

This could have been a teaching moment, and the recycling of the Rainbow Warrior II could have been an excellent fund-raising opportunity for the organization.  Heck, they could have made trinkets out of the hulks various parts and sold them off at an obscene profit.

But they didn't because like most institutions today they suffer from the twin handicaps of short-sighted thinking and a lack of basic competence.  I'm reasonably certain that the entire "business" side of the organization consists of earnest upper-middle class kids who breezed their way through school on the backs of tutors and degree programs based on "building awareness" rather than any sort of critical thinking.

Such creatures typically end up at trendy non-profits and rely on an ossified donor base to insulate them from the real-world consequences of bad decision-making.

The problem is that eventually, stupid will win.  The decision by environmentalists to ally with corporate globalists is a prime example.  One cannot claim to favor protecting the environment and still support the free flow of capital to third-world hellholes with no environmental protections.  China's air is literally toxic, and this is deliberate policy of their government to achieve economic growth.

Each time a leftist-dominated state like California passes "clean energy" legislation, everyone knows production will simply move offshore to avoid the rules and exploit cheap labor.

Blue-collar workers have already figured this one out.  It's an open question whether their college-educated "betters" will have the brain power to do likewise.

Welcome to 2019

Our readers will no doubt have noticed that blogging here has been sparse over the past few weeks.  Partly this was due to my being out of town (and having to recover) but since then it's simply fatigue with the repetitive cycle of anger that permeates the news.

Roger L. Simon has dubbed 2018 the year of living hatefully, which is both clever and accurate.

Vitriol is everywhere and it is not longer enough to merely disagree with someone.  No, dissenters must have their lives up-ended, losing jobs and homes if possible to punish them for their evil thoughts.

For a long time, this was a one-sided game, with the left joyfully attacking with impunity, but now the center-right is also getting radicalized.  We are rapidly filling what Winston Churchill dubbed "the vials of wrath" in our society.  When they are full, bad things will happen that no one will be able to control.

At the same time, I still see hope in the year ahead.  The popular rebellion in defense of "Baby it's Cold Outside," was both necessary and instructive.  We are reaching the point where the inherent contradictions in radical-left ideology are becoming unavoidable.  Just as with the transgender movement now attacking feminist icons like Martina Navratilova or banning drag queens, something here has to give.

It was one thing to sneer at half-century-old values, but increasingly views held only a year ago are being declared anathema for insufficient "wokeness."  No one can live like that.

We enter the new year with much of the federal government on furlough, and this fact will present a severe challenged to the new Democrat-run House of Representatives.  The modern left is expert at posing, preening and sniping, but actual governance is something different.  One need only glance at the once-lauded European titans who are now either caretakers or zombie leaders of to see what happens when inflexible principles meet implacable reality.

Whatever happens, we at the Posse wish you a happy new year and remind you that faith, family and freedom are what really matters.  Everything else is just details.

The Syrian pullout

Today President Trump announced that US forces would be withdrawing from Syria.  Their exact numbers and locations have been a closely-guarded secret ever since the Obama administration was forced to re-enter Iraq following the rise of the Islamic State, so it's hard to say how quickly (or completely) they are leaving.

But Trump has been clear:  we are leaving.

Naturally, the people who write about war for a living are upset.  Note that the vast majority of these people have not - and never intend to - actually fight in a war, but they are absolutely certain that endless American combat operations are a great idea.

News coverage is uniformly negative, of course, because Americans should keep on fight and dying in a country we aren't at war with and haven't formally invaded.  And this should go on forever.

It's almost as if that whole "give peace a chance/no blood for oil" line was total bullshit.

It's no coincidence that those beating the drums loudest for endless combat operations are also the biggest fans of the late, unlamented The Weekly Standard.   Their strident opposition tells us Trump is doing the right thing since they are uniformly wrong about everything they advocate.

Some might wonder who will occupy the power vacuum left by America's departure.  It will likely be Bashar Assad, who is still the nominal ruler of Syria.  Some of the uber-hawks naturally want to overthrow him so that the US can maintain a third shit-show of a country.  In reality, the Islamic State has been whipped pretty hard and if it rises again, we can smack it around some more.

This is the classical way to deal with piracy and unsavory actors: punitive expeditions.  It's clear that Trump's "principled realism" is based on the notion that we will never be loved and will never turn the world into upstate Vermont.  What we can do is hammer the ever-living crap out people who displease us, which is a far more reliable (and less expensive) form of deterrence.

Indeed, I admit that was what I expected in both Afghanistan and Iraq:  crack some skulls, kill the leaders, and then set up reasonably reliable strong men to keep order as we go home.   Instead, we have a war in Afghanistan that has dragged on so long, GIs who enlisted after 9/11 will be able to collect full retirement pay before it ends. 

This is insane, and why the Bush family is just as culpable as the feckless Obama crew.

Trump understands this and that's why his goal is to pull back our exhausted and overextended forces, regroup them and at the same time maintain a powerful force in being in case anyone gets ideas.

It's intelligent, sustainable and wise, which is why the usual suspects hate it.

The globalist gods that failed

Oh how the mighty have fallen.

After Donald Trump's election, the leftwing media was positively falling over itself in admiration for Angela Merkel, Theresa May and their ultimate hero, Emmanuel Macron.

Yet one by one these towering figures have stumbled over the fruit of the seeds they sowed in hubris.

Merkel's migrant policy has crippled her party, forcing her resignation.  She continues on as a zombie chancellor, free to deliver empty broadsides but lacking any real power over the international scene.

Theresa May's government also has become a shambling, undead husk, waiting only for the final convulsion before it collapses in a heap.  Given that her minority government depends on Ulster loyalists to remain in power, it staggers the mind to understand why should would try to push a Brexit agreement that slices off Northern Ireland and binds it in the EU in perpetuity.

Finally, there is the great Macron, Savior of the West and Hero of Globalism.  His bizarre obsession with global warming - and resultant effort to impose crippling energy taxes on the French people - has led to a prolonged popular revolt that refuses to dissipate.  The latest development is that the police union has declared themselves to be in solidarity with the "yellow jacket" protesters and plans to go on strike in support of them.

We must note that like everything French, there are detailed regulations about how one gets permission and who actually can strike, but still, this is significant.  For now, the French riot police are playing by the rules, but a public statement of this sort is often the precursor to not playing by the rules, which is common in French history.

The Sixth Republic may only be a few weeks away.

These are the globalist gods that failed, each in their own way embodying the transnational elite pushing ever less accountability and ever more fluid movement of people.  They won over their electorates and then set out remake them. 

They tried to use the rules to stymie their people, creating "all party-alliances" to lock out the will of the majority, but the outraged populace is determined to have its revenge.

The funny thing is that we've seen this play before, during the initial spread of Marxism.   Attempts to create "class solidarity" across borders collapsed when it became clear that "foreigners" would gain from lost jobs and wages at home.

The left responded by imagining "national socialism," and we all know how that worked out.

The Global Warming racket falls into the same category.  Everyone wants to feel good about the environment, but it's telling how little even the elites are willing to do to stop it.

Instead of taxing automobile fuel, why didn't Macron but a surtax on private jets?  Perhaps a landing fee on all aircraft with fewer than 20 passengers. 

Ah, but that would harm the elites, and our current crop can't tolerate the slightest inconvenience, which is why Hollywood celebrities preach environmentalism while consuming more carbon than an entire midwestern suburb.

This transparent greed and hypocrisy would be bad enough, but it is the gross incompetence that renders it a lethal combination.  The globalists are losing not just because they are wrong, but because they are stupid.

 

 

George H. W. Bush and the collapse of conservative intellectuals

When I heard George H.W. Bush had died, I wasn't surprised.  His wife had passed earlier this year and couples who have spent a lifetime together literally can't live without each other. 

My esteemed co-blogger has offered a first-rate consideration of the man's life and legacy.  I have nothing to add to the topic, save to note the absolute collapse of the conservative movement's intellectual wing.

During the 1980s there were vibrant and spirited debates with a number of keen intellects arguing about the future of conservatism.  Most of those voices have passed on, and publications like National Review and The Weekly Standard have since become pale imitations of the Huffington Post.

I've noted before how the current crop of senior thought-leaders are not only incapable of an intellectual argument, but demonstrably incompetent. 

Someone like Max Boot howling about RUSSIA would literally have been thrown of the stage by William F. Buckley.  Henry Kissinger would dismiss him with a wave of his hand.  Thomas Sowell could crush him in less than a minute.

I haven't been paying attention to the news much, but I see over the weekend, NPR ran an article that collapsed almost immediately, yet the Quisling Never Trumpers fastened on it like a lamprey on a lake trout.    Jonah Goldberg in particular was on it.

This is remarkable given that Goldberg's parent publication has been calling for the abolition of public radio for decades.  The bias of public broadcasting has been a recurring theme of years, and yet here was a National Review stalwart now citing in his bizarre jihad against another Republican.

Of course, having been exposed as dupe of the left, Goldberg expressed zero remorse because he does what he's paid to do and he loathes his readers.

Thirty years ago, that wasn't the case, and the fact of the matter is that Bush the Elder was far more savvy and capable than his son - just as the previous generation of establishment conservatives could run rings around the legacy hires filling their seats today.

Hillary's latest idea: Maybe open borders doesn't work

 

In a functional democratic political system, ideology necessarily yields to the will of the majority.

This is how parties change their platform over time as new issues rise and old issues fade.  Unlimited silver coinage doesn't have much of a following these days, but little over a century ago it was a hot topic.

One of the signs that the US political system was breaking down was the fact that neither political party seemed willing to address the issues that actually mattered to the electorate - specifically outsourcing and immigration.

Donald Trump won the GOP primary and then the general election because he was the only one of 18 candidates to take on these issues.  His personal popularity was always secondary to the popularity of his issues.  It was a mark of how thoroughly dominated both parties are by business interests and ideologues that so few politicians were willing to co-opt his positions.

Yet that may finally be changing.  Via the Belmont Club we learn that Hillary is suddenly reconsidering her loyalty to open borders dogma:

Plagiarism is the sincerest form of imitation. Clinton's realization that mass immigration must be adapted to suit the actual conditions is a sign that the populist revolution, though it may be checked or superseded, has left an indelible mark. Trump may be impeached, though probably not convicted, in the coming months; certainly he will, like all mortal flesh, eventually fade away. But there's no denying time has moved the needle and there is no way back to the global world paradigm of 2016.

One would be tempted to cite this as proof that Hillary has no moral core, but that was never in doubt.  The fact that a major Democrat figure is now considering reversing what was a core tenet of the faith shows that America's political system may yet have hope.

The situation is Europe is not nearly so rosy.  In the UK, the establishment seems determined to fight to the death rather than implement Brexit.  Similarly, Angela Merkel has decided that she can finally sound off on the evils of nationalism since she's no longer accountable to voters. 

While the New York Times may run with these salacious Trump-bashing quotes, they are in fact the last whines of political has-beens.  Merkel was forced to resign as party head.  France's Macron may have gotten in "sick burns" over the Armistice Day observance, but his nation is consumed with riots against his policies.  Again and again, we see establishment figures cited as sources of wisdom at exactly the moment when their political careers are headed down the toilet.

Is it any wonder that the Clinton Machine might finally recognize the obvious?

To be sure, Hillary may yet be planning the classic double-cross of running on one issue and then doing the opposite.  This is, after all, a major part of the Democrats' strategy for many years.

The problem is that this will now open up a new fissure in the Democrat coalition and shift the political debate closer to Trump.  It's hard to see how this hurts him.  Indeed, the Clinton Machine endorsing less restrictive immigration might actually get that wall funded.

In any event, it will be amusing to watch the paid shills of the leftist press and their Quisling Never Trumper allies have to reverse themselves yet again. 

Veterans Day and America's role in the world

Normally I offer a Veterans Day greetings to our readers, but I was unable to get do so yesterday.  I offer my apologies to our veteran readers and also thanks for their service.

The 20th Century has often been called "the American century," but that isn't strictly true.  In 1901 (note: centuries begin on the "1" not the "0"), the United States was a growing power, but by no means preponderant.  If I had to rank the Great Powers of the day, the US would have been behind Great Britain, Russia, Germany and France.  The US Army was tiny and still largely based on volunteer militias.  The Navy was starting to stir, but it would take not only wartime construction but large-scale international disarmament (in some cases voluntary, in other cases not) to put it within striking distance of Great Britain. 

Thus the "American Century" really began on Nov. 11, 1918.  Not only was the German Armistice in response to an American peace overture, many of the clauses in the subsequent Treaty of Versailles were effectively dictated by Woodrow Wilson.

I mention this because liberal talking heads like Max Boot seem obsessed with keeping the United States locked into the strategic position of 1947 rather than understanding the many unique factors that led our formerly isolationist republic to reluctantly take the lead in world affairs.

RUSSIA poses a strategic threat only to those nations on its immediate borders.  This may come as a shock to those who don't follow military capabilities, but RUSSIA is in fact spectacularly weak.  Those who grew up during the 80s or before may think that RUSSIA still has the ability to mobilize millions of men and tens of thousands of tanks.

In fact, the United States can now match RUSSIA in terms of land power and given our superior training, technology, equipment and logistics, we could probably defeat RUSSIA in a land war if we had a mind to do it.

The closes strategic and military rival the United States faces is in fact China, which is building up its power by leaps and bounds and openly challenging free navigation of the western Pacific.  China has also made major efforts to burrow into US intelligence systems, managed to compromise millions of background investigations and also rolled up almost the entire CIA network within the mainland.

Boot and his ilk remain strangely silent about all of this.  It's odd that a man who fancies himself a deep thinker hasn't called on former intel chiefs to be subjected to probing and hard questions about how exactly this debacles happened on their watch.

It's also curious how the Obama administration downplayed these disasters and took zero retaliatory action.

I've seen a number of commentators insist that this was due to incompetence and ass-covering, but could it not also have been a "thank you" payment for the many millions the Chi-Coms have paid to the Democrats over the years?  Before RUSSIA became a thing, the Clinton White House was busy taking in millions of illegal Chinese contributions.

Diane Feinstein had a ChiCom spy on her staff for two decades and was remarkably untroubled about it.  You'd think her general election challenger might have hammered that point how, but you'd be wrong because he's also a Democrat.  Democrats only bring up "national security" as a club to beat Republicans and as an excuse to hide their abuses of power.

It's also worth noting that RUSSIA appears strong only because our Western allies insist on being pathetically weak.  Germany's economy dwarfs that of RUSSIA and could easily field a military force stronger than anything RUSSIA could feasibly send into the Baltics or Eastern Europe.

Instead Germany wants to get cheap fuel and posture against Trump.

France likewise talks about building a European defense force as a counterweight, but who will man it?  Who will pay or it?  How many divisions will it field?

The once-proud British Army is so crippled by political correctness and the elites' hatred of the traditional recruiting pool that they are reduced to hiring mercenaries from around the Commonwealth to fill out the ranks.  Apparently defending Blighty is a now considered a job ethnic Britons won't do.

None of this was foreordained.  None of this was inevitable.  Those that argue that World War I somehow culled the best and bravest of the West need to look eastward and see how nations that suffered far more serious losses have still retained their cultural identity and a willingness to fight for their nations.

Decline was a choice, and one repeatedly offered to the United States.  It remains to be seen whether the Trump revival is a true change of course or the last gasp before the fall.