Posse Incitatus

Trump to Pelosi: If you want a junket, fly commercial

Over most of my life, the left has diligently worked to erode the unwritten customs that have sustained the Republic.

Each time they have flouted a long-standing convention, they've been careful to note that no laws were broken, or if they were, the was (as Al Gore put it) "no controlling legal authority."

At the same time, they've constantly harped on how each and every GOP move has violated this or that ancient custom.  With Donald Trump, they went positively bonkers, howling that his very presence in the Oval Office was an offense against everything Americans hold dear.

Of course, they did this all the while running a grossly illegal surveillance operation followed by a blatant coverup disguised as an investigation.

Much of the federal government is currently idle.  This is supposedly a crisis, but not enough of a crisis that Nancy Pelosi and a number of Congressional Democrats would be willing to postpone or cancel their seven-day world tour using US military aircraft. 

As all know by now, Trump put the kibosh on it.

What is noteworthy is that once again, Trump is answering the left's discourtesy with discourtesy of his own.  The GOP Establishment has never dared to do this, instead preferring to play the noble loser.

Their explanation was that someone had to uphold the ancient norms, but of course allowing one side to run over them did the exact opposite.  It is only through reciprocity that both sides have a reason to follow the unwritten rules of courtesy.

Pelosi and the Dems have just learned an important lesson:  Trump is playing for keeps.  He's done trying to be conciliatory and for all that they deride him as the second coming of Hitler, refusing free first-class air travel via the Air Force is hardly Kristallnacht. 

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.

 

Trump's eight minutes of blunt truth

I did not watch President Trump's speech live, but saw it shortly after it was given. 

Having seen it, I can understand why Democrat-supporting media were reluctant to carry it and why so many of them went into fits afterwards.

It was a short, powerful message built on an unquestionable foundation of truth.

Trump's proposition is a simple one:  are we nation of laws?  Are we a nation at all?

The Democrats want to answer "no" to both questions, but can't do so in public and remain a viable political party.  So they lie, generate fake news and hope that somehow their water-carriers in the media will move enough public opinion to get them out of this scrape.

But there is no easy out.  Not now.

As I pointed out before, we have now run out of slack in the federal payroll system.  Despite lies you may have seen from Democrats, no government worker has yet missed a paycheck.

That is about to change.

When it does, the furloughed federal workers will have to wonder why they are losing their pay.  Sure, most dislike Trump, but not enough to go without pay to deny him a compartively tiny $6 billion appropriation.  That amount is a rounding error in the vast federal budget.

Other programs are also going to start feeling the effect of the shutdown, including food stamps.  

It surely doesn't help matters that the Democrat "Green New Deal" will cost thousands of times as much as Trump's wall barrier.

I think Chuck and Nancy know they goofed.  Trump used his bully pulpit to devastating effect and he will continue to do so.  The fact that he actually low-balled the violence associated with illegal entries shows just how bad the situation really is.

So does the fact that CBS felt the need to drop that inconvenient truth.

Typically, when the Dems are getting clobbered on an issue, they change the subject.  The problem here is that going back to Mueller for more leaked lies or some sham indictments of RUSSIAN shell corporations won't resolve the budget impasse. 

This has long been the fatal flaw of Democrat strategy: you can only spin you way out of so much.

Chuck and Nancy may well want to get out of this and focus on other, potentially more fruitful lines of attack, but they can't do so without caving in to Trump.

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.

The overlooked equal and opposite reaction

I've been reading up on the events leading to what we may soon have to call the first American Civil War and have picked up on a number of factors I had previously overlooked.

For example, most accounts focus on the intense belligerence of the Southern states and their threats to secede following by the actual act.

What they leave out is that Northern states were issuing parallel proclamations and declaring their willingness to fight to keep the Union intact.  The South shouldn't have been surprised by the federal unwillingness to either abandon key forts (like Sumter) nor its decision to fight.  The Northern states had been preaching it as loudly as they could. 

In an era where the primary military forces were state-supported, the resolutions passed by Northern legislatures authorizing military forces in advance of any federal request should have spoken volumes about what was to come, but it was ignored.

I think the modern Democrats are making the same mistake as the Democrats of 1860 regarding the will of their opponents not only to resist but counterattack.  Beltway conservatives are widely (and correctly) regarded as effete squishes who actively seek the favor of their erstwhile rivals.  This surely convinces the Democrats that they can push as hard as they want for raw power and all they'll get in response is clucking about "coarsening discourse."

Mitt Romney is a classic example of this, and his pathetic broadside at President Trump was also a white flag being waved at the Dems in advance of anything they might do.  The message was sent and received.

But Mitt Romney doens't speak for the party, only a tiny Beltway-based sliver of it.  Dems who assume they can continue to harass people, state police-sanctioned riots and otherwise flout the law are only building up reciprocal energy that will come back at them with a vengeance.

Just as in 1860, Democrat vitriol produces and equal and opposite reaction.  Just as then, the Dems don't seem to notice it, and they likely won't until it's too late for everyone.

Key dates for the partial government shutdown

As a service to our readers, I thought I would break down a few key dates to give better situational awareness as to what's going on in Washington.

The partial shutdown is not taking place in a vacuum, after all.  Despite its inefficiency, the federal government still has deadlines for payroll submission and knowing these can help provide insight in the ongoing negotiations (such as they are).

The previous pay period closed on December 22, but all timesheets were required by midweek in anticipation of the shutdown.  The pay earned during this time was sent out on Monday, Dec. 31.

When the funding lapsed, affected federal employees were put on furlough, which is basically paid vacation.  However, unlike paid vacation, they cannot collect a salary.

The current pay period will close on this Saturday, January 5.  Normally, government employees would be submitting their timesheets, which have a deadline of January 8. 

This could be extended through extraordinary efforts (and when it comes to getting their pay, federal employees will make that effort), but whether or not this happens, the next payday is Monday, Jan. 14.

Thus, if the situation is not resolved, that is when federal workers will get their first payless payday.  It is important to understand that due to the lapse in funding, they can't simply take vacation pay. 

Now once funding is re-established, the government will (as noted) quickly try to run the back pay to minimize hardship for employees, but it will take time.

Thus a key question is how much suffering the Dems wish to inflict on their fellow government enthusiasts.

To this point, there has been no pain, merely uncertainty.  That will shortly change.  That is therefore when movement is most likely.

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.

Could Trump's shutdown be the end of failure theater?

The prevalence of government shutdowns are a key indicator of the breakdown of the political system.  Such impasses were formerly rare because the system itself prevented them.

Under the now almost-forgotten legislative procedure known as "regular order," bills for each department were generated at the start of the year.  These passed through committees, were marked up, modified and passed by each chamber in turn.  If there were differences between them, a conference committee reconciled them and the final bill was presented to the president for his signature.

A failure at any point in this process would result in a loss of funding for a single department.  The limited scope of the bill provided a check on non-related items, though of course these "riders" were still added in.

The system was far from corruption-free, but it at least had the virtue of keeping the lights on year after year.

When the Democrats gained control of Congress under Dubya, this system went out the window in exchange for massive, impenetrable "omnibus" bills that covered everything under the sun.  The entire discretionary federal budget was "take it or leave it."  Mostly, it was taken.

Among the many lies the GOP Establishment told its base when it sought to regain control of Congress was the fable that "regular order" would return.  Clearly, this hasn't happened and it was never meant to happen.  For all his pathetic excuses, Paul Ryan at least had the power to sort out budget bills, but this was a hill he never intended to fight on, let alone die.

This is because omnibus bills allow the GOP to vote for things it knows its base hates but that its corporate masters like.  The looming threat of a (partial) government shutdown gave the GOP Establishment at every level the perfect excuse to cave into Democrats.  Dubya signed it because he was too responsible to harm the nation.

The GOP House and Senate flirted with it under Obama, but mostly Ted Cruz was being an opportunist.  No actual concessions were wanted and none were gained.

And so here we are again, but this time may be different.  Donald Trump can take or leave the job and if he wants a second term, he needs wall funding.

He also has a higher pain threshold than anyone in DC.  That is why the shutdown continues.

Chuck Schumer and the Democrats have a fascinating dilemma.  They can cave now and give the new Democrat-controlled House of Representatives a clean slate to torment Trump over the next year, or they can hand Speaker Pelosi a steaming dog turd on her very first day in the big chair.  Of course, the Dems could but all sorts of goofy crap in the bill that the GOP Senate would then be compelled to strip out, but doing so would immediately mark Pelosi's restored reign as unserious.

Alternatively, they could go all-in, and it's hard to think of a less auspicious look for the 2020 Democrat contenders than forcing federal employees to endure payless paydays because they hate border security.

Trump knows this, which is why he timed the shutdown for now rather than earlier in December.  Had he held firm earlier, the payless paydays would have hit during the Christmas-New Year week, which would be horrific optics.   Pelosi's speakership would still be a distant future event, not a looming one.

But now all of these lines are converging and Trump loves nothing so much as creating chaos and forcing his opponent to figure out how to deal with it.

As a final added bonus, the Mueller witch-hunt will be a secondary consideration at best.  Lots of Democrat cultists are ready for the House to impeach him as soon as the Dem majority is sworn in.  A shutdown federal government with unpaid civil servants will make this an even more dubious strategy, since it will demonstrate to the world that the Dems are more interested in getting Trump than funding the government or border security.

President Trump consistently traps his opponents into lose-lose situations.  When Trump can't arrange that, he shifts terrain (usually to the dismay of his supporters), but such shifts are only short-term.  The master strategist has been maneuvering for a while and it will be fascinating to see his next move.