It is going to be on us, the Militant Normals, to call attention to what's on that slate, and to keep the Trump campaign on its messages, which should be borders, crime, inflation, and peace. The Democrats are likely to help us, unwittingly. "The Democrat-dominated establishment amounts to a coalition of insufferable narcissists with authoritarian instincts." They're likely to huff their own supply. "The last 3½ years have been filled with nothing but an unbroken series of triumphs, to hear the president tell it."
Speaking of insufferable narcissists, "Watching Obama speak, I am always reminded why I dislike him so much. I resist his churchy cadence, his haughty tone, and his gauzy rhetoric — the gauzy rhetoric in which he buries his earnest leftism. He enunciates his words as though he is speaking to a slow child." Tuesday night, he Just. Couldn't. Shut. Up.
The ditzy valley girl has her own annoying tics. "Harris probably hates how they keep telling her to talk less nasally, smile more, and soften herself for the cameras."
It's nevertheless going to be necessary to make a Trump presidency, should one take office, behave itself. "Harris and Trump represent variations on a theme of big, fiscally irresponsible, hyper-interventionist government."
Let us take stock of the ways things suck. "The bar for the presidency is so low it's been buried." It's Our Democracy(TM) don't you know? "Americans may be getting precisely what they want out of politics in 2024." This contest has no redeeming features. Be uncouth.
The weekly round-up of mostly pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.
1. I said mostly pithy. Harris’ plan to stop price gouging could create more problems than it solves. That is, if there is a plan. "Instead of delivering a substantial plan, she squandered the moment on populist gimmicks." There is work to do, calling attention. "Team Kamala should be very, very worried about this." Logic should trump demagoguery. "The price gouging proposal appears to be little more than a way to blame corporations for the inflation problems caused by the government." Recall this. "'Complicated,' remember, is libspeak for 'a Democrat got something fundamentally wrong.' But the reason prices are high is not, in fact, complicated." Watch, though, for the stray voltage. "It didn’t take long for people in the early 1970s to realize that price controls are, at best, an exercise in futility. And yet, here we are, 50 years later, with ignoramus Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party demagoguing them once again." Nixon absolutely knew better, but he did it anyway. "We seemed doomed to watch the same old errors unfold before our eyes, in a natural trajectory of folly from money printing to inflation to price controls, just as from universal quarantines to growing ill-health, education losses, and population demoralization. May the gods save us from more rounds of the same before it is too late."
2. Chicago. "The deep blue city is a showpiece for the policies they want to impose on the rest of the country."
3. Free speech? "Phoney liberals have ripped their masks to shreds and stomped them into the dirt for good measure." Populist Brahmins find themselves in the same position as Pope Linus. "The fear of free speech is always – always – a fear of the masses." And James Taggart asks who is John Galt? "The old party of the community organizers and union bosses and social workers and schoolteachers had given way to the party of the C-suite."
4. Finish the job. "Virtually every problem we face can be clearly traced back to a specific Biden-Harris executive order, a specific Biden-Harris appointee, or a proudly touted Biden-Harris policy." We know. "How can it be Trump’s fault that America is so divided and on the verge of ruin when Democrats have controlled the country for 12 of the past 16 years?" It's the presidency, but that only strengthens the argument to end the Cult of the Presidency. "Under no circumstances could I vote for Kamala Harris."
5. Demosclerosis. "It felt like the healthy red blood cells of dissent were trying to force their way through a clogged artery, crimped by the fatty tissue of a decadent republic."
6. The sky is falling! "There was no talk about nationalizing fossil fuels, mobilizing all of the nation's resources for an all-out struggle against mass extinction." Yeah, that should fix things.
7. The manufactured joy will wear off. "A Democratic Party mired in bitterness, condescension, and self-righteousness is not one that wins; it's one voters get tired of hearing from."
8. Call attention to the border, the crime, the inflation, the nation building wars. "The Democratic Party is hawking terrible policies that will hurt Americans."
9. Facts are stubborn things. "Why we Americans should quake in fear at these self-destructive Chinese economic shenanigans is a mystery."
10. We await the tell-alls. "Unless Biden did all this under threat of violence or some other coercive force (e.g., blackmail) then this wasn’t a coup by any stretch of the imagination." Imagine the 25th Amendment. The tell-alls will drop faster with a Trump victory in November.
11. Political correctness, now diversity, inclusion, and equity, kills. "Detached corporate elites go in armed with good intentions and horrible policies, and the next thing you know, we've got astronauts stranded in space."
12. Freedom is an elastic concept for Democrats. "Keeping schools closed for so long was a mistake, and the Democrats shouldn’t pretend Harris is responsible for opening them. Nor should voters allow Democrats to pretend that she did."
13. Nation building wars don't work, either. "The United States of America isn’t exactly a fair arbiter. It is without question the most hyper-interventionist country in the history of the world. It has repeatedly intervened in the internal affairs of governments it doesn’t like, often invading and overthrowing them, ostensibly, for the cause of democracy."
14. Taking dad's car keys is hard. "I love Columbia and genuinely consider myself its biggest fan, but sometimes when someone you love is destroying themselves the most loving thing you can do is to put them into rehab." The self-destruction goes beyond Columbia. "If the universities remain diseased, our society will not be healthy."
15. Political economy is hard. "Allowing people to keep more of what they earn is not a 'cost' to government."
16. Government is not the solution to our problems. “I’m so sorry, I wish I could help, but I’m unable to take any new patients with [insert here major healthcare plan, most of them state-sponsored or, in the case of Carefirst, D.C.’s version of Blue Cross Blue Shield, contracted by the federal government for its employees].”
17. Academic novels tend to be set in English departments for a reason. "You don’t have to be normal to chair an English department. You don’t have to be a leader or be well-liked. You just have to do it, because chairing is something everyone has to do, eventually."
18. Been there, did that, got the scars too. "Being in a society that forces you to show outward compliance just gets you very salty and low-key mad forever."
19. Free minds and free markets for the win. "Louis XIV had an astonishing 498 workers preparing each of his meals. Yet his standard of living was still a fraction of what we experience today."
20. Robert Kennedy has had enough. "Governments don't censor lies. They don't fear lies. They censor the truth."
21. Richard Vedder has had enough. "Like most professors, I have generally negative feelings about politicians’ heavy-handed involvement in university affairs. In the final analysis, however, academics are too important to be left solely to academicians."
22. Not Borchert Field. "The Brewers had a lighted park before the Reds did."
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