7.1.25

PROJECT 2025.

Happy New Year.  I intend to start by taking stock of some phenomena that might transcend the daily news cycle or the latest crisis of the moment.  We'll start, though, with a musical interlude.


I have reservations, some of them serious, about another Trump presidency.  And yet, after the serial disasters of Obama and Biden, perhaps the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.


Danielle "WTH" Pletka, an establishmentarian sort of conservative, details the serial disasters.
I’ve been pretty hard over on the Obama-worse-than-Biden side, but I’m starting to wobble. Joe Biden is leaving office not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with an expulsion of noxious gases that hang like a toxic cloud over the last four years. But let’s first admit that Barack Obama was a hard act to beat.

The election of America’s first black president should have been a cause for celebration, a post-racial moment for a nation that had long struggled to put a history of racism behind it. But that wasn’t Obama’s legacy; au contraire. Instead, Obama served up an administration that unrepentantly exacerbated race relations, that spawned — though far from on its own — the execrable antisemitic Black Lives Matter movement, that forced down America’s throats in partisan fashion a federal takeover of certain elements of the nation’s healthcare, and in foreign policy — that is, after all, our focus — authored the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, ignored the deliberate murder of 500,000 Syrians, fostered the creation of ISIS, ignored the Russian invasion of Crimea in Ukraine, allowed the establishment of Russian forces in Syria, abetted the Saudi war in Yemen, aided the ouster and killing of Muammar Qadhafi in Libya, and then ignored the subsequent collapse of the Libyan state, and so very, very much more. That he did so with a sneering disregard for anyone that disagreed with him, aided and abetted by a rogue’s gallery of odious incompetents convinced of their own moral and intellectual superiority only ground salt into the weeping sore of his legacy.
The Normals impatience with the sneering and the superiority is material for a post soon to follow.  The best thing about Barack Obama shattering the color line on the presidency is that subsequent presidential hopefuls can be evaluated along more conventional lines.

Arguably, Mr Obama's taunting of Donald Trump helped make him president the first time around.


And then there was Dementia Joe.
Joe Biden has been hard at work trying to make his former boss look good.

Please understand, when Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump, many of us greeted his election with mixed relief: Yes, he was a Democrat, but the odds of a GOP Senate were high (thanks DJT), Biden had always been a man of the center left, and the previous four years had been exhausting. After January 6, it seemed clear that the American people had made the right choice.

Biden, however, never seemed committed to governing as the Senator he once was. Much of his legacy has been litigated already — the worst inflation in decades, an immigration crisis of historic proportions, skyrocketing crime, the exploitation of covid to exert control over our lives, an explosion of antisemitism, and in foreign policy, a series of spiraling disasters that will reverberate for years to come, many prompted by foreign despots’ correct sense of a fearful American president whose main obsession was “escalation.”

Consider not just the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but also the ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan, the faltering support for Israel in the face of terrorism, the indifference to the onward march of al Qaeda and ISIS around the globe, the consolidation of the left’s reign of terror in Venezuela, Iran’s ongoing and virtually unopposed development of nuclear weapons, Yemen’s Houthi closing of the Bab el Mandab, and the cementing of a new axis of evil between China, North Korea, Iran, and Russia.

Now reckon that I am eight paragraphs in, and haven’t yet mentioned the fact that none of the many Obama retreads around Joe Biden, nor his silly vice president, his power-hungry wife, nor all of the “serious” and “professional” members of his cabinet thought the American people should know that Joe Biden was losing it. That not one of them who had spouted endlessly about Donald Trump’s predations against DEMOCRACY was in the least bit troubled by the idea of a) a senile president; or b) the fact that the senile president was running again. What does this tell you about those people? About the Biden family? About the Democratic Party? That it took a self-important movie star to finally drop the ax on the doddering Biden is a disgrace that should never be forgotten.
The four years that just ended were every bit as exhausting, and it seems like 2024 went on interminably (even though there were travel opportunities and new locomotives in steam to enjoy).  That noted, it could have been worse.


That the people high on notions of their own superiority have to resist another Trump presidency, with the Normals more disposed to mock them, well might turn out for the best.

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