‘The world is changed’

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“The world is changed,” she says (and behind, just audible, the same voice echoing in the original Sindarin Elvish, “I amar prestar aen.”) “I feel it in the water.” (“Han mathon ne nen.”) “I feel it in the earth.” (“Han mathon ne chae.”) “I smell it in the air.” (“A han noston ned gwilith.”) “Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it. . . .”

The opening of “The Lord of the Rings” — as interpreted by filmmaker Peter Jackson — is haunting, if not actually accurate. (Among the immortal elves, there were indeed some who remembered the failure to destroy Sauron’s One Ring when the first opportunity arose -– just as some few of us today “remember” what’s been lost from our mostly more wholesome American past.)

Once you’ve seen and heard it, who can fail to acknowledge, “Yes, the world is changed, and much that once was is lost”?

For instance . . . We used to believe deciding who to vote for involved finding someone with whom we could agree about how to best protect America, our free-market economy, and our precious constitutional and individual rights, who also appeared to be a person of character, willing to stand up for principle.

And now?

Hey, kids! Want to amaze your friends, maybe even land a job as a “media pundit,” by successfully predicting the outcomes of at least two-thirds of the races on this fall’s election ballot in your state and city?

I can tell you a system that should work nine times out of ten. I’ve actually seen it employed by highly paid professional pundits. Not that I like it. You probably won’t like it, either.

The first and simplest lesson is the hardest: Ignore the candidates. In 99 cases out of a hundred, your ability to analyze a candidate’s charisma, good looks, ability to think on his or her feet, knowledge of the issues, and PARTICULARLY your ability to analyze whether they’re socialist, fascist, racist, hard-hearted, soft-hearted, weak-minded, geniuses, morons, Keynesian, free-market, tax-raisers, tax-cutters, pot-smokers, drug warriors, demented fornicators, adulterers or self-righteous Bible-thumpers or several of the above . . . doesn’t matter and will only mess you up. Forget about it.

Like most secrets, once you hear it, you’ll go “That’s a secret? That’s really dumb.”

That’s the secret.

Who’s getting the biggest bribes?

First, get the registration figures for the district in which each race will be contested. Throw out the “non-partisans” and the voters registered as Libertarian or Green or Nudist. Just compare Republican with Democratic registrations in the district. (Obviously, for governors and U.S. Senators and the like, the “district” is your entire state.) In any district where one of those parties has an eight-point registration edge — 54-46 or stronger — choose the candidate of the stronger party. (If the “D” and “R” registrations don’t add up to a hundred, you haven’t been listening. Throw out all the “independent” or “non-partisan” or “third party” numbers — assume they’ll disappear or split between the “D” and “R” candidates. Ignore them.)

Now look at fund-raising. Candidates are supposed to report their money spent and cash on hand a couple of times during the election cycle. Those numbers then get posted online, usually at a dedicated Secretary-of-State web site. Take the latest report available, even if it’s months out-of-date. Add those two numbers together; you’re interested in “total money raised.” Assume whoever’s ahead is going to stay ahead. If one candidate has out-raised the other by two-to-one or better, choose the moneybags.

You may be tempted to ask, “What about cases where a candidate who looks like a loser based on partisan voter registration numbers, wins the fund-raising contest big-time?

Don’t worry. That will hardly ever happen. The PACs and the big corporate boys tend to fund based not on stated positions on the issues, but based on who they think is going to win. In essence, they’re paying bribes in advance for favors they’ll need next year — the biggest favor often being just to be left in peace, though “enacting regulations that will cripple my competitors” is also high on the list. Money follows money.

Reviewing the races this system has allowed you to “call,” you’ll probably notice you’ve chosen a lot of incumbents. What a surprise. Among the races these first two steps have NOT allowed you to call, you can now go ahead and pick all the remaining incumbents. American voters throw out incumbents at a rate lower than the rate of turnover on the old Soviet Politburo. After all, incumbents already know how our current system of graft, corruption, and “fund-raising” works. Why send in amateurs who will require months or years to “learn the ropes,” and meantime might ask a bunch of embarrassing questions?

In all likelihood, you’ve just “called” 90 percent of the races on your ballot — including races for water board in some outlying suburb most people would have trouble finding on a map. “How on earth did you do that? You’re a genius!”

Disgusted, yet? I told you you wouldn’t like it.

You may have noticed one “loophole,” though. I said this pathetic system should work “nine times out of ten.” Why did I say that?

Except once each generation

About once in a generation -– every 40 years or so -– there’s a watershed election, which cleans things out like a Tsunami hitting a garbage-strewn beach. The other way to describe this phenomenon is that the big pendulum starts to swing back the other way, slowly at first, but with irresistible torque. Usually, this reflects the fact that an incumbent gang has grown so accustomed to its dominance that they get lazy and start to obviously recycle the same rhetoric and attacks that have been working for decades, not noticing that the electorate is finally wise to their game, has actually found a way (Wikileaks? Judicial Watch? YouTube videos?) to listen in and hear them saying, “OK, time to set aside our caviar and Chablis for a couple months, go out and eat some disgusting hot dogs and pizza, pretend to be interested in stock car racing and football, humor the rubes again.”

People forget that Franklin Roosevelt won the 1932 election on a platform calling for a balanced budget and a reduction in government programs and expenditures — that he dismissed the platform of Socialist Norman Thomas — including the national old-age retirement scheme that would become “Social Security” — as “fantastic and un-American.”

1932, when Roosevelt got elected on all those lies, was not a watershed election. But 1936 — when voters embraced Roosevelt’s New Deal (based on the state corporatism of Benito Mussolini), and finally (and, I fear, permanently) rejected the conservative, strict-constructionist, smaller-government Old Right -– was. They were really suffering by then, after six years of Depression, and even though it was obvious FDR’s economically crippling state-socialism wasn’t working, they were convinced “We just have to give him more time, at least he’s trying; he really CARES.”

(Sound familiar?)

Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 re-election was a landslide, but not a watershed. In fact, the conservatism of Barry Goldwater, while it went down to defeat that year (because Goldwater was a “callous conservative” warmonger who wanted people to be able to earn their own way, while welfare-state Johnson “really CARED” and would NEVER get us into some quicksand foreign war) was the first harbinger of the change to come.

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The watershed came in 1980 and especially in 1984 with Ronald Reagan, who inherited Goldwater’s opposition to the growing warfare/welfare state.

Unfortunately, Reagan’s ability to downsize Washington turned out to be limited, and his successor turned out to be George Herbert Walker Bush -– a charter member of the Arab-funded, internationalist, Federal-Reserve, tax-and-spend club.

There hasn’t been another watershed since. It’s due soon . . . maybe now?

By 1992 the Democratic Party felt snakebit. Yes, honest farmboy Jimmy Carter had won a single term over Gerald Ford, who discredited himself by pardoning Richard Nixon and then announcing the way to end inflation –- a phenomenon created by the Federal Reserve’s control of the money supply -– was for everybody to pin on a ”Whip Inflation Now” button. Nice man; clown. (As a member of the “Warren Commission,” he also signed on to the whitewash of the Kennedy Assassination, just for good measure. A “team player,” you see.)

But in 1972 and 1980, George McGovern and Walter Mondale had lost so badly you had to look under the sofa cushions to find a state they’d won. Michael Dukakis, too.

Bill Clinton and Al Gore won the election of 1992 by insisting they weren’t any part of that “elitist, East Coast, left-liberal, tax-and-spend, meddle-in-your life, socialist Democratic Party.” No, no, they were a completely different species: “Moderate Southern Democrats.” Remember?

Not even pretending, any more

Of course, it was all a scam. They didn’t govern that way. (Crippling our energy and manufacturing economy to fight fictitious “man-made global warming” is “moderate”?) Even Bill Clinton later admitted the Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994 because they’d pushed through an absurd “assault weapons ban” which actually attempted to ban rifles based on cosmetic features which had nothing to do with their caliber or rate of fire. Meantime, Miss Hillary’s secret meetings produced a Soviet-style national health care system that went down in flames.

But compare those Democrats’ successful (albeit completely fraudulent) “We’re moderates!” campaign of 1992 with what they’re offering the public, today.

Today, they’re no longer even pretending.

The “compromise” of cartelized private health insurance known as “Obamacare” is failing. Everyone knows what Hillary favors -– totally socialized medicine on the Soviet model: “The operation you have to have next week will be absolutely free, comrade . . . but the first date we can scheduled it is eight months away. What’s that, you’re willing to pay more for an earlier date, in cash? In that case . . . you’re under arrest, for attempted bribery of a government medicrat.”

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Gun rights? Hillary has said repeatedly she favors the Australian solution, in which every semi-automatic weapon in the land is confiscated, crushed, and melted. (Yes, they called it a “buy-back.” But believe me, the owner didn’t have any opportunity to negotiate the price of his matching-numbers collectible, or to refuse the one-size-fits-all government “offer.”)

Efforts to lower tax rates to get people to invest more in America, building up businesses and creating new jobs? The Hillarycrats of course revile any such plan as “Tax cuts for the rich!” After all, it might mean a little less loot for the EPA, the DEA, the BATF, the DOE . . . .

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Hillary Clinton has actually called for higher estate taxes -– meaning more American businesses (and their jobs) will be sold to foreigners, since the children of the founders will be unable to keep the business going after paying her confiscatory socialist “inheritance tax.” Yippee! Ship all the machine tools to Red China!

Forget the rigged government statistics: Twenty-five percent of Americans who want jobs aren’t working, and a lot of the rest are holding down a couple of part-time job with little or nothing in the way of benefits specifically because so many Democrats and RINOs have ginned up so many “progressive” taxes and regulations that make it prohibitively expensive to hire an American to work full-time in America.

Enforcing the immigration laws to stop illegals for undercutting market wages, thus reserving more jobs for Americans? That’s now called “incendiary racist hate-speech.”

Point and scream, call them names

But the pendulum is swinging.

No one thought British voters would vote to pull out of the Common Market, which is a suicidal scheme to destabilize Europe with jihadi Muslim immigrant terrorism so the German bankers can end up owning and running whatever’s left. Meantime, here in America, the Left has thrown every insult and invective they can think of at Donald Trump, and he’s still standing, refusing to play their game and apologize. (Unthinkable! Loose cannon! He’s no “gentleman”!)

Wanting to enforce the immigration laws makes him “a Nazi, another Hitler.” Really? Hillary and supposed Libertarian Gary Johnson want to “round up millions of people” and imprison them for owning the wrong kinds of guns, or using cocaine or opium or amphetamine or LSD or MDA or MDMA. And those are U.S. citizens. That’s all OK?

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Besides, Dwight D. Eisenhower enforced these same immigration laws quite effectively, rounding up illegals and shipping his seasick lawbreakers to the Yucatan in freighters 60 years ago, with a program called “Operation Wetback.” Was he “a new Hitler”? Why weren’t we told?

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How come nobody seems to remember that when this “Open Borders” gang talked Ron Reagan into signing an amnesty for two million illegal aliens 30 years ago, they swore that in exchange, as part of the deal, they’d “seal the borders” so the problem could never arise again. How come the fact that an even bigger job now faces us is never their fault, but instead the fault of the new sheriff who now faces the task of coming in and cleaning up their mess?

If they just want all the customs and immigration and naturalization laws repealed, why don’t they say that, so we can have that debate? If you want laws left on the books but you just don’t want them enforced, how are we supposed to know which laws “apply,” and which don’t, and to whom? (Anyone who fails to make a big enough donation to “the Clinton Foundation”?)

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Now, finally, people seem to want to know about Hillary’s health, and about Huma and all those pay-for-play “Clinton Foundation donations.” If it were Oct. 21, maybe “Deny everything and make counter-accusations” would work. But they really think they can keep their candidate on ice, helped up and down the stairs with that big “health aide” guy massaging her back and whispering in her ear to bring her out of her “freeze” (or just picking her up bodily and throwing her in the van when she collapses), ridiculing anyone who asks questions, for two more months?

Meantime, the hunger for an outsider who’ll talk straight about terrorism and immigration — and maybe even about how capitalism creates jobs and socialism doesn’t — is palpable.

See:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/why-democrats-in-western-pennsylvania-are-voting-trump/499577/ :

People who the pollsters miss

“CHARLEROI, Pa. — Angela LeJohn is 49, has worked at a local energy company for nine years, and loves it. A registered Democrat, she never once voted for a Republican and never expected to entertain such a thought — not even in a local election — until this year,” writes Salena Zeto in the Sept 13 edition of The Atlantic.

“The short of it is that I am looking at this election through self-preservation,” she explained to the magazine writer.

“LeJohn will vote for Donald Trump for president and for incumbent U.S. Senator Pat Toomey in November, she candidly admits, not because she loves either Republican candidate but because ‘they have my back.’”

She was among more than 60 employees who attended an informal voter-registration effort conducted by Secure Energy for America, a non-partisan trade association out visiting energy-industry vendors and suppliers in key counties of Southwestern Pennsylvania, adjoining Ohio, and Virginia, Zeto reports. The outfit hopes to mobilize energy-industry workers, along with their relatives and neighbors, to vote in November. Officially, the effort is non-partisan. But for most energy workers in Pennsylvania, Zeto explains, voting to preserve their industry means voting for Trump and Sen. Toomey.

“The registration drive gets to the heart of the election in Western Pennsylvania,” Zeto continues. “Democrats in these small communities want to hold on to their way of life; they feel their communities have as much value as those of their more-cosmopolitan Democratic cousins, and they cannot reconcile themselves to a national Democratic Party that they feel is working against them. They are the voters whose simple motivation to vote outside of the party they were born into has fallen under the radar of the national press and the polls.”

In the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama told the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle “If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them.” Washington County voters abandoned their Democratic voting tradition that fall and chose John McCain over Obama. They did so again in 2012, choosing Republican Mitt Romney. What’s different this time, Ms. Zeto reports, is the intensity of people’s feelings.

“Sheik” Shannon, 55, a 17-year employee at the company, believes the political class fundamentally misunderstands what this election cycle is all about. “They think it is the celebrity of Trump. It’s not. They think we’ve all gone mad. We’ve not,” he said, emphasizing each sentence with passion.

What it’s all about, Shannon tells the reporter, is saving their jobs and their community.

Paul Sracic, a Youngstown State University political scientist, tells Zeto of the Atlantic there are two categories of voters rallying to support Trump. “First, there are people who don’t normally vote. Nearly half the voting-age population was either not registered to vote, or was registered and decided not to vote in 2012. And if even 10 percent of that group was to show up and vote this year, it could easily change the outcome in the important swing states.”

Sracic asks whether these voters are even represented in the endless presidential surveys: “If people aren’t registered voters, they won’t be picked up by most polls,” he tells the magazine. “If they are registered voters but don’t normally vote, they may be eliminated by ‘likely voter’ screens pollsters use.”

Potentially more significant, however, are those voters who “flip” — Sracic’s second category. “Remember,” he said, “taking a Democratic voter and having them vote Republican is both a plus-one and a minus-one. In other words, if Romney lost Pennsylvania by 300,000 voters, all you have to do (this time) is flip slightly more than 150,000 votes.” Between Ohio and Pennsylvania, out of 11 million voters expected on election day, that means 225,000 party-switchers could tip the entire election.

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“Every single person who walked into Lee Supply’s training room, from the CEO down to the janitor, was a registered Democrat,” Ms. Zeto of The Atlantic concludes. “And every single person pledged not only to vote for Trump and Toomey but to ask family, neighbors, and friends to do the same.”

Thus endeth today’s reading from The Atlantic.

Revolt of the Deplorables

The day after the election, the chin-pulling “thoughtful pundits” will likely convene to tell us this was an election about the economy and about the “direction of the country” and about illegal immigration — especially about avoiding the kind of crazed, violent Muslim jihad we now see developing in Western Europe.

So why won’t they talk about those issues, now?

Because they know that to do so would be to help the hated Bumpkin Trump, of course.

The grip of the collectivist elite on our urban centers means a modern Democrat could probably count on the 115 electoral votes of New York, California, Illinois and Massachusetts — almost half the 270 required — even if she actually did drop dead. So Republicans face an uphill road.

But as Daniel Henninger of the financial blog Zero Hedge wrote in the Sept. 15 Wall Street Journal (under the “house” pseudonym Tyler Durden): “Hillary Clinton’s comment that half of Donald Trump’s supporters are ‘racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic’. . . puts back in play what will be seen as one of the 2016 campaign’s defining forces: the revolt of the politically incorrect.

“They may not live at the level of Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables,’ but it was only a matter of time before ‘les deplorables’ — our own writhing mass of unheard Americans — rebelled against the intellectual elites’ ‘ancien regime’of political correctness,” Henninger continues.

“In the eight years available to Barack Obama to do something about what rankles the lower-middle class — white, black or brown — the non-employed and underemployed grew. A lot of them will vote for Donald Trump because they want a radical mid-course correction. . . .

“This is not the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton. The progressive Democrats, a wholly public-sector party, have disconnected from the realities of the private economy, which exists as a mysterious revenue-producing abstraction. . . .

“Donald Trump’s appeal, in part, is that he cracks back at progressive cultural condescension in utterly crude terms. . . .They’re fed up with the relentless, moral superciliousness of Hillary, the Obamas, progressive pundits and 19-year-old campus activists,” Mr. Henninger concludes.

“If the Democrats lose behind Hillary Clinton, it will be in part because America’s ‘les deplorables’ decided enough of this is enough.”

Fifty-four to forty-five

Donald Trump is not my ideal. He’d probably continue most of the Draconian, counterproductive, unconstitutional War on Drugs. His highly variable concern for individual liberties leads him to find no problem with Michael Bloomberg’s “stop-and-frisk” policing policies. And his first economic instinct is to grab for high protective tariffs — the kind that launched a tariff war that spread and extended the world-wide Great Depression of the 1930s.

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But he has a winning issue in simply declaring he’ll enforce our immigration laws (while the fact that 45 percent of Americans nod when this is condemned as “racism” shows just how far the leftist agitators have succeeded in twisting our political dialogue into the realm of “Alice in Wonderland.”) And after a lifetime in the actual private sector, Donald Trump at least vows to do something to salvage and restore our free-market economy and the jobs and prosperity and freedom it has a 300-year history of generating — making us the envy of the world.

His opponent, meanwhile, is a bribe-taking, pay-for-play crook ($25 million from the Saudis to the “Clinton Foundation,” alone, and the going rate for any State Department favor was a $750,000 “speaking fee” to husband Bill), whose brother benefited enormously from the Clinton’s highly curious Haitian “earthquake relief” efforts, who would continue the sell-out of this nation to our “multicultural” and Muslim jihadi enemies (hello, Huma Abedin). . . who coincidentally shows signs of suffering from a serious, progressive, degenerative neurological disease, along with a willingness to sacrifice the good of her party and her nation by lying about it . . . who left four Americans to die in Bengazi (not to mention shrugging and turning her eyes away as her minions burned dozens of women and children to death with their flammable “ferret” rounds at that church at Waco, 23 years ago), whose only real claim to the presidency is “I’m a woman and it’s my turn and a mere 28 years of having your country run into the ground on behalf of George Soros and the United Nations and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by the Bush and Clinton and Obama families isn’t nearly enough.”

I suspect Professor Helmut Norpoth of Stony Brook University called it about right, way back last winter
( https://www.sbstatesman.com/2016/02/23/political-science-professor-forecasts-trump-as-general-election-winner/ ), when he predicted that two terms with a Marxist disciple of Saul Alinsky and Frank Marshall Davis in the White House, a “community organizer” grinding our free-market economy under the heel of the “environmental” globalists, destroying American jobs, setting black against white and everybody against the “greedy capitalists” while selling out this country to the Islamic jihad (look up Phil Haney’s book), would turn out to be about as much as Americans can stand.

The morning line set last February by Professor Norpoth’s computer program (which would have called every election since 1912 correctly, with the sole exception of 1960, which may not really be an exception, if the Democrats stole it) was Trump over Hillary in the popular vote, 54-45, at which popular-vote margin he predicted it would be impossible for the minority candidate to hold the majority of the electoral college.

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For good or ill — and here’s hoping the good outweighs the ill, though vigilance must still be eternal — we may indeed be seeing the beginnings of a tidal wave, the Revolt of the Deplorables.

As in 1980, they don’t care whose “turn” it is. They want someone to Make America Safe Again . . . to Make America Great Again.

Another Alpha Male. Donald Trump.

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