This from one of Savannah's most respected citizens:
You have become a hating guy. Like trump and his enablers, you see corruption everywhere except what's right in front of you, trump and his businesses who kept him solvent when he has crushing personal debt with the Germans and who knows where else. He may pardon himself, but can't do that for state crimes like in NY. If somehow we can get rid of our current Senators our country can bet back to actively fight the virus, getting the wealthy to again pay a fair share of taxes, get dreamers a path to citizenship, let medicare and Obamacare push big farm to reduce prices, and solidify protection for pre existing conditions in all healthcare. Most important we will no longer be the laughing stock of the world, especially our Allies that trump has crapped on and Putin who probably holds something on trump but not on Biden. You can deflect to Hunter, the Clintons, and whoever else, but the net result is that our nightmare will soon be over.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++This was sent to me by one of my oldest, dearest friends who also is a memo reader and the shrewdest institutional investor I came to know and respect.
This was my response:
Thanks. I will post and not depressed. I am actually bemused.
Ten Reasons Why It Could Be Awesome for Conservatives if Biden Wins
My good friend,Deplora Boule, who wrote “The Narrative,” a satirical novel about the threat that the biased media poses to freedom, sent me a note today after the weirdest election night anyone has ever been through. (Go buy her book now. You will laugh your behind off and I know you need that right now and it’s free for Kindle Unlimited. The fistfight she dreamed up in the newsroom between all the different genders is worth the price of admission.) One thing about the MAGA side is our ability to see the positive and humor in every situation. Trump’s fans are by nature prone to optimism and rooted in a world of truth and goodness. We believe that even in hard times there are things to be grateful for and ways to pursue our happiness. We don’t scream at the sky or turn to endless protests to make our feefees all better. DB, as I like to call her, wanted to remind you that every cloud has a silver lining and I agree with her whole-heartedly.
This is not to say we admit any defeat or believe the election is over, BUT, we want you to know that an outcome that we thought we didn’t want might be a boon for conservatism and it does no good to wallow in any kind of despair. The battle is for the strong, and we need to exercise our muscles with a little adversity now and then.Here are DB’s top ten reasons and my commentary about why a Biden/Harris presidency might just be awesome for conservatives.1. The courts and the Senate defend against the worst
DB: “Trump’s Herculean efforts to shore up the courts, combined with the War Turtle and Lindsey Graham 2.0 holding the Senate, have saved us from the worst Biden/Harris could have done: no packed courts, new states that would create four new Democrat senators, or millions of legalized illegals.This is nothing but a win. There isn’t much to add to this. Every crazy piece of nonsense The Squad cobbles together to bankrupt this nation will die in the Senate. Hallelujah!2. RIP the media
DB: “The complete and final disgrace and delegitimization of the Fake News Media and its polling adjunct is now a fait accompli.”Not even Fox News will survive this. Their behavior on election night–wantonly calling Arizona and Virginia way too soon for Biden–has exposed what they really are: fake news. We can now feel free to hate Fox as much as CNN. I fully expect a Trump rally or something where the crowd is chanting “FOX NEWS SUCKS” very soon. Pollsters will be and should be roundly mocked and laughed at. They should all lose their jobs.3. A fully unleashed President Trump
DB: “A fully unleashed President Trump with two-and-a-half months to go balls-out, exposing the Biden Crime Syndicate and getting to the root of the money behind the rioting.”If you think Trump is unchained and unchecked now, wait until he has the freedom of a man about to be paroled. This is a man who has been through hell over false allegations and character assassinations and downright lies. Lies so big and so debunkable that any honest media should never have let Joe Biden get away with using them to smear Trump. The “fine people” hoax brainwashed half the country into thinking their president — who brought peace to Israel and funded black colleges — is a racist. He and his children have been put through hell and those who know him say he never forgets and will get his hunk of flesh. It’s going to be epic. And imagine what he knows now, with his presidential privilege, that the American people will benefit from when he opens both barrels. Oh! This is going to be fun. Those of you who enjoy brawler Trump would get an early Christmas present.4. The spectacle of a Biden inauguration
DB: “The hilarious spectacle of Joe Biden reciting the birthday song as he’s sworn in with a poop stain on his pants.”I didn’t say it, DB did. But I can’t say I didn’t laugh. The gaffe master will be a lot of fun. Remember how fun the video montage of Sleepy Joe rambling about his hairy legs was? Trump was playing it his rallies. Biden is well-known for being extremely meme-able. Meme farms will grow and bloom. Meme farmers everywhere will rejoice at the bountiful crops.5. Paging President HarrisDB: “The hideous spectacle of the Wicked Witches of the House removing Biden from office and installing the trench harpy from California.”Nancy Pelosi already admitted that her inquiry into the 25 Amendment to remove a president wasn’t about Trump. We can rationally deduce that she actually meant it was about Biden. Watching them try to replace him with Comma-La in the next six months will be extremely entertaining.Pelosi Says 25th Amendment Move Is Not About Trump. Is It Preparation to Remove Joe Biden?!
6. Four years of pointing and laughing.
Winning elections isn’t the hardest part. Governing is the hardest part. And the Democrat Party is split up into two groups of people: moderates and far-left whackjobs who are not going to stop trying to take over the party entirely and implement their crazy ideas (like defunding police and sending social workers into dangerous situations). If Biden wins, it’s is going to be a sh*tshow of warring factions inside the party. And we’ll have the buzzkill button in the senate. Lulz.7. Dems miscalculated Comma-La’s appeal
DB: “Democrat voters realizing why Harris never even mustered 4% Democrat support while she was running in the primaries.”Harris is extremely unlikeable. Even her own party doesn’t like her and rejected her immediately in the primaries. She’s sure to have a much bigger role in a Biden administration than Mike Pence does in Trump’s. But her dismal record on criminal justice and locking people up for smoking pot soured her for a lot of people who want actual systemic reform. She will be especially unpopular with antifa who want to defund the police. Harris was the police. She locked up a lot of people, some of whom didn’t belong in jail. Law enforcement reform should start with attorneys general like her. I think the anti-police faction of the party is going to turn on her and that will be popcorn-worthy.California Scrubs Arrest Reports from Kamala Harris Years
8. Retaking the House in 2022.
There’s no doubt we will retake the House in 2022 whether or not Biden wins. The motivation for Republicans to take back control will quadruple after this morass of media-driven shenanigans that a lot of people see as disenfranchisement. The 2022 elections are going to be lit AF.9. Palm Beach Trump still tweets
DB: “The great and awesome President Trump, having preserved America to fight another day, retiring to his own slice of heaven in ever-redder Florida where he can enjoy the lifestyle he richly deserves, tweet to his heart’s content, and continue to inspire the movement he created.”Can you see it? I can. And it’s hilarious.10. Trump TV, baby!
Drudge has abandoned us. Fox News has abandoned us. It’s time for Trump’s media empire that will wipe out Fox News as being the place conservatives go. It’s going to be epic. Trump is finally going to be in the position to be our billionaire who pours money into real journalism. We’ve never had one of those before. This could be the injection of support we have needed in order to break through the fake news narrative.So, be of good cheer. Nothing is off the table yet, and we will keep fighting for a fair election, but if the “worst” happens, it’s not going to be that bad. Buck up, little camper!
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Let's hear from Salena:
One PA House race illustrates why the Blue Wave fizzled for Democrats down ballot everywhere
By Salena Zito
“What Eugene DiPasquale, a moderate charismatic, likable Democrat, as well as his DC based party, journalists, and the institutional elite misunderstood was that they thought it was Republican Rep. Scott Perry who was out of touch with his constituents — when, in fact, it was DePasquale, pressured, tugged, and pulled by the Left who lost his way.
Click here for the full story.
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A few more personal observations:
a) The longer Trump fights to see if he can get SCOTUS to review actual state voting methods the more he will appear as a mean spirited sore loser when , in fact, he is fighting as hard for election reform as he fought to Make America Great Again. However, the (m)ass media will not portray him that way.
b) I truly want Biden to succeed but have serious doubts he has the talent. Furthermore, I believe he is as false as a four dollar bill, lacks character, had 47 years to accomplish all the things he is going to do now. At least he is not as dangerous as Obama.
c) When I say Biden has been on the wrong side of every major issue I have been backed by some in his own party. I do not know why his judgement is wrong. Maybe he just sticks his finger in the air and goes with what is the current dish.
d) If the Republicans do not protect him from the radical element in his party we are in for some serious trouble. I urge you read the article entitled "Can The West Still Lead?" I have posted below.
d) I still fear Biden will crumble because the job is so demanding. There are rumors gathering that even Putin is resigning due to health issues and he is a black belt.
e) Finally, solid conservative Republicans have four years to demonstrate they are qualified to lead America in the direction Trump did and if they blow it, by being obstructionists, that would be tragic for them and for our ailing republic.
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CAN THE WEST STILL LEAD?
Speaking at the Berlin Wall in June 1987, President Ronald Reagan famously urged his Soviet counterpart, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Presaging the Soviet bloc’s collapse and the Wall’s dismantling two years later, Reagan explained why the U.S. and its allies would triumph: “In the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom is the victor.”
Today, however, the West finds itself in an existential crisis. Its role as a global beacon is in doubt, and institutions such as NATO are, in the words of French President Emmanuel Macron, “brain-dead.” Nationalist populism on the right and identity politics on the left threaten what used to be a broad consensus rooted in shared values of democracy and human rights—a consensus borne of the struggles of World War II and the Cold War.
At the same time, China’s astonishing rise over the past three decades suggests that prosperity can indeed come without freedom—a new paradigm that is inspiring autocrats around the world. The coronavirus pandemic that appears contained in China has also hit much of the West particularly hard, repeatedly ravaging economies on both sides of the Atlantic as most governments failed to halt the disease’s second wave.
Nor are the threats to the West just external. As the continuing controversy over this week’s U.S. elections demonstrates, faith in the fundamental fairness of democratic institutions is, for many, no longer a given amid a political polarization that often generates echo chambers of conspiracy theories.
Speaking at the Berlin Wall on June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan called on the Soviet Union to ‘tear down this wall.’
PHOTO: IRA SCHWARTZ/ASSOCIATED PRESSFrom adepts of the right-wing QAnon conspiracy to the Portland anarchists besieging federal government buildings, to the Yellow Vests in France and so-called Reichsburgers in Germany, frustration and anger with the status quo have pushed more citizens of Western democracies outside the established political system. Social media algorithms spoon-feeding hyperpartisan content, meanwhile, have atomized what used to be a broadly shared understanding of reality. Even the public-health response to the virus has become tribalized, with the question of whether or not to wear a mask turning into a marker of political allegiance in the U.S. after President Trump questioned the need for it.
“The idea of the West is still there, but it’s on life support,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “And it’s in part because it’s been stressed from within these democracies. Termites—the angry populist forces on both the right and the left that are deeply illiberal—have been chipping away at open societies from within.”
Internal discord overlaps with a growing divide between the West’s key nations. The sense of common values and purpose between Europe and the U.S., the core of what used to be known as the “free world,” is fizzling away. The drift that began under President Barack Obama turned into outright acrimony during the Trump administration, which adopted a transactional approach to traditional allies and unleashed trade wars.
These days, only a third of Europeans harbor positive views of the U.S., according to a September survey by Pew, not much better than their opinions of China and Russia. The theme of this year’s Munich Security Conference, the annual gathering of Western leaders and their defense and foreign-policy establishments, was to explore a new feeling—and fear—of “Westlessness.”
“I would have never imagined I’d see this relationship become so complicated and difficult. Throughout my entire political life, ties between Europe and the U.S. used to be good by definition. Now, we are no longer sure,” Romano Prodi, a former Italian prime minister and a former president of the European Commission, said in an interview.
In the past four years, France’s Mr. Macron pushed Europe toward greater “strategic autonomy” that would diminish its dependence on an unreliable America in a world of increasingly assertive autocratic leaders such as Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping.
Others, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, were reluctant to embrace the project full-throttle, clinging to hopes that President Trump’s administration would prove a temporary aberration. The rancorous outcome of Tuesday’s election is likely to convince many other European leaders that the time has come to rely on their own forces, regardless of who won the White House this time.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron at a meeting in June.
PHOTO: POOL/ABACA/ZUMA PRESS“There was a lot of wishful thinking in the past four years that the pendulum may swing back, but having observed the election campaign, there is a more realistic perspective on the drivers of the U.S. foreign policy going forward, and a realization that in any case Europe must take care of itself,” said Daniela Schwarzer, director of the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin and a foreign-policy adviser to the European Commission. The messy aftermath of the American vote, she added, “changes the perspective of who the U.S. is, and doesn’t make it easier for Europeans to see themselves as still anchored in that old liberal consensus of democracies.”
The geopolitical West is a relatively recent construct. It was forged by the democracies that had won World War II against one totalitarian ideology, Nazism, and fortified in the ensuing decades of the Cold War against another totalitarian system, the Soviet-led Communist bloc.
These democracies’ values became the bedrock of new institutions underpinning the West, such as NATO and the precursors of the European Union that united the war’s winners and losers. NATO’s founding charter in 1949 proclaimed a commitment to “the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” It’s precisely these principles that made the West so attractive to those denied basic freedoms on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain—and that made Eastern and Central European countries so eager to join the EU and NATO after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
The fact that these values formed the core of the political consensus in the West for more than seven decades, however, was a product of historical experience rather than an innate feature of Western civilization. After all, the two totalitarian ideologies that drenched Europe in blood in the first half of the 20th century, holding that individual liberties should be crushed in the name of class struggle or racial superiority, are as much a product of Western culture and history as the enlightened democratic ideals that ended up gaining the upper hand. These totalitarian ideologies never completely disappeared, and their mutant heirs are bubbling up to the surface again amid the general dislocation and populist ferment.
“As we distance ourselves from the defining conflicts of the 20th century, World War II and the Cold War, we become more and more confused about what it is that we stand for, in large part because much of the population has no frame of reference,” said Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.
A decade after Francis Fukuyama proclaimed “the end of history” and the triumph of liberal democracy in the wake of the Cold War, a new conflict consumed the West’s energies: the global war against the militant Islamism of al Qaeda, the Taliban and, later, Islamic State. The initial hubris with which the U.S. and allies tried to remake Afghanistan and Iraq eventually gave way to frustrations over the limits of Western power. At the same time, the proliferation of terrorist outrages at home, coupled with the 2015 refugee crisis, created new fractures within Western societies. These attacks continue, with a spate of murders in France and a rampage in Vienna in recent days.
Though the new enemy was the ideology of radical political Islam rather than the Muslim faith as such, many in the West responded by turning to a more atavistic and illiberal worldview amid waves of Muslim immigration. The populist movements that rode the crest of these anxieties, coming to power in some nations, championed a different—and older—idea of the West as a bastion of Christianity and traditional values threatened by an Islamic invasion, rather than a universal model of freedom and inclusiveness.
“The West will fall, as Europe is occupied without realizing it,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban predicted in a 2018 speech, ticking off the numbers of Muslims born in EU nations. “The last hope for Europe is Christianity.”
According to a Pew survey, only 46% of Americans believed last year that their nation’s government was run for the benefit of all, down from 65% in 2002.
This debate about what the West really stands for, triggered by terrorism and immigration, overlapped with frustrations over deepening economic disparity, particularly in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis—an event that prompted China’s leaders to decide that their hour to challenge the West’s global pre-eminence has arrived. “The financial crisis is when the tide started to shift: it was no longer self-evident that the traditional Western capitalist system was going to be the predominant modern model of governance,” said Alexander Stubb, a former prime minister of Finland and a professor at the European University Institute in Florence.
As autocratic leaders of NATO countries like Hungary’s Mr. Orban and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan solidified their power, the once nearly universal faith in representative democracy started to fray on both sides of the Atlantic. According to a Pew survey, only 46% of Americans believed last year that their nation’s government was run for the benefit of all, down from 65% in 2002. In Germany, that proportion fell to 48% from 86%, in Italy to 30% from 88%. Only 27% of Americans, 23% of French citizens and 37% of Canadians agreed with the notion that elected officials care about their interests, according to the survey.
Critics on the left blame this state of affairs on unbridled capitalist greed and the capture of the West’s state institutions by corporate lobbies focused on maximizing profits, as well as on the divisiveness engendered by the Trump presidency. Those on the right argue that the crisis of Western democracies is caused by a yawning gap between the general public, especially in regions left out by globalization, and out-of-touch, liberal, technocratic elites. “There are threats to liberty and threats to national identity in our societies, and they come from the elites who have lost confidence in the virtue of their own societies,” said John O’Sullivan, president of the conservative Danube Institute in Budapest, who advised former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Back in the days of Thatcher and Reagan, the virtues of the West seemed self-evident. To East Europeans standing in dreary food lines that snaked through their decrepit cities, the West’s democracy and the West’s prosperity appeared indivisible. A sophisticated, modern economy, it seemed, was incompatible with dictatorship.
A street in Wuhan, China, in August, where Covid-19 was largely contained even as it continued to spread in the U.S.
PHOTO: YAN CONG/BLOOMBERG NEWSIn part thanks to new technologies that make state control over citizens much more efficient, China is proving this wrong, so far. Beijing has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and created new products and companies that are globally competitive while maintaining an increasingly repressive political system. “The challenge from China is new and unlike the challenge from the Soviet Union because China is visibly a more economically successful society,” said Peter M. Robinson, a scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who, as a speechwriter for President Reagan, wrote the 1987 Berlin speech. “The Chinese are present all over the Silicon Valley, they have invested, they have cash. This was never true of the Soviet Union, which didn’t have cash to buy anything other than wheat.”
These days, the dreary winter of renewed lockdowns in England, Belgium and France, where restaurants and nonessential businesses have been closed amid a resurgence of the virus, contrasts with a nearly normal life and an economic recovery in China. In Wuhan, the city where the pandemic originated, thousands reveled in August at an electronic music concert in a water park, without social distancing or masks—precautions no longer deemed necessary.
In China, of course, the Communist Party managed to largely eliminate the virus by using draconian measures and intrusive surveillance that would be inconceivable in the West. “The price you pay for your freedom in Europe is that you end up with a situation that also makes diseases more likely to spread,” said Dr. Chris Smith, a virologist at Cambridge University.
Still, the stark difference with Asian nations that have remained largely untouched by the pandemic is deepening the sense of gloom and malaise that already permeated Europe and the U.S. before the coronavirus. “We are now aware how naked we are in the world, and how poorly prepared we are,” said Peter Frankopan, professor of global history at Oxford University. “Just three-four years ago, we were optimistic, we were convinced we were going to have golden ages and that everybody will be brought inside the big tent. And it’s amazing that suddenly there is this transition to people being so negative and even talking about the end of the West.”
Oswald Spengler’s book ‘The Decline of the West’ was a bestseller in Germany in the 1920s.
PHOTO: ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY IMAGESProphesying the end of the West has been a cottage industry for well over a century. “The Western nations are nearing their dissolution; the diseases from which they are suffering are radical and cumulative, they do not yield to treatment,” British writer James Stanley Little warned in his 1907 treatise, “The Doom of Western Civilization,” that focused on Asians’ commercial prowess and the loose morals of European women. Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West,” which lamented the corrupting influence of democracy and the press, became a bestseller in 1920s Germany. And in America, Pat Buchanan’s 2002 bestseller “The Death of the West” predicted the collapse of Western civilization because of high immigrant fertility rates.
But through crises and trials, the West has repeatedly managed to reinvent itself, displaying a capacity for innovation and change—a flexibility that early 19th century China or the 17th century Ottoman Empire, then at a pinnacle of prosperity and power, failed to show. Edgars Rinkevics, the foreign minister of Latvia, pointed out that the Soviet Union, like China today, also appeared to have an advantage over the West in the 1950s and 1960s, when it sent the Sputnik satellite and the first man into space. That superiority, of course, turned out to be a mirage. “Authoritarian regimes are more agile to face the kind of crisis that we are experiencing with the coronavirus,” Mr. Rinkevics said. “But I can’t believe that in the long-term their model will prevail. The rumor about the death of the West is grossly exaggerated.”
Mr.
, President Reagan’s former speechwriter, is also guardedly optimistic. “It’s touch and go at the moment. It is not preordained that the West will find its footing all over again and come back together,” he said. “But if you look at the long sweep of European history, the capacity for renewal is astounding.”
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