The Best We Can Do?

A foreword: Regular readers know I’m no fan of the Untethered Orange Id. Regular readers also know that, while I didn’t vote for him in 2016, I did in 2020, thus breaking a string of Libertarian Party presidential votes dating back to 1988. That last vote was a ..!.. to the Democrats’ leftist plans - plans they’ve pursued with gusto despite Biden being pitched as a moderate. Here, I lambaste both Joeb (as a friend has dubbed him) and The Donald.

I am aware some readers are big Trump fans and plan to vote for him, and that criticisms may not sit well. Before you reach for that unsubscribe button, however, do consider that I write about a lot of other stuff here, and we don’t have to agree on everything (and it’d be kinda boring if we did). All I ask is that you give my points a fair shake. After that, if you still wish to vote for Donald, or Joeb, or anyone else, it’s none of my business. Cheers and thanks for reading. Peter.

Ponder President Joe Biden, who spouts vaguely racist, faux-folksy chestnuts as regularly as the local diner waitress calls you "honey." He gets away with them all, in a time when even one such by a lesser mortal suffices to ruin a career and destroy a reputation.

Ponder former President Donald Trump, who blurts out incendiary nonsense with less shame than an itinerant carnival barker. His loyalists not only let it all slide, they revel in it and repeat it with the conviction of a testifying born-again.

Biden just declared his 2024 candidacy. Trump declared back in November, and has spent a good part of his time trashing (and lying about) Ron DeSantis, his presumptive primary opponent.

In the minds of many, these will be the two will duke it out for the White House in 2024. Nikki Haley, Asa Hutchinson, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Larry Elder have declared for the GOP, Marianne Williamson and RFK Jr have declared for the Dems, and DeSantis and a sheaf of others are figured as likely tossers-of-hats. At this juncture, however, with a full understanding that it’s very early, all but DeSantis and perhaps Haley appear extreme long shots for the GOP, and the Dems will coalesce around Joe (barring either an irrefutable medical deterioration or the improbable success of the corruption investigations).

Biden lies, makes up stories, repeats those stories even when they've been debunked, bully-boys the people he serves, and says truly awful things about half the country, all while running the nation into the ground. He said the phrase "MAGA Republicans" ten times in a three thousand word speech in an effort to conflate tens of millions of good, honest citizens with fascistic extremism. A toxic divider, and by outward appearances a terrible human being, yet, about half the nation would vote for him if the election were held tomorrow.

Trump lies, makes up stories, claims against all evidence that he wuz robbed of his second term in the White House, and has demanded, absent any legal mechanism for doing so, that someone

declare the 2020 Election irreparably compromised and have a new Election, immediately!

About half the nation would vote for him if the election were held tomorrow.

A dodderer and a lunatic, running ahead of everyone else for the job of President of the most powerful nation on the planet and by extension 'leader of the free world.'

As President, Trump did a middling job on policy. A mixed bag, as I've written time and again, but nothing more extraordinary than many other candidates would have. And, in some ways, less than those other candidates would have pursued and accomplished. Beyond his "own worst enemy" antics, mercurial behavior, and wild-man untetheredness, he was simply wrong in some policy areas. There's no reason whatsoever to elevate him to the GOP nomination above half a dozen other prominent names, and every reason to move on from him. But, because he's been and continues to be fixated on (and repeatedly mistreated) by the Left's armies of the deranged, he's a martyr and a saint and the man to save the nation.

Barf.

As President, Biden has been a disaster. His governance has been a mix of "undo whatever Trump did" and "embrace every woke lunacy out there," coupled with incompetence, disinterest, and "nothing to see here" deflection of myriad failures. About the only thing he's gotten right so far is keeping American boots out of Ukraine (and pardoning a relative handful of pot smokers). But, because his likely opponent is Trump, and if not him some other definitionally "evil" Republican, he's being defended and even praised by people who can't possibly be so stupid as to think he's doing well.

Barf^2.

Neither should be installed in the White House in 2025. Neither should even survive the party primaries.

I often mock the concept of The-Best-and-Brightest, a phrase popularized by David Halberstam in 1972. The old adage that 'cream floats to the top' suggests that government should ultimately find itself populated by the smartest, the most capable, and the most good-minded among us. This is, of course, farcically naive, but it is what the young and earnest have been conditioned to believe. Our antepenultimate President Barack Obama haughtily informed us (did any President in living memory do "haughty" better?) that "we are the ones we've been waiting for," and built a cult of personality around himself in the process.

Barf^3

We all know how that turned out. Policies that went against the national will and to the detriment of the national good. Sowing of division. Derision of half the country's citizens. Petulance in the face of electoral rejection. Arrogant over-reach via "pen-and-phone." Finger-pointing on a daily basis. Eight years of malaise excused as "the new normal." And, finally, a collective sky-screaming meltdown that an uncouth orange-tinted outsider dared upstage and defeat Herself, the heir-presumptive to Obama’s throne.

The Democrats' strategy is emerging as a two-pronged effort to scare voters into seeing their cross-aisle brethren as evil fascists and to harden the resolve of Trump's supporters so that they harden their resolve in his favor instead of strategically moving on to a more-likely-to-win candidate.

It may very well work. The mid-terms should have been a catastrophe for the Democrats, but Trump’s mucking about and endorsement of weak loyalists over stronger candidates for critical Senate seats cost the GOP a Senate majority with which they could have erected a real roadblock to Biden’s excesses. In the House, the GOP barely eked out a majority, which also attests to the success of Dems’ (and the legacy media’s, but I repeat myself) whitewashing of Biden’s messes.

Really, America, is this the best we can do, or hope for? Have we devolved so in our expectations that we would extend one of these two reprobates the near-infinite power of the Presidency in 2025? Or can we finally move on from this squalid stretch?