The hysterical Peggy Noonan says Trump, whom everyone now knows to be a bumbler because of Iran, still might not bumble the overthrow of the republic?!

You've got to be kidding me.

He's been bumbling everything since he was elected in 2016. Hell, he bumbled his 2016 campaign, during which he switched from Lewandowski to Manafort to Bannon/Conway! He wasted 2017 trying to repeal and replace Obamacare. He could never get The Wall built. He lost the House in 2018. He handed the war on terror over to the Taliban! Weeks later he utterly capitulated to hysteria during the pandemic, even boasting about the spending orgy of the $2.2 trillion CARES ACT. His cosplaying revolutionaries who strolled through the Capitol in January 2021 had dinner reservations for that evening at The Olive Garden. In 2025 he launched an insane tariff regime, fought the Houthis to a draw, made our friends in The Great White North our enemies, sent ICE goons into the streets who ended up executing two Americans in broad daylight in January, and in February started this stupid war completely unprepared to finish it.

Trump has never been a threat to the Republic. He's the chief clown in a circus act. He's ten times the bungler we ever thought Obama to be.

But whatever happens Tuesday, just remember that Peggy is just fine with giving the revolutionaries of the other side power and influence.

Better to keep your head while everyone else is losing theirs.   

The Case for a Historic Wave: The president should be dealt a rebuke, a rebellion and a rout. Only then can the Republican Party be rebuilt.

 ... Mr. Trump’s problem is that everyone on both sides of the issue knows that he’s out of his depth in running a major war. They weren’t sure of that when it started.

Democrats think he went in because he’s a bumbler, Republicans think he can’t win because he’s a bumbler. Supporters and opposers of his decision are united: He’s a bumbler whose bumbling made things more expensive.

... If Tuesday yields only a small wave, it will embolden and empower the president’s attempts to undo the results. He will try—he’s Donald Trump. They rigged it! We won’t certify!

He never misses an opportunity to toy with the republic, and it didn’t start in 2020. McKay Coppins’s recent biography of Mitt Romney recounts how supporter Donald Trump reacted to Mr. Romney’s 2012 loss to Barack Obama. In transit to Mr. Romney’s victory party, “Trump sat in the dark of a helicopter, unraveling.” He decided, based on nothing, that the election had been stolen. He started tweeting: “This election is a total sham and a travesty.” “We are not a democracy!” “We should march on Washington and stop this travesty.” “Revolution!”

The 2012 election wasn’t a sham, Mr. Trump just made his charges up, as he did in 2020, when his supporters stormed the Capitol.

It’s what he does. He’ll likely do some variation next week.

... It is likely true that if the Democrats get a big, historic outcome Tuesday, they will misread their mandate and go off on various toots. They’ll think that change by definition must be extreme or won’t be noticed. A growing number will continue their grim plodding toward socialist revolution. ...

Democrats are defending this Biden whopper by saying he's referring to the 2009-2010 H1N1 "swine flu" epidemic, which officially killed 3,433 people

 I don't remember it being called a "pandemic" much at the time, but I do remember the hype to take the vaccine, which the authorities bungled so bad it wasn't widely available until the flu had already burned itself out.

Anyway, here's grandpa talking about a really bad pandemic when he was VP, which was way back when I was in 'Nam:

 Here.

Update:

I'm so glad we could clear this up.

When he nukes Muncie instead of Moscow I'm sure Indiana will understand. 

 

China's Marxist vision of state control and redistribution never went away

 

What is a communist? One who has yearnings

For equal division of unequal earnings.

Idler, or bungler, or both, he is willing

To fork over his penny and pocket your shilling.

- Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849)

 

… it’s back, says Rudd, and Xi’s Marxist vision means greater control over the private sector, an expanding role for state-owned enterprises and industrial policy, and the quest for “common prosperity” through redistribution — all of which is likely to shrink economic growth, he concludes. Rudd is the current Australian ambassador to the United States. …

Stevenson-Yang is … one of the few who isn’t puzzled by what’s happening in China, after living there for more than 20 years. The CCP “was always going to decouple. Once the party had acquired enough power, enough resources, enough money, it was always going to decouple,” she told CNBC.

The reforms that began in 1979, she says, “were always meant to be temporary, in order to bring in more resources.”

More.

Biden's daring visit to Kiev had more to do with repairing his own image at home as a bungler than with helping Ukraine

The visit, combined with VP Harris' labeling of Russia guilty of crimes against humanity, has resulted today in Russian suspension of the last nuclear arms treaty remaining.

The Democrats are playing a very dangerous, impetuous, self-serving, unnecessary, game. 

Over the weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris said the U.S. has determined Russian forces have committed “crimes against humanity” in Ukraine.

Putin pulls back from last remaining nuclear arms control pact with the US

"Talk softly and carry a big stick" would be a much better policy right now than this.

WAPo calls Chicom propaganda that coronavirus came from Fort Detrick, Maryland, "baseless"

 I don't think so.

This is the same WAPo which highlighted an unexplained outbreak of a respiratory virus in Virginia, just across the border from the Fort Detrick biodefense facility, in June-July 2019, which killed 3 and hospitalized and sickened dozens more. The CDC concluded in late July 2019 that a "common cold" virus was to blame in the outbreak.

Hm, imagine that. But don't think about it too long. The investigative reporting on the right wants us to concentrate on a possible outbreak at the Wuhan lab, which, by the way, wasn't a Wall Street Journal scoop. An Australian journalist had the story already in March.

Meanwhile the CDC temporarily shut down the US Army part of the Fort Detrick operation in August 2019, just a month after the Virginia outbreak, for numerous safety and other violations, not the least of which was an incomplete inventory of agents. The latter problem seems to be chronic at Fort Detrick. The place was similarly cited way back in 2009.

And Congress was deliberately kept out of the loop.

What else is Fort Detrick famous for, besides bioweapons research long ago supposedly abandoned by the US government? 

In 2001 a bunch of people were killed by anthrax mailed in letters shortly after the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The anthrax was traced to Fort Detrick.

Robert Mueller and James Comey infamously fingered the wrong guy for those anthrax attacks, who was later compensated millions and exonerated. The true culprit was a senior scientist at United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008 before our incompetent FBI could arrest him, seven years after the crimes.

What other nutjobs are still working in sensitive positions in our government? 

In light of recent testimony by Anthony Fauci to Congress that he couldn't guarantee that NIH funds awarded to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through a third party were not used for gain of function research to weaponize viruses, you have to open your eyes to the fact of long-standing and intimate cooperation of US researchers with their Chinese counterparts. Chinese "scientists" are all over the place at American universities and research institutions, including at Fort Detrick, where their American counterparts seem all too often unruffled by the security implications. They are all also all dependent on US government, including military, funding for their livelihoods, as well as on funding from what President Eisenhower once warned us about, the military-industrial complex.

I don't believe any of these people as far as I can throw them.

We know the Chicoms were working on coronavirus. But it's not outside the realm of possibility that one of the inventory lacunae at Fort Detrick was the coronavirus, too. Was it just a coincidence that there was an outbreak of coronavirus-like disease in Virginia in the summer of 2019? CDC should be forced to reveal more.

The American elites who work on this stuff have all the same incentives to keep it all secret as the Chinese do. American scientists are thick as thieves with the Chinese. The fact is they are in this together, and we are the helpless bystanders on the outside. My estimation is they have too much to lose to tell the truth to the American people. Money trumps patriotism. 

As U.S. calls for focus on covid origins, China repeats speculation about U.S. military base:

Zhao, one of the country’s most notoriously hawkish diplomats, referenced a U.S. military location that has been baselessly linked to the coronavirus outbreak by Chinese media.

Politically speaking about coronavirus . . .

The virus and the economic problems themselves have basically drowned out the Democrat race for the presidency. Trump is front and center in all of it, dominating the news cycle.

The news is very bad for Trump, but the focus is on him and the problems, not the Democrats.

Neither Biden nor Sanders have much going for them personality wise or policy wise. Their voices sound frail and small in the face of these enormous challenges.

Trump is clearly in his element . . . for now.

But wealth destruction, massive unemployment and death now stalk him politically as much as they do the rest of us in reality. It's not going to help him to insist he knew this was a pandemic all along as he did yesterday when he's on camera denying it was not long ago. Besides, if he already knew, he should have taken drastic action like canceling jet travel on Feb 1. Instead he simply canceled the jet travel of a few Chinese nationals. Had he been knowledgeable, he would have known too that all those travelers by jet from China had asymptomatic spreaders in their midst. That's in part why we have an explosion of cases everywhere. They also came from other hotspots on jets to America. Trump bungled this badly and allowed the pandemic to come here.

Anecdotally people in my orbit are heeding the call to stay home. Commuter trains into Chicago are nearly empty, says a close friend. Road traffic is very light on workdays here in Michigan. Work orders have dried up and employees are on-call, if they haven't been furloughed outright. Work-from-home for the $40k or less crowd is estimated to be possible for just 17% of all individual wage earners in the US. Higher earners have more opportunity for that, but it will probably not last long for some as the economy nose dives. Many will soon be underwater, if they aren't already. This is going to cost an enormous sum and do tremendous damage to the people and the economy.

And to think it was mostly preventable with a little common sense, something neither party seems capable of providing.

This is a catastrophe, a pathetic display of human incompetence.    

Iowa Democrats bungle caucuses, infuriate candidates, as reporting app developed by Democrat Party of Tech fails

Hello? Sum ting wong wit da app.

“We have no sense when results might come in," said [Mao fangirl] Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to Biden. "We are, as other campaigns are, very concerned with what they might release: the alignment numbers are not adding up." “It’s a total meltdown,” she added. ...

Sanders' supporters were already crying foul. [WaPo slogan stealer] Rep. Ilhan Omar, who campaigned for Sanders in Iowa this weekend, tweeted, "Democracy dies in the darkness!”

Elizabeth Warren's campaign and its allies barely contained their fury at the state party’s bungling of the caucuses. “It’s a mess,” [a trail of tears] campaign manager Roger Lau told reporters. "I think that every single second that passes where we don't get a final result is concerning." ...

The candidates addressed supporters late Monday, not waiting for results. Despite the delay in reporting, Sen. Amy Klobuchar [noted for throwing binders at people] said her campaign knew it was “punching above our weight.” ...

The results delay came after anecdotal reports from precinct caucus chairs early Monday, who said they were having issues with their caucus night reporting apps. The app, developed by the Democratic Party, helps the chairs do the math to help figure out which candidates will meet the viability thresholds Monday night. And it’s a tool to feed the ultimate results to the party in real-time. ...

In Polk County, county Democratic Party chair Sean Bagniewski said only about 20 percent of the chairs would actually be able to use it. “We’re telling everyone to phone it in at this point," Bagniewski said earlier in the day. But that may have set off the next snafu: the phone lines then jammed up. 

More.

Florida, laughstock of the world

Federal judge blasts Florida for bungled election: 'Laughingstock of the world':

“We have been the laughing stock of the world, election after election, and we chose not to fix this,” U.S. District Judge Mark Walker said in court, where he is at the center of the legal battle over the election recount.

Flashback: Robert Mueller and James Comey at FBI accused the wrong guy in the 2001 anthrax letter deaths

Carl Cannon recounts the sorry episode of their incompetence, here, in The Orange County Register.

Chicoms call Obamao (conveniently absent on Veterans Day) an idler

Reported here:

"We made this meeting so luxurious, with singing and dancing, but see Obama, stepping out of his car chewing gum like an idler," wrote Yin Hong, a professor of journalism at Beijing's Tsinghua University, on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo micro-blog service. Twitter, like Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, is banned in China, whose censors fear such services could aid political protest.

-------------------------

. . . idler or bungler or both he is willing . . .

Ron Fournier: Obama Is An Incompetent, Obfuscatory, Demagogic, Bungling Political Quack And Buffoon

Well, that about covers it from the former Washington Bureau Chief of the Associated Press.

Ron Fournier says all that, and more, for National Journal here.

7 in 10 Democrats Sympathize with Communism

According to the latest Gallup Poll, here:

Seven in 10 Democrats believe the government should levy taxes on the rich to redistribute wealth, while an equal proportion of Republicans believe it should not. The slight majority of independents oppose this policy.

Recall Ebenezer Elliot (1781-1849):

What is a communist? One who has yearnings

For equal division of unequal earnings.

Idler, or bungler, or both, he is willing

To fork over his penny and pocket your shilling.

THE ONE

What is a communist? The One who has yearnings
For equal division of unequal earnings.
Idler, or bungler, or both, he is willing
To fork over his penny and pocket your shilling.

- Ebenezer Elliott, son of "Devil Elliott", adapted

The Bungler Resurrects Mutually Assured Destruction

So says J.E. Dyer, here:

Russian leaders have repeatedly rejected America’s offers to cooperate and share technology for strategic missile defenses. They have remained determined instead to hold American and allied populations at risk as the guarantee of Russian security. With the New START treaty, they have prevailed on that point, placing America’s missile-defense program under limitations both implicit and explicit. Obama is effectively returning us to the MAD regime.

Equal Division of Unequal Earnings

The title summarizes one inspiration for this blog's existence, which dates to last September, and illustrates what is more and more becoming the open description from Democrats of their own, and Obama's, political philosophy: equal division of unequal earnings.

Many in the center and on the right have shrunk from calling Obama a communist out of fear of being labeled McCarthyites, despite the fact that with the fall of the Soviet Union it has become clear that the senator from Wisconsin underestimated the depth of pro-Soviet penetration of the U.S. government at the time. The task has been left to our court jesters instead.

Even our most unsympathetic critics on the right today shrink from calling Obama a communist because Obama's mentor, Saul Alinsky, would not identify himself as such, even though that duck walked and quacked like one. We remind our contemporaries, however, that it was at Antioch that the followers of The Way were first called Christians. It was an outsider's estimation, and later an accusation, not a term of self-identification. So it is here.

It is not necessary to link communists to a no-longer extant political entity for them to be such now anymore than it was then, in the Victorian age. Communists already existed in the popular British imagination of the time because they existed in fact, long before the philosophy found political expression in a national government in Russia.

That Democrats today, like Max Baucus, Howard Dean, and Barack Obama readily and openly identify with communist ideas should make the blood boil in every American patriot's heart. These ideas mean death to our way of life, and death to us who hold to the immemorial rights of Englishmen in America. Not a dime's worth of difference between the two political parties? More than ten times the difference, and a world: "Idler or bungler or both he is willing to fork over his penny and pocket your shilling."

In "Obamacare Was Mainly Aimed At Redistributing Wealth," which appeared here, Byron York points out:

It hasn't attracted much notice, but recently some prominent advocates of Obamacare have spoken more frankly than ever before about why they supported a national health care makeover. It wasn't just about making insurance more affordable. It wasn't just about bending the cost curve. It wasn't just about cutting the federal deficit. It was about redistributing wealth.

Health reform is "an income shift," Democratic Sen. Max Baucus said on March 25. "It is a shift, a leveling, to help lower income, middle income Americans." ...

At about the same time, Howard Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chairman and presidential candidate, said the health bill was needed to correct economic inequities. "The question is, in a democracy, what is the right balance between those at the top ... and those at the bottom?" Dean said during an appearance on CNBC. "When it gets out of whack, as it did in the 1920s, and it has now, you need to do some redistribution. This is a form of redistribution."

You'll want to read the rest, at the link.

"THE SINGLE MOST INEPT PRESIDENT...IN ALL OF AMERICAN HISTORY"

Ron Smith of The Baltimore Sun rips the president a new one in "We Do Get It, Mr. President; We Just Don't Like It":

Barack Obama seems to believe he has magical powers of persuasion. If true, how come fewer and fewer are persuaded? Is it that, as much of a smoothie as he is with words, he lacks passion? Perhaps, but the idea that his drooping poll figures and the Republican electoral wins in Massachusetts, Virginia and New Jersey are the result of an epidemic of misunderstanding is ludicrous on its face. We understand what he and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid want, and we're opposed to it. We know the present health care system is heading for a financial crack-up, but we also know that the proposed cure that was cobbled together in an untidy, indecipherable monstrous piece of pork-ridden, bribe-filled legislation would make things worse, not better. We get it. We just don't like it. ...

Earlier in the week, I talked with David Michael Green, a devout "progressive" who teaches political science at Hofstra University in New York. He has written a powerful polemic, "How to Squander the Presidency in One Year," in which he says, "There's only one political party in the entire world that is so inept, cowardly and bungling that it could manage to simultaneously lick the boots of Wall Street bankers and then get blamed by the voters for being flaming revolutionary socialists.

"Barack Obama has now, in just a year's time, become the single most inept president perhaps in all of American history, and certainly in my lifetime," Mr. Green said, adding that "Never has so much political advantage been [squandered] so rapidly, and what's more in the context of so much national urgency and crisis. It's astonishing, really, to contemplate how much has been lost in a single year."

The parts I left out are pretty good too, at the link.

Hey, Obama! Why Don't You Get a Real Job?

What is a communist? One who has yearnings

For equal division of unequal earnings.

Idler, or bungler, or both, he is willing

To fork over his penny and pocket your shilling.

-Victorian Era