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. ...

If you can keep your head . . .

 

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

 

-- Rudyard Kipling 1910 

It's an American tradition: Peggy Noonan loses her head

Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Feels Like a Hinge Point: What a disaster for the young. It will forever shape their understanding of politics in America, Peggy Noonan, WSJ Opinion, September 11, 2025

... We are in big trouble.

We all know this. We don’t even know what to do with what we know. But the assassination of Charlie Kirk feels different as an event, like a hinge point, like something that is going to reverberate in new dark ways. It isn’t just another dreadful thing. It carries the ominous sense that we’re at the beginning of something bad. Michael Smerconish said on CNN Thursday afternoon that normally after such an event the temperature goes down a little, but not in this case, and he’s right. There are the heartbroken and the indifferent and they are irreconcilable. X, formerly Twitter, was from the moment of the shooting overrun with anguish and rage: It’s on now. Bluesky, where supposedly gentler folk fled Elon Musk, was gleefully violent: Too bad, live by the gun, die by the gun.

But what a disaster all this is for the young. ...

 

No, we are not in big trouble.

We are simply in the same trouble we've always been in, but that doesn't sell newspapers or drive clicks.

But surrendering to hysteria will misguide us, as surely as Tyler Robinson's feelings misguided him when he pulled that trigger, allegedly.

Didn't the country just get over surrendering its mind to its feelings?

Or are we, left, right, and in between, going to do this all over again? 

Fear of death made 270 million Americans trust a completely novel vaccine in 2021, only for over 20 million new infections in early 2022 to rip the mask off the whole thing.

We found out that we were not going to die.

We found out that the experts oversold the threat and the vaccine, ka-ching ka-ching, that after taking it "the virus didn't stop with me". We got sick anyway, and we continued to spread it. The adults knew that the virus was mutating to spread at the cost of its deadliness, but the adults were not in charge. We ended up learning the hard way.

The virus of violence is endemic to the world. Woke is a counterfeit. Summer 2020 was not a summer of love. Christianity is Uberwoke and explains that hate lives in us all.

The spectrum of hate's evidence is wide: By intentional homicide rate, Canada ranks 111th in the world in 2023. Mexico ranks 18th, and the United States ranks 66th.

But in 1975 the intentional homicide rate in the United States was 9.6 per 100,000. 9.6 is 43rd in 2023, Iraq-like. In 2023 the United States is 5.8. The rate is down 40%.

We have become far less violent, not more, in the last fifty years, even as religious faith supposedly has declined.

Maybe we should rethink that. Or maybe for starters we should just think.

Brethren, be not children in understanding: howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men. 

-- I Corinthians 14:20 

Jim Lovell was the greatest of Americans

 

 

This is a fabulous tribute to the man who kept his head while all others were losing theirs. 

Apollo 13 moon mission leader James Lovell dies at 97

... One of NASA’s most traveled astronauts in the agency’s first decade, Lovell flew four times — Gemini 7, Gemini 12, Apollo 8 and Apollo 13 — with the two Apollo flights riveting the folks back on Earth.

In 1968, the Apollo 8 crew of Lovell, Frank Borman and William Anders was the first to leave Earth’s orbit and the first to fly to and circle the moon. They could not land, but they put the U.S. ahead of the Soviets in the space race. Letter writers told the crew that their stunning pale blue dot photo of Earth from the moon, a world first, and the crew’s Christmas Eve reading from Genesis saved America from a tumultuous 1968.

But the big rescue mission was still to come. That was during the harrowing Apollo 13 flight in April 1970. Lovell was supposed to be the fifth man to walk on the moon. But Apollo 13′s service module, carrying Lovell and two others, experienced a sudden oxygen tank explosion on its way to the moon. The astronauts barely survived, spending four cold and clammy days in the cramped lunar module as a lifeboat. ...

“I think in the history of space flight, I would say that Jim was one of the pillars of the early space flight program,” Gene Kranz, NASA’s legendary flight director, once said. ...

The Apollo 13 crew of Lovell, Haise and Swigert was on the way to the moon in April 1970, when an oxygen tank from the spaceship exploded 200,000 miles from Earth.

That, Lovell recalled, was “the most frightening moment in this whole thing.” Then oxygen began escaping and “we didn’t have solutions to get home.”

“We knew we were in deep, deep trouble,” he told NASA’s historian.

Four-fifths of the way to the moon, NASA scrapped the mission. Suddenly, their only goal was to survive. ...

When Antifa thinks even the media are the fascists, you know we are still at Orwell's "meaningless" fascism from 1944

 

 

George Orwell, here:

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

George Orwell on the Meaninglessness of the Term 'Fascism'

"It would seem that, as used, the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, youth hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I don't know what else."

The source of this statement attributed to Orwell is given as "Tribune, 1944" here. I haven't found a credible alternative citation proving Orwell wrote it.

In a leftist age, the promiscuous use of the term would be understandable.