Free Republic

“I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.”

William F Buckley Jr.

From, The Last Lion, biography of Winston Churchill, page 2036:

“Jock Colville later recalled,
“Churchill had a natural sympathy for simple people, because he himself
took a simple view of what was required; and he hated casuistry. That was
no doubt why the man-in-the-street loved him and the intellectuals did not.”
Churchill, for his part, considered those on the left who anointed themselves
the arbiters of right and wrong to be arrogant, “a fault,” Colville recalled,
Churchill “detested in others, particularly in its intellectual form.” For that
reason, Churchill “had dislike and contempt, of a kind which transcended
politics, of the intellectual wing of the Labour party,” which in turn
despised Churchill. In 1940 the intellectualism of the left was inimical to
Churchill and to Britain’s cause, which was simplicity itself: defeat Hitler.
6”

The West should grab this opportunity with both hands.

It is essential to get negotiations going even though the positions on each side are mutually unacceptable.

Ukraine is running out of soldiers, the West is running out of ammunition, the United States is running out of enthusiasm.

Russia is sacrificing soldiers at an incredible rate that might be unsustainable, Putin's economy is showing signs of cracking, rumors abound of Putin losing control over his supporting elite.

The United States is broke, we are out of ammunition, we don't have the forces in place to protect or even deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan, the Saudis are breaking away from the dollar as is some of the rest of the world. If America does not act to stop the disintegration, we will soon be unable to influence events.

It is imperative that Putin does not succeed in his inevitable efforts to divide his adversaries. It is imperative that Biden not be permitted to undermine Zelinski's negotiation efforts in Ukraine as he has done to Netanyahu. As difficult as the objective is, it is vital that the United States and Europe negotiate with one voice and that voice should embrace Zelinski's Ukraine.

The first response to Putin's offer of negotiations for settlement should be a demand for an armistice in place. This saves lives on both sides, especially Ukrainian lives and forces Russia to negotiate for land it does not occupy.

Once negotiations are started, all kinds of cards can be played but it is essential to stop the fighting as soon as possible.

The only time I have ever seen posts from you are during the elections of 2016 and 2020, and always to trash Trump

Clearly, you don't see much, Joe. I have posted 19,222 replies for about 20 years.

I invite honest readers to consider Trump's appointment to Attorney General, to Secretary of State and to Chief of Staff. How did these few of many available examples work out?

You insult us when you sacrifice truth to protect conservatives on Free Republic, lest we be seduced away from our deeply held convictions.

You are wrong on the facts about the extent of my 19,222 replies, you are wrong about my support of Donald Trump whom I believe to be vital to our national survival, and you are wrong when you think Trump and Free Republic should be protected from simple reality.

I invite the reader to consider how we are both insulted by Joe's belief that we must be prevented from knowing the truth about Trump's history of appointments. I think the reader can handle the truth and remain strongly in Trump's camp.

Anyone still believing the GOP cares about us is living in the 19th century.

That may be true but I don't know what it has to do with my comment.

In any event, the framers conception of checks and balances, separation of powers, federalism and constitutional guarantees in general originates under the presumption that no politician cares about us but that his self interest will prompt him to act to check other self-interested politicians, to our benefit. The framers were not naïve and I trust neither am I.

Before you can set the agenda, you have to have a majority in both the House and Senate.

In agreement with you, I have often quoted John Kennedy who said, "first, you gotta win."

But it is also true that the entire rationale behind Donald Trump's candidacy is that a true conservative campaign will prevail. If we do not believe that then we are trapped in an endless cycle of loss. Do we want to return to the days of Mitt Romney for president?

T he truth is that it's vital not only to win but to win with candidates who are reliable (repeat, "reliable"] conservatives.

Donald Trump is our Paladin but let us not deceive ourselves, his history of picking subordinates and some candidates is disheartening.

AOC, although certainly a hypocrite for willing to throw Trump in jail, is also cynic enough to seek martyrdom for herself for its political effect .

You are absolutely correct, there are threshold limits on the amount of tyranny the people will accept when the left reveals its fascist underbelly as it enforces its policies. We have seen this reaction you describe this very day in Europe in the Europewide vote for the European Parliament.

But let's look at the position from which the left is being forced to retreat and I believe we will find that they will be forced one step back after two steps forward.

If you can sell global warming, there is no end to the tyranny that can be enforced from regulating stoves to imposing taxes.

If you can sell pandemic, there is no end to the tyranny that can be enforced up and down our Bill of Rights.

If you can sell racism, there is no end to the tyranny you can inflict to achieve social justice.

In other words, the Democrats know how to seize the high ground and rule from above. The higher the ground the more impervious the misrule is to reform.

The left tested the limits of its cynicism in Europe and was served a temporary setback. Now, it must either pretend to limit its tyrannies or increase the fear or urgency they had induced by ascending the high ground. Yes, they will take one step back.

In the modern era the vice president candidate has been selected because he would presumably help the ticket either geographically or ideologically.

Donald Trump chose Pence to balance the ticket ideologically, in the wake of Trump's sex escapades he needed an unimpeachable Christian to shore up his evangelical supporters.

Perhaps the most successful geographical choice was Lyndon Johnson by John F. Kennedy because Johnson delivered the barrios, legitimately and illegitimately, along the Mexican border which won the state of Texas, without which Kennedy would not have been President. This even though that, within the matrix of the Democrat party in 1960, Kennedy and Johnson were light years apart and both were despised by the their opposite camps.

If Trump needs a geographical help it would not come from any state of any candidates mentioned here. Trump does not need Florida, South Carolina or Ohio. He will not get enough help from Stefanik in New York to make a difference. Trump needs Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin; Doctor Ben Carson hails from Michigan and that is a very compelling consideration if one believes that Carson's presence on the ticket could make the decisive difference there.

Without polling data we are unable to make a considered judgment on Carson's potential to deliver Michigan. On the whole, I am of the opinion voiced by many on this thread that Carson simply does not have the charisma nor the aggression to fill the adversarial role of vice presidential candidates, to attack. Further, as noble a character as Doctor Carson undoubtedly is, I don't believe he is simply mean and ornery enough to win election in his own right and carry on as a conservative in office after 2028 and stand against the slings and arrows that a corrupt Democrat party and their corrupt media will hurled against him.

It seems that an overwhelming factor motivating Trump in his selection of subordinates has always been loyalty. Carson, if nothing else, is steadfast but that is not the moral basis for the selection. If Trump wants to act as a statesman he will select someone who can, above all, serve the nation as president. Carson would serve honorably but, I fear, not effectively. One can understand Trump's desire to have a loyal running mate after his experience with Pence and in view of the fact that the vice president is a constitutional officer over whom the president has no effective constitutional control but this is a decision for the ages.

An interesting consideration in the selection is personified by Senator Vance and Senator Cotten. Cotton is not specifically named in this list but he has been otherwise prominently mentioned. Senator Vance is a non-interventionist who was unambiguously clear in his opposition to the war in Ukraine while Cotton has spoken loudly in support of Ukraine and need to protect Taiwan. These two men embody contending policies concerning America's policies beyond the water's edge. In terms of public persona and quality of presentation on television there is nothing to choose between them and, therefore, the choice is whether one believes in a hard-line against foreign adventures or whether one sees the need to avoid another Afghanistan skedaddle that might lead to a disaster in Taiwan because we continue to betray our allies to the point that they abandon us. This is one of the main clefts in the Republican Party; as the age of Mitch McConnell begins to slip into unlamented memory, the issue of American foreign policy will have to be settled. Perhaps the fact that Senator Cotten has apparently been left off this shorter list tells us what Trump believes.

Representative Donalds offers the possibility of thoroughly poaching in the Democrats' traditional African-American domain and delivering us the election. Donalds is highly articulate and reliably conservative who hopefully has a very bright future in the Republican Party but it is a big jump to go from the House of Representatives to the national stage. Representatives Stefanik is equally articulate and able but she, too, is handicapped because she stands on a limited platform. In my judgment the best man for the job, even before Vance or Cotton, is Governor DeSantis who has gravitas, who is a proven executive, a brilliant mind, and a bona fide conservative who will assuredly carry on the policies of Donald Trump because he is a good chance of becoming president and 2028 and beyond. The problem of his coming from the same state as Trump can easily be rectified by Trump declaring his residence in New Jersey as Dick Cheney similarly did when he moved from Texas. DeSantis never puts a foot down wrong, he will not make any mistakes or embarrass the ticket, he will unite the party in this sense that we know we have a man in the wings ready to be president from day one. I believe the only problem is Trump's concerns about loyalty which we may view as an obsession or as prudence born of history.

McConnell is highly motivated by revulsion over the denial of due process meted out to his political enemy, Donald Trump. McConnell is speaking out not on behalf of Trump but in defense of the system which he wishes to prevail.

If the Democrats can corrupt the system with lawfare, the role of The Uni- Party and as well as stealth government will be swept away in favor of a pure leftist/Marxist power structure which will deal McConnell's kind no hand in the game.

McConnell is only protecting his own by protecting the status quo.

I agree with your contention that the bulk of the military age Chinese males illegally infiltrating America are likely crossing the border not with terrorist intent but out of economic necessity and a yearning for a better life similar to the motivation of other illegal aliens.

However, it is good to remember that it required only 19 terrorists armed with only box cutters to shake America to its core, disrupt aviation, cast us into recession, and precipitate two very ill considered disastrous wars for which we have yet to recover.

I calculate from the government figures that in the last two years nearly 100,000 illegal Chinese have entered the country and I suspect they can find 19 men with box cutters among them. It is not beyond the cold-blooded ruthlessness of the Chinese regime to threaten the families of every one of these men with torture and murder if the men do not carry out sabotage on order.

Examined here as a modification in urban warfare, this adaptation could easily be in reaction to drone warfare that has become so prolific and increasingly effective in Ukraine.

Kennedy's only hope in the election is to face either Trump or Biden one-on-one. He cannot win as a third-party candidate so he has produced a poll of 25,000 respondents that allegedly shows him beating Biden handily one-on-one and Trump narrowly.

Kennedy can get his one-on-one race only if one of the two main party candidates drops out. He probably considered Trump to be a likely dropout falling victim to lawfare but that eventuality seems increasingly less likely in view of the events delaying the federal and state cases. Biden, on the other hand, is possibly to be a victim of his own party establishment as his polls reveal his chances to be increasingly dismal. Therefore, Kennedy must assume that his one-on-one, if he is to get the chance, will come against Trump if it comes at all.

So what would Kennedy's strategy against Trump be? Just as the MAGA base is quite unlikely to dessert Trump, so too is it unlikely that Trump haters, conditioned now for nearly a decade by leftist media to despise and fear Trump, are unlikely to desert any reasonably acceptable candidate on the left who opposes Trump. Thus the race, beyond get out the vote drives to respective bases, will boil down to never-Trump Republicans, independents, and suburban women who want everybody to play nice and who recoil from Trump's alleged grotesqueries.

In this field, Kennedy is running on the side of a slightly larger party in a world in which independents are bigger than either party. His task then is to confine Republican voters to Trump's MAGA base. His task is to provide all other Republicans with a reasonable, that is sensible, alternative to Trump's conservative policies. In other words, wherever Kennedy can run to the right of Trump he should do so providing it does not antagonize his own Democrat base, independents and never- Trump Republicans.

The pollsters tell us that the number one issue today is the open border and Kennedy has declared recently on the side of angels calling for closing the border. Thus, he put himself in alignment with about 68% of the voters and provides sensitive and race phobic voters with a reasonable alternative without all that unseemly racism that the left has attached to Trump. Hence, Kennedy is in a position to run to the right of Trump quite safely on this issue.

Similarly, Kennedy is running to the right on the issue of voter ID, calling for the issuance of photo identification. He does not offend the base of the Democrat party, again, he can run to the right and even get to Trump's right without undermining his own party's support because the Democrat party grassroots are themselves not committed to voter fraud, that feature comes from their elites and professionals.

Kennedy has called for cutting the military budget in half, using the saved monies to balance the budget, increase healthcare subsidies keep taxes at current levels and, magically, balance the budget. In this he runs to Trump's right, who will want to increase military spending, and he panders to Trump supporters who want an end to foreign adventures, a position that Kennedy also promotes with the additional argument that foreign adventures will be curtailed because he will have reduced the military budget. Running to Trump's right, he still offers a plausible scenario for fiscal and foreign policy sanity.

There are other issues which should be analyzed but the thrust of his campaign emerges. It is also important to emphasize that Kennedy is artful in appearing to be reasonable and, when pushed, he is quite facile in diverting attention away from the downside of any issue he espouses by averting to his personal or family history. These discourses are well delivered and hold the audience.. He anticipates many of the potential charges against himself and blunts their force by frank admissions of his own drug and alcohol abuse etc. His story of redemption is credible and actually moving, especially to Moonbeam independents.

Kennedy is not to be dismissed, he is a very dangerous candidate who carries more than the aura of his name.

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In 2020 I watched rioters and looters burn their way across American cities and, old enough to remember 1968, concluded that the Democrats in their support of these leftists had sealed their fate in the upcoming November election for president and Congress. I was entirely wrong.

Trump lost, at least on the count if not the vote, we got bitch-slapped in the Senate and fell short of expectations in the House. 1968 simply skipped past 2020 and 1968 might well skip past 2024 if we don't understand what happened in 2020.

Consider the really stellar record the Trump and put together in his time in office leading up to 2020. The economy was breaking records and delivering the goods for every race and class because Donald Trump had turned it around. The good times rolled until Covid but Donald Trump rushed a vaccine through that everyone at the time believed would save us. He pumped money into the system that should have bribed every self obsessed voter a time proven election winning practice of Democrats. Yet he and Congress fell short.

It is not enough to claim that the election was stolen, we have not yet proven that to be the case in any forum that would carry the day although it is clear that it was rigged by the government and media as typified by the Hunter Biden laptop censorship. It was rigged because Zuckerberg ponied up more than $400 million to buy offices around the country that set the rules on voting. It was rigged because Republicans, including Trump, simply failed to understand the implications of mail in voting.

Despite 1968 and despite the great record that Donald Trump had amassed, we lost because we did not understand how the game had changed. After 2020 when it came time to clean house at the Republican National Committee we dithered and left Rona McDonnell unchecked and mostly unaudited. Have we done the long overdue housecleaning too late? We reversed our positions on mail in voting but have we created the infrastructure necessary to beat Democrats at that game? Do we have time? Given the imbalance in the records of these two men, how could it be that the polls are remotely close to even today?

Did Russia gate, impeachments, and now lawfare turn the world upside down in 2020? Why not in 2024?

Given the times and given the history since 1968, I too am "genuinely concerned."

Gaetz' forensic skills are not to be underestimated. He deftly played whack-- a--mole, smiting one challenger after another in his prosecution of the motion to vacate speaker McCarthy. It was one against all when Gaetz stood virtually alone against many establishment Republicans, emerging unscathed, at least unscathed as judged by those considering his rhetorical skills rather than the outcome.

He's long been known as a bomb thrower in House committee hearings and has earned a reputation as dangerous when on the hunt.

At a time when we have an asymmetrical media battlefield in which to plead our case to the electorate, we need every single voice that can penetrate. Gaetz offers a nimble mind and a sharp tongue. Oh and by the way, he is right on nearly all the issues.

I think this is it just about right. Thanks a lot!

I think I got my avatar back!

I think I got it now, thanks a lot!

Kennedy’s Flanking Strategy.

“It’s not “anti-Trump” to accurately discuss his record in office”

Whether accurate or not, and whether “anti-Trump” or not, it is important to understand that this is, in essence, a pro Kennedy attack and, significantly, the attack is from the Right.

Kennedy is recently boasting that he is in possession of a poll of about 26,000 individuals that shows with a minimal margin of error that he would best both Biden and Trump if he can get into a one on one matchup. In other words, if one drops out the other is doomed.

None of us will accuse the Democrat party of patriotism or in recent days of sanity (2+2= 5) but none of us will deny that Democrats are the apex predator when it comes to getting and holding power. Therefore, it remains within the realm of possibility that the Democrats will jettison Biden for some other candidate. Perhaps this will come not from the party elite but it might come from grassroots at the convention if Biden continues to falter and Kennedy shows some game.

So what would Kennedy’s approach be? He claims with his 26,000 individuals polled that he would win in a walk if he faces Biden alone. Against Trump, however, Kennedy claims the narrowest of margins in the all-important electoral college.

Given this asymmetrical battlescape, Kennedy must run today against Trump rather than Biden but he must appear to be running against Biden rather than Trump. In other words, Kennedy must attack Trump from the right and be confident that he will hold at least as much or more of the leftist base as Biden enjoys. He must bet that Democrat propaganda has done its job so well that there is nothing that can induce the Democrat base to vote for Trump, although some may be inclined to stay home. On the other hand, many more who would have stayed home out of ennui with Biden might become energized under Kennedy.

So Stossel’s argument presented here, that Trump blew up spending and fertilized rather than drained the swamp, is calculated to woo never Trumpers, Republican fiscal hawks (those opposed to tax cuts etc.) good government patriots and independents.

Recall that in the run-up to the election of 2016, Trump evaded issues of budget cutting preferring instead to run on tax cutting. To be fair, Trump’s position was that by cutting taxes, cutting regulations, reigniting manufacture and, presumably, firing up energy production, he would generate economic growth that would more than compensate for spending.

Many would argue that he was well along to achieving this when all was shattered by Covid. We probably will never know whether he was right or whether Stossel’s claims made here are the true story.

Note that Kennedy wants to balance the budget by cutting defense In Half! This is a modified approach to the right of Trump who certainly wanted to build up the military and to do so by increased spending. But note that Kennedy couples this proposal to cut the military in half with harder-edged Trump-like arguments against foreign wars, an approach which will be saluted by the right and by Trump supporters. In effect, Kennedy hopes to divide Trump strong military supporters from Trump non interventionist supporters.

Kennedy tries to get to the right of Trump on the issue of voter identification by declaring that he will provide all citizens with voter ID and confine voting to those with his ID. One of the few issues where Kennedy is consistent with confirmed Democrat platform is the issue of abortion which, of course, he cannot afford to waffle on. But note his conciliatory language and his appeal to the right with social services for children who survived the knife. Thus he hopes to tiptoe around to the right as he soothes with words agreeable to conservative ears.

This analysis of Kennedy’s approach can be run on many issues. It will be interesting to see how he positions himself against what he perceives as his real opponent, Donald Trump.

Nathan

I am touched by your concern and the remarks of those on this thread. I have not lost interest but energy as I venture into my 80s. I promise to get back on the job and try to add something worth reading.

Nathan