Thy will be done.

Basically speaking, 73.8 million prayers were lifted. The realist in me has come, sort of, to a reconciliation that the Biden/Harris ticket won. All that’s left to do is the crying.

It’s especially hard, I think, for Christians who do firmly believe in the power of prayer. How do we ‘measure’ the effectiveness of prayers against actualities not of our choosing? While we may be hurting, I think it’s important to step back and look at things dispassionately.

First of all, America has been moving in this direction for quite some time. We did little to recognize it, let alone stop it. We just went along because, well, we’re busy and who has time to work these things out while juggling kids and work and family issues and the day to day trials and tribulations of the work a day world. Secondly, who could have foreseen the tremendous accomplishments of President Trump when he assumed power four years ago – did any one of us think he’d have such breath-taking success?

The thing to remember, when we scratch our heads and wonder if God has deserted us, is that for God, this is all just one long day. He sees the beginning, the middle, and the end of all things all at one time. He knows and sees what we can never know and see. There is always a reason. There is always the fulfillment of His plan. This turn of events may be a chastening; it may have an outcome, over the next four years, that we simply can’t imagine. But whatever the future holds, He is still in charge and ultimately, His will will be done – on earth, as it is in heaven.

So, as folks say, buck up, buttercup. He’s given us the strength to get through all that we’ve surmounted throughout our lives and we’ve lived through tough times as a country and we will, with His help, get through this as well. Don’t stop praying for our country; don’t stop praying for the President of the United States no matter who he or she may be; don’t stop praying for our governments and the people who man them. He hears us. But always remember, “THY will be done”

Now What, America?

One of the things that feels strange lately to me is that I’m only really writing one post a week. Mind, it’s a good thing, I was burning out till first Audrtre and then Jessica (God love ’em) rescued me. In truth, I don’t read quite as much either, and my viewpoint tends to be a little longer, which is where I’m at my best. But not writing a book every week does feel strange. But you all benefit from it.

One of the things that were written about this week, from all over the right is essentially “Now what??? Where is America going?” It’s a fraught question, so let’s look at some options.

In American Thinker, Frank Friday thinks we and Canada ought to trade some territory.

Let’s take the blue parts of America along the East and West Coast and put them in Canada. I mean, it’s so obvious, so simple — Canada already is what American liberals have always wanted. Complete government-run health care; gun control; a make-believe military; high taxes; and impossibly snooty, elitist politicians. Even Barack Obama, when he sees the effortless way Justin Trudeau can lift an eyebrow, or stick his nose in the air, just melts with envy. We’ll call this new country Canada-America to start with, Can-America for short.

Then, for red America, we will add the Prairie Provinces of Canada, the Yukon, and all of British Columbia except the southwest corner. This is the part of Canada that talks like Sarah Palin; owns all the guns, such as there are; and has no problem with great big machines strip-mining the earth to get all the good stuff, like the Alberta Tar Sands or Tony Beets’s gold-mining dredge. We’ll call this amalgamation Big America.

That’s far more elegant than simple secession and likely would make a lot of people on both sides of the present border happy. New England threatened this once before of course, during the War of 1812. In short, I like this idea, but since it would reduce the coasts to depending on a foreign power – Red State America, for their very sustenance (as in fact, they do now) It’s probably not very likely.

But Robert Lopez, writing in American Greatness seems to think America will split, as well. His scenario is more history-based, which can be useful but should never be carried too far into the details.

The Supreme Court seems to have made peace with its own irrelevance vis-à-vis the irremediable schism between two halves of the country. The Texas-led half is not, despite some people’s surface reading, a resurrection of the confederacy. Territorially the states that joined Texas’s case form a column reaching from the Mexican to the Canadian border, including the northernmost state, Alaska, and Indiana. Georgia and North Carolina, obviously, are not aligned with Texas anymore, while several northern states like Ohio are moving toward alignment with the red camp.

In cultural terms, the California-led states have reversed their historic position on civil rights and now oppose the fundamental purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment and equal protection under the law (which I review in some detail here.) In their successful pleading to the Supreme Court, they rejected the notion that outside forces can intervene in a state’s voting or judicial process, thereby resurrecting the arguments from former confederate states about their right to block African Americans from suffrage through practices like a poll tax, literacy test, or KKK-style voter intimidation.

“But the courts said so!” is a cold argument to raise given the history of Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Korematsu v. United States.

So much of the way we look at ourselves has been formed by the history of the Roman Republic, maybe he has a point when he says that the US will split much as the Roman Empire did, with the blue states playing Rome with its multiple sackings while the red states (including the leadership of Texas) continue for maybe a thousand years as Constantinople did. It’s an interesting thesis, in any case.

Then there is Steven Hayward at PowerLine who posits that Trump is (whatever happens now) the most consequential one-term president since Lincoln. He makes the point that Trump has led a realignment that may be as great as that led by FDR who took four terms to accomplish what Trump has in one. I agree with him.

In two posts, The Adaptive Curmudgeon summarizes his (and my) view from the trenches, in the first, published just before SCOTUS ran and hid in their bunker, he said this:

[…] Resignation has not been the feel of the world. The press is screaming at me until every intellectual circuit is muttering “we’re doomed” but my soul senses otherwise. I know “doomed”. This ‘aint it. Doomed is a gutless leader facing a wise and implacable foe doing incremental measured misdeeds. We have a guy who’s never backed down from a fight facing a stupid, overconfident, and power drunk group that just plain isn’t up to the task of coup. Yeah, I said it. It’s a coup. They’re chumps for initiating it. Sloppy, uncontrolled, incapable of recognizing a time to retreat, domestic (and foreign?) enemies have acted like toddlers with a machine gun. Our would be oppressors are dangerous, but they’re losers and idiots.

Yup, that’s what I saw as well, and to a point still do. In the second just a day or so ago he says this:

Texas offered an “all in” argument but the SCOTUS took a powder. Fuck them. Texas wasn’t the only game in town. Ironically, it was the argument least likely to publicize the cheat. Meanwhile, each “contested State” has one or more independent legal actions. They’re still ongoing.

I like this movie. I’m not a “sprint to the finish” kind of guy. I like to win with grinding certainty. Slow and steady, hard to refute, documenting every step of the way. Legal action in every State is doing what I want; carefully establishing facts.

So do I, the legal equivalent of Grant’s Overland Campaign. grind them up till they’re destroyed, and about that time Sherman will come along and kick them in the ass. It’s a decisive war-winning strategy.

At The American Spectator, Lou Aguilar reminds us of something else: Real Men voted for Trump. He writes:

A new poll from the Survey Center on American Life found that self-reported “masculine men” overwhelmingly supported President Trump in the last election, 55 percent to 35 percent (“less masculine” men went for Biden 58 percent to 40 percent). Yet even without the alpha dog in the White House, these masculine men will battle the Swamp. That’s because tough guys will do what they always do: usurp tyranny and unreality, beginning with the liberal dream of a Rainbow Coalition. The greatest obstacle to a permanent majority of minorities is male bonding, which partly explains the record high non-white turnout for Trump. In the same poll, 71 percent of black men and 70 percent of Hispanic men (a group that includes me) identify as “completely masculine.” Pitiably, only 54 percent of white men do — too many having buckled under their racial and gender shaming by liberals.

And that is what makes red states red, in my experience, the men (and women too) here are people who actually do things, make things, fix things, and above all live in the real world. We simply know that anyone who says there’s an easy way is full of bullshit, and not fit to lead a horse to water. He also reminds us of the cycle that Spencer Klavan summarized for us.

Weak men make bad times.

Bad times make strong men.

Strong men make good times.

Good times make weak men.

He says we are someplace between the first and second cycles, I think he’s right.

That’s the major takeaway today, the corollary is from our history.

Hold the Line and keep your powder dry.

Fox News Delenda Est

Today is of course our traditional Veteran’s Day (or as it used to be known Armistice Day).as across the rest of the English speaking world it is Remembrance Day, the day when we all remember the carnage of The Great War. I wrote about it years ago and I have little to add, so you can read that here, and remember our veteran’s as our friends recall their war dead.

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But the Republic is threatened today as well, and so we need to pay attention. One of the things that was most disheartening and then infuriating on election night was, Fox News’ unseemly haste in calling Arizona for Biden (which is still not decided as I write, and its abysmal slowness in calling Florida for Trump. It was neither coincidental nor accidental, it was planned to discourage Trump Voters. Ace has been outstanding on this.

But this is not a decision recently made. Fox — the News Division — has been trending hard left for years and years, and have ignored our protests and complaints about it.

Remember Chris Stirewalt making the very, very early call that the Democrats had won the House in 2018 — while people on the West Coast were still voting? Costing Republicans in highly competitive House seats the election, as marginal voters, dispirited by the early call, decided not to vote?

And remember him explaining to viewers — who were already registering their anger about this — that Fox News’ “brain room” (that’s what they really call it, and it’s a murderer’s row of smug but stupid liberals) could make this call “because we’re just that damned good”?

If anyone can find that clip, please post it in the comments.

Anyway, we screamed about that two years ago.

And what happens Tuesday night? The same thing, but this time on steroids.

This time, Fox News made the startlingly early call that the Democrats would keep the House — and gain at least five seats!

They’re sticking by that call. Even though there is some doubt the Democrats will keep the House. Certainly they’re not gaining any seats.

But they’re on Team Democrat.

Have been for years.

The guy making all these calls is a registered Democrat and a big donor to Obama and Hillary.

Fox News knew what they were getting when they hired him. Fox News got what it wanted out of the hiring.

They decided to do this. This is a plan they are executing. Even if one or two of these people make some very weak noises about Trump still having lawsuits in play — which, again, is an inarguable statement; we should not credit these assholes for managing to report that which is inarguably true — it’s simply an attempt to con you into sticking with them as they continue their metamorphosis from ugly conservative pupa into beautiful liberal butterfly.

But it will, of course, fail. We are far from gullible these days, we’re all grizzled veterans of the media and corporate war, and we no longer give quarter, or grant forgiveness. we don’t talk about what to do, we simply do, and if Faux News thinks the libs will keep them going, well why would they, they’ve got their own loyal networks.

By the way, there is a rumor that Jeanine Pirro has been fired for not failing to criticize these people, there will be more, I’m sure.

Many of us have switched to Newsmax, as a friend says, they do say “Our President” too much about Trump, but only the nonvoting dead have no opinion on him. Frontpage Magazine reports that:

It is official. Newsmax TV surpassed both Fox Business and CNBC in daytime ratings the day after Election Day.

Nielsen reported Wednesday that Newsmax drew 287,000 average viewers per minute in the key daypart 9am to 4pm, outpacing CNBC with 285,000 viewers and Fox Business with 281,000.

Newsmax also outpaced Fox Business in primetime, with 205,000 viewers compared to 138,000.

The Nielsen rating only tells part of the story. OTT viewership on platforms like YouTube added an additional 100,000 per minute live viewers tuned into Newsmax TV on Wednesday.

“We’re in less cable homes, our channel position is usually not as good as competitors, and our brand is less known, yet we’re beating these guys,” Chris Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax TV said. “We have a better mousetrap and viewers are flocking to us.”

Conservatives started disappearing during the election coverage due to the obvious bias, and we are gone beyond reach. We don’t need a condescending liberal Fox News, we’ve got plenty of choice in that without the hypocrisy. Very few of us would return for any reason. Ace sums it up.

But they have no plan of deviating from the plan to become CNN With Country Music.

They thought about this plan. They previewed this plan for the past three years.

They’re now executing this plan.

The only way that Fox stops the plan is if the Murdoch bois are forced to sell their stock in the company to someone with more credibility with conservatives.

But the only way that happens is if their ratings fall so low as to constitute a bloodbath.

And, as I’ve said: Who cares if that even does come to pass? Fox News is just a brand. It’s not even a good brand.

Once Fox goes down, there will be replacements.

As Roger Ailes observed: Fox News — the conservative-leaning fair and balanced version of it — discovered an overlooked niche audience — “Half the country.”

The current ownership of Fox and its suburban Karen liberal directors like Paul Ryan have forgotten that. They want to compete for leftwing eyeballs.

Well, they’re welcome to try!

But there will in fact arise a new, big, conservative alternative.

And whether the new alternative is Newsmax or OAN or a merger between them or some new network entirely — the new alternative won’t need Fox News’ poisoned brand dragging it down.

American Integrity

A reminder of just how young the United States is. According to the Daily Wire, Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr., died Sept. 26 in Franklin, Tennessee. Who? I hear you ask. Well, he was an attorney and a teacher, teaching at both The Virginia Military Institute and at The Citadel. All in all a very admirable man as the linked article shows.

But what is really striking is that 175 years before his death, his Grandfather left the presidency of the United States. He was John Tyler, the first President to succeed after the death of the President, in his case William Henry Harrison, the victor of the Battle of Tippecanoe, which pretty much ended Tecumseh’s Confederacy, and propelled him to become the first Governor of the Indiana Territory, and then the first Whig president of the United States. The campaign slogan that you may remember from school was “Tippecanoe and Tyler too”.

John Tyler was the president who annexed the Republic of Texas, at its request, in 1845.

“Perhaps John Tyler wasn’t the greatest of presidents,” Tyler reflected. “He was a great man, a loving husband and father and was a servant of the people. You can’t beat that. Who knew the unknown president would be an example to us all (through his integrity)?”

I think we can safely say the same about his grandson.

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Over at Ace’s where they speak plain English, occasionally the Anglo-Saxon version, CBD has some thoughts about how TDS got so prevalent.

President Trump is their worst nightmare of an Alpha Male; he gets the hot chicks, he has lots of money, he is physically imposing, and worst of all, he doesn’t run away from a fight the way they were taught by their mothers. That’s why they snipe at him behind the anonymity of Twitter, and the protection of the crowd during press conferences.

But deep down in their frightened and intimidated hearts, they know that Donald Trump and his immense shock of hair would punch the bully and bang the prom queen…and they wouldn’t and couldn’t. […]

And even worse! he loves America, and America loves him back.

As CBD says the idea comes from Dennis Prager.

He and many other Americans (we will soon know how many) who support the president’s Republican policies will vote for the party that stands for almost everything they oppose because they will “vote for the man, not the party.”

I find nothing admirable in this position — morally or rationally. At this time in American history, to care more about an individual candidate than the party is to support the unraveling of America. It is so irrational as to be incredible.

Voting for any Democrat — whether for mayor, district attorney, state legislature, state governor, the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate or president — is to vote for someone who will enable the left to destroy America as we know it. (That is their wording, not only mine.) The Democratic Party was once largely liberal. But today, it is left, and the left readily acknowledges it wishes to “transform” America, which means to destroy America as we have known it.

Yep, for years, I was one who voted the man, but that was in the days of the ‘Uniparty’. Those days have gone, The only possible vote today for an American patriot with any claim to integrity is to pull the Big Red Lever marked Republican. There’s that word again: integrity. It’s something that runs through American history in a flood rare if not nonexistent in the rest of the political world. We’ve spoken of this before. In one of Jessica’s articles on John Ford/John Wayne (and Maureen O’Hara) movies, she said this ( about A Quiet Man):

[…] It works because the great John Ford conjures up the things which matter in real life including greed, pride and ambition – and he makes a good story out of them. We can identify with Sean as the outsider with a secret – and a heart as big as a city, and we can sympathise with his ignorance of the local customs. But we also see a humility there too – a willingness to try to learn and to fit in – without losing his integrity. Mary Kate is almost a Bronte heroine – fiercely proud and independent, but trapped by her sex and times into a place where the option open to her seems to have narrowed to being a house-keeper to her bullying brother – to whom she gives almost as good as she gets. But there’s a sense of life being wasted and yet, heavily as she falls for Sean Thornton, she, too, will not do so at the price of her integrity.

That word, integrity, seems to me at the heart of so many of Ford’s films. Men, and women. make choices, and often the rewards for a loss of integrity seem greater than those for retaining it – but Ford gets what we want from him – that his characters choose what is right. His worlds are complex reflections of reality, but he never loses us in relativism; men are men if they make the sacrifices necessary to sustain that identity, and Ford shows us them in many dimensions.

And that is one of the things that connects us, from now in the 21st century, all the way from Trump and the Duke through Lincoln, and Polk, to Jefferson and Washington himself, the man who no less than George III of England called, “The Greatest Man in the World”.

Integrity is that important to free men. To the point that the great founder who designed the economic system that made America the greatest economic power the world has ever seen, a guy by the name of Alexander Hamilton, President Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury, who had a running feud with Jefferson, which was current during the election of 1800 (The ugliest in American history including 2020) said this:

“In a choice of Evils let them take the least – Jefferson is in every view less dangerous than Burr.”

And so, a deal was made, to protect the Federalist economic program, while electing Thomas Jefferson to be the 3d President of the United States. In Hamilton’s view, Jefferson for all his faults (and there were quite a few, in Hamilton’s, and my, view) did, and it was an overriding characteristic, believe in liberty, and in their knowledgeable view, all Burr believed in was Burr and Burr’s pocketbook.

And that is exactly the situation we face again in 2020, 220 years later. President Trump, whatever his faults (and he too has plenty) believes in liberty, while Biden believes in Biden and Biden’s pocketbook to the exclusion of anything else.

Like Hamilton almost said then, we can vote for the United States or we can vote for Burr Biden.

Video Monday

So, are tired of listening to me? I’m tired of flapping my jaw, so today we are going to let some other people talk. Let’s start with why America is so rich.

This, in fact, pretty much sums it up

 

So, what makes us different?

Here’s why

But this election has the possibility of ending all this, and putting out that beacon. I’ve said many times this year, “You can vote for America, or you can vote for the Democrats.” I mean it.

Here is Victor Davis Hanson on “Plague, Panic, and Protests …” Our weird election year

Trump and the Glorious Revolution

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, 

Almost all Americans know these words, many of us review them at least annually. But they did not spring forth fully formed from Thomas Jefferson’s mind, great and agile as it was. They are part of our English inheritance, just as most of our government and constitution were. In fine, the entire concept comes from John Locke and his Second Treatise on Government. In it, he begins by defining political power as the:

right of making Laws with Penalties of Death, and consequently all less Penalties, for the Regulating and Preserving of Property, and of employing the force of the Community, in the Execution of such Laws and in defence of the Common-wealth from Foreign Injury, and all this only for the Publick Good.

The chief property he is referring to here is one’s body. One owns his own body and no one can tell him to use it otherwise than in his own interest. He also owns the things that he has made, and that includes his income and all the things he may purchase that derive from his labor. He also posits that the Legislature can only legitimately legislate from the basis of the natural law and that it must apply equitably to all citizens and not favor certain sections of the citizenry.

Here is the ultimate defense of the right of self-defense, so eloquently stated in both the  English and American Bills of Rights. And the delegation of that right (while still preserving it to us as individuals) was one of the things we did as we instituted governments amongst men.

And that is also why the President was entirely correct in stating that he would never denounce the right of American citizens to defend themselves or their property from lawless rioters.

The Democrat city and state hierarchies have been almost uniformly derelict or worse in protecting their citizens against the mobs that Democrats themselves have set loose amongst them, and mind, this is primarily a city and state responsibility, one of the major reasons they exist, that no person or shopkeeper in these cities can reasonably expect protection from the authorities, and thus the right to defend themselves and their property comes right back to them, unless and until they can again get reasonable assurance that the government will protect them.

The legislative body and it’s executive, whether from within the body or separately elected is central to all this, and I’ve merely skimmed it. But when the government in any or all of its parts (executive, legislative, and judicial in Locke’s view as in the Constitution) shirk or evade that duty, as we are seeing this year in many Democrat run cities, then the people have the inherent right to remove the offending officials, or to supersede them, or even to revolt, changing the entire form of government.