... because nothing matters. Here's why.
Progressive policies and philosophies are completely divorced from real world performance. They float along, propelled by the looting of the future. As long as you can still borrow money, you can live in their fantasy world.
As the election draws near, I've taken to listening to Mark Halperin's excellent Two Way channel on YouTube and X. Unbiased and professional, it's expert-level sports talk radio for political junkies. On his morning briefing show, he and his guests have repeatedly wondered why Kamala can't answer simple questions, particularly when the same questions arise over and over and over again. Why hasn't her team coached her on better answers? Why doesn't she have any answers at all? The topics include:
- Biden's cognitive decline
- The invasion at the southern border
- Inflation
- What she would do different than Biden
She never has a coherent, solid answer for any of them which is why she gets asked the same questions in every single town hall and interview that isn't a complete tongue-bath.
If I took the time to join 2-Way and had a chance to interact with Mark and his cohosts, I'd say the answer is simple. The analogy I'd use would be watching a high school baseball prospect take batting practice. If the guy takes 50 batting-practice fastballs and grounds them all to the infield, the answer is simple. He's a lousy player. Kamala is like that. She's been served up these questions in friendly environments over and over and over again and doesn't have answers. This is as good as she gets. She's a lousy candidate. She's an airhead.
And yet, the Democrats can afford to run a lousy candidate since nothing is riding on the election for them. Nothing real, that is. We as a nation glide along, our path lubricated by borrowed money and a relatively peaceful world whose order was purchased by previous generations. There's no need for real accomplishments or solving real problems.
Gary, Indiana
I don't recall what prompted it, but I searched for black-majority cities in the US. One such is Gary, Indiana. It's about 70% black. The mayor is black as is almost the whole power structure in the city. It has been for some time. Naturally, it's solidly deep blue. Its schools churn out illiterate kids.
The progressives don't have to perform, not in any real sense, not even for their top-ranked demographic, blacks. It's not just that they don't perform, they don't even come close to performing. Reading doesn't require technology or fancy school rooms. As far as education goes, it's as simple as it gets and yet, the progressives aren't getting the job done. Life up to now has shown them that there isn't much of a penalty for failure. It's all covered by borrowed money.
Back To Kamala
So why not run Kamala? Why not run a woman who is clearly a figurehead? Biden's been a figurehead his whole term and that seemed to work out pretty well. Why not import voters from Haiti and similar dumps? It hasn't caused any serious problems yet. The wealthy people in DC are doing fine and they can all preen about how compassionate they are.
Trump For President
To be sure, I'm voting for Trump on Tuesday. It's not a hard choice. I'd have gladly taken DeSantis or Haley over Trump, but here we are. MAGA wanted primal scream therapy so primal scream therapy is what we got. It's not really an election about serious issues, it's simply a referendum on whether or not you hate Trump. No one really knows what Kamala thinks about anything and it doesn't matter. Is Orange Man Bad or is Orange Man Good? That's the crux of the election.
Meanwhile, the black kids in Gary, Indiana can't read. That's OK, right?
I rather expected that you were eventually going to talk yourself into voting for a man that you personally despise again, even though he is not only the personal embodiment of the Seven Deadly Sins, but has also run up the national debt by almost 8 trillion[1] while his ham-handed actions did more to prevent conservatives from achieving their objectives than the Democrats did. I didn't expect you to say it was "not a hard choice", though.
ReplyDelete[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN
As for Gary, Indiana, their problem isn't who is in charge, or the poor quality of their schools. Their problem is that Gary only exists as a company town for two steel mills and an oil refinery. I've been there. I once got turned around and ended up driving right through the oil refinery, and it was the closest approximation to Mordor that I've ever seen. The steel mills used to employ lots of people, but with increasing automation over the years, the number of employees has cratered while the mills are still as much of a source of smokes and stinks as they ever were. Gary is Not A Nice Place To Live, and so everyone who isn't employed at the mills and has the skills and resources to go elsewhere has done so. The city lost a full 2/3 of their population since the 1970s, with all the abandoned buildings and shuttered businesses that go along with that.
ReplyDeleteTim, it's reading. People have been learning how to read since long before electric lighting in homes. Stop making excuses for it.
ReplyDeleteAlmost all of the most onerous entitlement programs were started by the progressives. Once we got hooked on the "free" money, it became nearly impossible to turn off those money spigots. The conservatives are the only ones who have tried. It's a bit misleading to say that Republicans presided over this or that much deficit spending when there was no practical way for them to attack the largest causes of the debt.
ReplyDeleteI'm not "making excuses", I'm pointing out a fact. If you take any school, and pull out most of the kids whose parents care about their education, then what's left is a bunch of kids who can't or won't learn and whose parents won't do anything about it. I don't care if the school is run by "Liberals" or "Conservatives". If the school district either had a huge slug of the population move away to find work elsewhere, or had a lot of parents move their kids to a nearby "better" school, their school is going to suffer for it. I am seeing it happening up here: we've got one school that is regularly rated as one of the top schools in the state, and parents in the surrounding districts who care about their kids' education send them to that school. Michigan has a "schools of choice" program, which means parents can do that without penalty. And so that school has almost a third of their students coming in from the surrounding districts, to the point where they are running out of space and are looking into expanding the facility. And meanwhile, the surrounding school districts are performing significantly worse, because all the kids who used to show that they were perorming well have transferred. And now these surrounding schools are developing bad reputations as a result.
ReplyDelete"The conservatives are the only ones who have tried"
ReplyDeleteThe only time they really tried was during the Clinton administration. And the thing is, *it was working*. But then once Clinton was gone, they blew it and ran the deficit up all on their own. And they've done absolutely nothing to convince me that they really actually care about the deficit since then. Which leads me to thing that if you really care about the deficit, you should support having a Republican congress with a Democrat as president.