Bloomberg vs Trump

 

In the words of Red Buttons: "Strange things are happening...".  We're 240-some-odd days from the election, 8 months or so, and we can begin to see the vague outlines of how it's going to shape up.

Joe Biden, who just a few months back was the Dem front-runner, has slipped to 4th place as his campaign collapses reminiscent of a slow-motion train wreck.  The DNC has changed the debate rules to allow Mike Bloomberg to buy his way onto the stage.  Even so, Bernie Sanders has surged to first place and the DNC is going to be faced with a plateful of unappetizing choices at the convention.  If Bernie is, by then, still the leader, the DNC is going to have to torpedo him because there is no way he can compete against Donald Trump in a bustling economy.  Only Mike Bloomberg stands a chance now.  It's a small chance, but that's all the Dems have at this point.

What's interesting is that Bloomberg is an inveterate gun-grabber, so the pro-gun electorate finds him abhorrent.  Trump has been, over the past few months, methodically alienating that same community.  If the contest in November is 'Bloomberg vs Trump', 120-plus million gun owners will have no place to go...

...except to a third-party.  Or just stay home.  What if the LP or the Constitution Party puts up a plausible candidate for the first time in 30 years?  The threshold for getting a podium at the Presidential Debates is only 5% of the electorate.  In 2016, almost 129 million votes were cast.  Were some third-party to gather 7 million votes, the FEC would be forced to include them in the 2024 debates or, like the DNC in 2016, to rig the rules to keep the debates a two-party affair.  Either choice would be 'good news': one would finally allow a fresh voice to be heard nationally, while the other would demonstrate once and for all how utterly corrupt the entire system is.

Strange things, indeed.

 

The End Of The Affair

 

This is the situation as it stands now:

• the House has voted to impeach Trump and sent the articles to the Senate
• the Senate, after considerable debate, has voted against calling additional witnesses beyond those called by the House
• a formal Senate vote to remove or acquit will be held early next week
• everyone assumes the Senate will acquit Trump of wrongdoing.

The Democrats have been working to remove Trump from office since the instant he won the last Presidential election, and possibly before then, that much is glaringly obvious.  Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller spent $32 million on a team of Democrat-allied lawyers in a 2+ year effort to find high crimes or misdemeanors and found nothing even peripherally related to 'Russian collusion'.  The most serious result of that investigation was the indictment of General Michael Flynn on charges that — just this week — have resulted in a finding by a judge that the FBI withheld exculpatory evidence from Flynn's defense team.  That is: the FBI knew Flynn was innocent and went after him anyway.  In any ordinary criminal case, this would be enough to get any charges thrown out, and that is exactly what Flynn's team is asking for.  If they win, Flynn walks free, and what we got from the Mueller Probe, all that time, all that money, is 'nothing'.

Various employees of the FBI, CIA, and NSA and other TLAs have resigned or been fired for their related actions over the past 3 years.  At least one, Andrew McCabe, is in danger of going to federal prison.  Judges from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court have put on their shocked faces and declared that, much to their surprise and chagrin, affidavits presented to them by the FBI (signed by Director James Comey) to obtain warrants to spy on American citizens have now been discovered to be faulty, a nice way of saying "the FBI lied to us and we weren't skeptical enough to ask any piercing questions".  This is 'rot', and it's all the way through most of the federal bureaucracy.

At some point, a reasonable person will look inward and ask:  "After all this time and all this money and all these blemishes on formerly-revered institutions, could it be possible that there really is no 'there' there?"  This is an important question and can't be safely brushed aside.  If it turns out to be true that Trump is guilty of nothing beyond being a jerk (of which he is certainly guilty), that same reasonable person is face-to-face with a bureaucratic machine that can and will deliberately destroy anyone that gets in its way.  Is that what we want from our federal government?

Brushing the question aside is an admission that the chasm between Republicans and Democrats is unbridgeable, and that means that we are — not 'will be'; are — currently in a civil war; that Democrats and Republicans can no longer share the same country.  Although I think 'brushing it aside' is a very bad idea, I fear there are far too many people who will do exactly that.  They hate Trump so much that even the looming specter of civil war is not enough to bring them to their senses.

There is one thing that may save us from the dangers of Trump Derangement Syndrome: the example of Czechoslovakia.  In 1992, Czechoslovakia's parliament agreed that on January 1st, 1993 the country would split into two countries: Slovakia and Czechia, a 'Velvet Divorce'.  No shooting, no dead partisans, just 'haul down the old flag and run up two new ones'.  It went off without a hitch.  Splitsville, amicably.

In a way, it might be a good thing, all things considered, for the United States to become 'the Disunited States', for the left and right to 'dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them'.  Several quite nice things would happen very quickly if we were able to disunite the way Czechoslovakia did in 1993.  For one, Red America and Blue America would stop paying for each other's pet projects.  Blue America would stop funding seemingly-endless foreign military interventions; Red America would stop supporting a host of progressive giveaways.  Because both factions would get to write new Constitutions, other hot-button issues could be handled expeditiously:  the 2nd amendment, the hottest of hot-button issues, might exist in one and not in the other.

We should think about maybe having a 'Velvet Divorce' of our own.  What do you think?  Good idea or bad idea?