I think that a number of factors will ultimately tamp it down [campus protests/riots]. The ability of people to record videos of police has been a tremendous spur to calls for reform. But police are not the only people who can be filmed in public; so can protesters. I suspect that as people discover what can happen when future employers google up videos of you shouting “[expletive deleted] the police” or screaming at professors and speakers, the costs of this sort of protest will rise, and there will be less of it. Moreover, I suspect that both alumni and state funding for schools where this sort of thing happens a lot will often decline, putting pressure on administrators to curb it.
Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.
April 19, 2019
QotD: The revolution will be YouTubed, which might snuff it out before it gets underway
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April 17, 2019
Theresa May has been brilliantly successful in achieving her (true) aims
Theodore Dalrymple admits having misjudged Mrs. May as a failure, when in fact her plans have been coming brilliantly to fruition:
Like almost everyone else, I regarded [Theresa May] as a pygmy in courage and a giant in incompetence, but it is time for a re-assessment, especially with regard to her efforts to Britain’s exit from the European Union. After the Union granted a further delay to Britain’s departure, the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, said that it was his secret dream to prevent Britain from leaving. It is pleasing to know that Mr Tusk’s secret dreams so entirely coincide with those of the British political class, including (I surmise) those of Mrs May. At last we have a basis for full and final agreement.
Like the great majority of the British political class, Mrs May was always in favour of remaining in the Union. This class was so confident of its ability to persuade the population that it was right that it agreed with practically no demur to a referendum which would pronounce the winner as the side which obtained 50 per cent plus one of the votes cast. Thus the matter of British membership, it thought, would be settled once and for all.
The problem for the political class was now to find a method of overriding the result of the referendum without doing so in too blatant a fashion. And here, in Mrs May, it found a perfect leader.
Needless to say, Mrs May, having been selected as Prime Minister, could not just put forward her conviction that Britain should remain in the Union and say outright that she had no intention of carrying out the will of the majority. At that stage, such a disavowal of the result would have been politically impossible and might even have caused unrest. Instead, she went through a brilliantly elaborate charade of negotiating withdrawal, in such a way that the result would not be accepted by Parliament. Her agreement would be withdrawal without withdrawal, the worst of all possible outcomes, all complication and difficulty, and no benefit.
She knew perfectly well that the European Union, having drafted this agreement unacceptable to Parliament, would not renegotiate it. Why should it, since it knew that Parliament had no intention of demanding a real and total withdrawal, since it did not want to withdraw at all? She also knew that Parliament would never agree to a withdrawal without an agreement with the Union, as Parliament has repeatedly made clear.
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April 14, 2019
April 9, 2019
QotD: It won’t be easy to bring back politicians’ willingness to compromise
I think the donors are a problem for both parties, in terms of driving choices that aren’t necessarily the best strategies for building the base. (Both parties completely missed the populist backlash on trade, for example. Now, as a free trader, I like the resulting policy. But they paid for it at the polls.) But the issue isn’t fundamentally the donors. The issue is that fundamentally, both sides hate each other, and both sides have an increasing “It is not enough that I win. My enemies must lose” mentality about politics. Combine that with various reforms that have empowered extremists — campaign finance reforms that empowered outside groups, yes, but also the shift to primaries from conventions, and the abolition of the earmarks and pork that used to grease legislative passage. Throw in the “Great Sort” into increasingly politically homogenous communities — those are the problems you need to fix if you want to bring back legislative compromise. And damned if I know how we get there, because you can’t tell people where to live, and anyone who suggested getting rid of primary elections and bringing back pork barrel politics would come off as a backroom sleaze.
Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.
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April 8, 2019
April 7, 2019
Justin’s SNC-Lavalin swamp … how deep does it go?
For a penny-ante scandal where there’s no hint of sexual impropriety or unmarked bundles of bills being passed along in brown paper bags, Justin’s SNC-Lavalin scandal looks more and more interesting the more we look at it:
A game-changing bombshell lies buried in the supplementary evidence provided to the House of Commons Judiciary Committee by former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould.
It has gone virtually unreported since she submitted the material almost a week ago. As far as we can find, only one journalist — Andrew Coyne, columnist for the National Post — has even mentioned it and even then he badly missed what it meant, burying it in paragraph 10 of a 14 paragraph story.
The gist of the greatest political scandal in modern Canadian history is well-known by now. It’s bigger than Adscam, the revelation 15 years ago that prominent members of the Liberal Party of Canada and the party itself funneled tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks into their own pockets from federal spending in Quebec sponsoring ads promoting Canadian unity. That was just venal politicians and a crooked political party helping themselves to public money.
The Trudeau-SNC-Lavalin scandal is so much more, involving the corruption of the supposedly non-partisan civil service, and even the judiciary, for the political benefit of a disgraced political party, and a cover-up endorsed, encouraged and actively engaged in by the sitting Members of Parliament of that political party.
[…]
Which brings us to the ticking-timebomb-evidence the committee and the public didn’t get to hear.
In between the appearances by Butts and Warnick, Wilson-Raybould testified to getting a report from her chief of staff who had had a meeting with Butts and Trudeau’s chief of staff Katie Telford. They aggressively pushed the attorney general to get an “outside” opinion from someone like the retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Beverley McLachlin, on dropping the criminal charges against SNC-Lavalin in favour of a non-criminal plea deal.
Wilson-Raybould took contemporary notes of what her staff member told her.
“My COS (chief of staff…ed) asked what if the opinion comes saying “She can review it, but she shouldn’t” or simply “She can’t review it” end of story? Mr. Butts stated “It wouldn’t say that.”
BOOM!!!!!!
Read what Butts said again. And again. And again.
“IT WOULDN’T SAY THAT”
H/T to Halls of Macademia and Small Dead Animals for the link.
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April 6, 2019
“The Prime Minister has repaid my loyalty with betrayal”
Despite the full applicability of the headline to Canadian politics, this isn’t about the Dauphin’s betrayal of cabinet ministers or the Canadian people, it’s actually Matt Ridley talking about Prime Minister Theresa May:
The Prime Minister has ignored the views of the majority of her Cabinet and ruled out No Deal. The reason, we are told, is that No Deal might lead to the re-imposition of direct rule over Northern Ireland, and might lead to a second Scottish independence referendum.
That either of these considerations should outweigh the independence of the United Kingdom from an increasingly decrepit but increasingly autocratic empire is bizarre. If No Deal causes a second referendum in Scotland – we were told that the vote itself would cause that too, remember, but it did not – then we will win that too.
But more bizarre is that these worries have existed all along. If the Prime Minister thinks the risk of direct rule in Northern Ireland (which is happening in practice anyway) trumps all other considerations, and rules out No Deal, then why did she not say so more than two years ago or at any time since? Instead, she said 108 times that we would leave the EU on 29th March, whatever happens; 50 times that she would not extend that date; and 32 times that No Deal is better than a bad deal. Not once did she say it was impossible.
[…]
Mrs May should have ruled out No Deal at the start of the negotiations, if that is what she thought, or she should have meant “No Deal is better than a bad deal” when she said it. As it is, the combination of threatening No Deal until the moment when it might actually matter in the negotiations, then dropping the threat on the feeblest of latest excuses, is about as foolish as one can imagine. And now rushing off to hand the initiative to an apologist for totalitarians, anti-Semites and terrorists instead. Thanks.
The Prime Minister and her allies are now chanting that it is all the fault of the European Research Group for rejecting her deal and are saying they have no alternative than the dismal choices of supporting her deal or no Brexit, as if amnesiac about the third option: their recent promises to leave with No Deal if necessary. Yet the truth is that ever since the debacle at Chequers in July, when everybody from half the Cabinet to the Democratic Unionists to the media to the people themselves told her quite clearly that she would never get the Chequers plan through Parliament, she has been the one at fault.
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SNC-Lavalin – Justin couldn’t admit that he was wr… wr… wr… not right
Chris Selley on the Prime Minister’s odd decision not to get ahead of the SNC-Lavalin scandal while he still had some credibility with the public:
It seems like another century, but was in fact only a few weeks ago, that Justin Trudeau had a plausible plan to cauterize the SNC-Lavalin wound within his party: He would apologize for … something.
Presumably he would not apologize for trying to protect 9,000 jobs, and presumably he would not admit improper interference in the attorney general’s and director of public prosecution’s roles. But perhaps he might cop to overzealousness in concern for those jobs, or for poorly communicating his entirely appropriate concerns, or for the various anonymous party sources who were slagging off Jody Wilson-Raybould to friendly journalists.
The latter, certainly, seemed downright imperative. Trudeau and his minions, either under orders or self-assigning, had snatched calamity from the jaws of bother. They were badmouthing an accomplished Indigenous female lawyer for being headstrong, “difficult to work with,” and various other descriptors commonly attached to Type A women when they behave like Type A men. When they ran out of those, they started insinuating she wasn’t a very good justice minister — which is certainly an arguable point, but which rather clashed with Trudeau’s insistence she would still hold that title if not for Scott Brison’s impending departure.
It was absolutely torching their brand. People were laughing in their faces. Something had to be done. And this stand-by-for-contrition narrative was lent some credence, fittingly enough, by anonymous sources. “A senior government official said one of the options being discussed is for Trudeau to ‘show some ownership over the actions of his staff and officials’ in their dealings with his former attorney general,” CBC reported on March 5.
Floating a trial balloon to measure potential reactions is not often prelude to the sincerest of apologies. But in the end, no real apology was forthcoming. The brand-torching continued unabated. And by Wednesday this week, the Anonymous Sources had come full circle: Wilson-Raybould had set various extraordinary conditions for remaining in Cabinet, they told various outlets.
One of them was that Trudeau apologize.
In Maclean’s, Paul Wells wonders why SNC-Lavalin has shaken the Liberals so much:
How did this scandal manage to rattle this government so profoundly? And the best answer I can find is this: Because it reveals truths about this Prime Minister that shake many Canadians’ confidence in him.
As my moral betters in the newspaper columns never tire of repeating, by many standards the SNC-Lavalin mess is quite modest. It seems probable that no money changed hands improperly in 2018 and no law was broken. The protagonists were motivated mostly by a kind of distracted hunch that jobs might be at stake. I mean, the extent to which they had zero evidence for that is breathtaking, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. And also by a similarly vague suspicion that it might be bad for branded Liberal candidates if SNC ran into trouble ahead of a Quebec or federal election.
[…]
Finally, all three of these scandalettes have laid bare a stubbornly ramshackle approach to running what has sometimes been a serious country. When flying to India, sure, pack your embroidered sherwani and your convicted attempted murderer, but also maybe bring along a travel plan, a sales pitch and a list of objectives worth achieving. Especially if your ineptitude is about to guarantee you will never get a second chance to visit India.
On SNC, what emerges from all the testimony is the impression that a dozen kids from the McGill debating team snuck into the abandoned ruins of Ottawa and started pretending to be the government of Canada. Jody complained to Bill that Elder and Ben were being mean to Jessica. Justin sent Michael but somehow Michael didn’t have the Section 13 ruling Jody had sent to Mathieu. Then it was Christmas and they all went home for a month.
Where the hell were the 208,000 public servants whose job was to ensure options were explored and workflows respected? Why, in September, when Wernick says everyone was distracted by NAFTA, did nobody at the weekly deputy ministers’ meeting say, “Well, there’s only room for 10 people at the NAFTA table, so why don’t the rest of us strike a working group of officials from Justice, Finance, Innovation and the Privy Council to ride this SNC puppy until we know what’s what?”
I’m pretty sure the reason this didn’t happen is that Butts found it thrilling to have all the important conversations run through his phone. That’s a bush-league reason to stumble into a government-shaking mess.
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April 5, 2019
The Brexit trainwreck is “revealing to the British public the extent of its political class’s incompetence”
Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal on the scale of political tomfoolery going on in the Brexit clusterfutz:
The imbroglio over Brexit has at least had the merit of revealing to the British public the extent of its political class’s incompetence. If it is accepted that people get the leadership that they deserve, however, thoughts unflattering to self-esteem ought to occur to the British population.
Theresa May did not emerge from a social vacuum. She is typical of the class that has gradually attained power in Britain, from the lowest levels of the administration to the highest: unoriginal, vacillating, humorless, prey to the latest bad ideas, intellectually mediocre, believing in nothing very much, mistaking obstinacy for strength, timid but nevertheless avid for power. Thousands of minor Mays populate our institutions, as thousands of minor Blairs did before them.
Avidity for power is not the same as leadership, and Brexit required leadership. There was none to be had, however, from the political class. From the very first, it overwhelmingly opposed Brexit — for some, the eventual prospect of a tax-free, expense-jewelled job in Brussels was deeply alluring — but found itself in a dilemma, since it could not openly deny the majority’s expressed wish. Many Members of Parliament sat for constituencies in which a solid majority had voted for Brexit. They feared that they would not win their next election.
The opposition Labour Party was as divided as the Conservatives. Irrespective of what its MPs actually believed about Brexit—its leader was, until recently, ardent for leaving the European Union, which he believed to be a capitalists’ club, changing his mind for reasons that he has so far not condescended to disclose — its main concern was to force an election that it believed it could win, a victory that would soon make Brexit seem like a minor episode on the road to ruin. The majority of the Labour MPs wanted first to bring about the downfall of a Conservative government and second to prevent Britain leaving the European Union without an agreement — what might be called the leaving-the-Union-without-leaving option. But they wanted the first more than they wanted the second, so under no circumstances could they accede to anything that Prime Minister May negotiated. Because of her tiny majority in Parliament, the hard-line Brexit members on her own side who want Britain to leave without a deal, and the refusal of her coalition partner, the Democratic Unionist Party, to back her, May needs the support of a considerable proportion of Labour MPs — which, so far, she has not received.
But the House of Commons as a whole, including the Conservatives, deprived May of leverage with which to renegotiate, because it voted that it would not accept leaving the Union without a deal. This deprived the European Union of any reason to renegotiate anything: it was a preemptive surrender to the demands of the E.U. that makes Neville Chamberlain look like a hard-bitten poker champion.
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April 4, 2019
LPC Omertà in action
Omertà, according to Wikipedia, is “a Southern Italian code of honor and code of silence that places importance on silence in the face of questioning by authorities or outsiders; non-cooperation with authorities, the government, or outsiders; and willfully ignoring and generally avoiding interference with the illegal activities of others.” It’s also a remarkably appropriate way to describe the Liberal Party of Canada’s standard operating procedure:
“Ultimately the choice that is before you,” Jody Wilson-Raybould pleaded with her caucus colleagues, in a letter written hours before they were to pass sentence on her, “is about what kind of party you want to be a part of, what values it will uphold, the vision that animates it, and indeed the type of people it will attract and make it up.”
But they made that choice long ago. They knew what kind of party they wanted to be a part of from the moment they accepted their nominations; indeed, were they not the type of person that party attracts they would not have been recruited for it. It is the kind of party, and person, that unquestioningly puts loyalty to party before principle — and mercilessly punishes those who do not.
So on the question of whether to expel the former minister of justice and attorney general — along with the former Treasury Board president, Jane Philpott — for the crime of denouncing the attempt, by the prime minister and senior government officials, to interfere with a criminal prosecution, there could have been little doubt how they would vote.
Whether they chose to shoot the messengers so spontaneously, over Justin Trudeau’s objections, as some reports have claimed — they were “determined to take the matter into their own hands,” according to a Canadian Press story, as if MPs were so eager to prove their obedience to the leader as to be willing to defy him — or whether they did so under orders doesn’t much matter. The rotting of the soul is the same either way.
We can now see, if it were not already apparent, the moral compass by which the prime minister and his caucus steer. The scandal in the SNC-Lavalin affair is, by this reckoning, not the months-long campaign to subvert the independence of the attorney general and, through her, to force the independent director of public prosecutions to drop charges of fraud and corruption against a long-time Liberal party contributor, but the opposition to it.
Traditional political theory teaches that the executive branch of government is responsible to the legislative. It is now clearer than ever that the reverse more nearly applies: members of the Liberal caucus plainly see it as their role, not to hold the government to account, but rather their fellow MPs — on behalf of the government. When wrongdoing by those high in government is alleged by a pair of whistleblowers, their first thought is to root out the whistleblowers.
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April 3, 2019
A review of Woke by Titania McGrath
The poetic titan of Twitter, ultra-woke voice of her generation Titania McGrath (recently revealed to be the creation of comedian Andrew Doyle), is now a published author:
… Titania McGrath, the radical intersectional feminist poet who verbally bombards the “white supremacist patriarchy.” A malcontent who is fed up with us ignoramuses, McGrath has published her first book. Simply titled Woke: A Guide to Social Justice, it’s a manifesto written in prose possessing a revolutionary zeal so potent Che Guevara would lecherously swoon and request that she provide him with remedial education in social revolution.
McGrath addresses the vast intricacies of wokeness and responds to the counterarguments that the agents of the patriarchy often make. She also outlines how this puritanical movement can attract converts. Her insight is sought after since, after all, “our society is a slumbering beast that has been trapped in its coma for far too long.”
Proving to be Winston Churchill’s 21st-century equivalent, McGrath teabags “the foes of justice with a gender-neutral scrotum.” And challenges the “illusion of freedom” to extirpate Nazis and destroy any other obstacles to the “Intersectional Socialist Utopia.”
We all live in a “heteronormative patriarchy” that’s a “Tyranny of Facts” erected by the “Scourge of Whiteness.” Knowledge is a “patriarchal construct” that is only convenient for those who want to strengthen the white male authoritarians’ grip on power. So what must we do to rectify this?
According to McGrath, our society is almost irreparably “unwoke,” and we might have to implement drastic purgatory measures. We shall be heedful of the wisdom of brave reformists like Hannah Gadsby and eradicate anything offensive. Reforming things like comedy and any other art form perceived to be toxically masculine should be our first priority. Scientists will also tremble at the feet of these woke revolutionaries. As McGrath avers: “The idea that knowledge is more important than feelings is everything that is wrong with the field of modern science.”
With a knack for conflict analysis that would rival Churchill’s, McGrath identifies our real enemies with panache. “Every sperm is an invader” if you didn’t know, and those who commit cultural genocide by doing yoga are civilization’s true adversaries. As are compilers of the English dictionary who give credence to antediluvian definitions of racism that enable us to think a person of colour can also be racist.
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April 1, 2019
Sean Gabb on the Brexit crisis
In his latest email newsletter, Sean Gabb discusses the Brexit situation:
The consensus in the media appears to be that Parliament is out of control, and is attempting to stop our exit from the European Union – even if this means tearing up every settled constitutional norm. I disagree. No doubt, the House of Commons is filled with some very trashy people, and I have little doubt most of them would like to stay in the European Union. Even so, they are acting collectively with strict constitutional propriety. For the first time in my life, they are earning their inflated salaries and expenses and bribe allowances.
Three years ago, we vote to leave the European Union. The margin was respectable, though not substantial. The Government was therefore given one reasonably difficult job. This was to detach us from the institutions of the European Union, while respecting the wish of a large majority for continued good relations with the European Union. This was difficult, but hardly in the same class as trying to win a war against the greatest military power in the world, or dismantle an Empire, or even reform the structures and financing of local government. The most obvious compromise was to rejoin EFTA and remain in the Single Market, while negotiating a longer term set of arrangements. Most people, I think, would have accepted such a compromise. I would, and I may have written about it at the time.
Instead of doing this, however, Theresa May loaded us with endless vague promises, while negotiating in secret with the European Commission. At the end of two years and six months, she presented us with a draft Withdrawal Agreement that was universally unacceptable. I will not rehearse why it was unacceptable. Everyone has read it for himself, or read a fair summary and critique. When this was presented to the House of Commons, it was overwhelmingly rejected. Why the Labour Party and the various open Remainers voted against it is less important than that they did vote against it. This is why we have a Parliament. It is there to stop the Executive from acting against the public good. It is there to make the voice of the people heard.
Our present set of crises blew up when it emerged that Theresa May had allowed no one to think about any alternative to her Agreement. Her only solution to losing the first vote was to arrange for another, and then for another. Each time, her Agreement was rejected – and rejected, I repeat, for good reasons. But, thanks to her wickedness or stupidity, there were only three options available to Parliament. One was to swallow her Agreement. Another was to leave without any deal. The other was to give up on leaving – to cancel the Referendum result.
[…]
It may be that the plan was to unveil a fraudulent leaving agreement, and to whip this through Parliament, leaving the rest of us to grumble about it for the next generation, though unable to do anything about it. If so, the plan has failed. The problem is not that our ruling class does not want to be bound by the will of the people – this is hardly a novel discovery. The problem is the crude inflexibility of our rulers. The EFTA compromise I and most other people would have accepted three years ago would have allowed any number of quiet understandings in London that let things as they matter to our rulers go on much as before. Instead, they wanted complete victory on their terms, and they planned for no other outcome. No competent strategist or negotiation behaves like this. The Tory ultras did not behave like this in 1832 or 1911. Labour did not behave like this after 1983. On the whole, we are lucky that we have asked these people only to arrange a departure in good order from a customs
union. They might instead have messed up something really important.These crises have been a useful learning experience. Theresa May and the interests she has been chosen to front are both wicked and stupid. Speaking for myself, I think our Members of Parliament – wretched creatures if these may be in themselves – for doing their job and lifting the stone to show the pale and stinking bugs in full light of day. Sooner or later, we shall leave the European Union. This will be a messier and more acrimonious departure than it needed to be. But I suspect that the debate between Leavers and Remainers is turning to a shared demand for our will to be obeyed by the Executive. This is a much wider matter than our membership of the European Union. Leaving is now a symbol of who has the final say in this country. The longer our decadent rulers try to hold firm, the more radical the demands will grow for a reconstruction of the system.
I have no idea what will happen in the next few weeks. But I am glad we have the Parliament that we have.
Alex Noble feels the situation is going pretty much exactly how the EU wanted it to go from the start:
For a few months now I have written about how the EU’s plan is increasingly transparent, and it is becoming possible to anticipate their every move.
I believe we are now so close to the outcome they wargamed a year ago, that the final week is now almost completely predictable.
For what it’s worth, here we go.
[…]
So this coming week, the EU will water down or remove the backstop they never cared about, and the British people will be betrayed into vassalage by their Vichy Parliament.
That’s right – another “breakthrough” is imminent, although I suspect the EU will once again trot out the gap-toothed Belgian bumpkin Verhofstadt to pretend to find the whole affair insulting, so we remember to be properly grateful to his paymasters.
All other options now are just scare tactics – No Brexit, No Deal, long extensions, a general election, a loss of drinking water, or pet food, or medicine – these are all just the Bad Cop act designed to get us to gratefully turn to the Good Cop.
Namely the EU’s Withdrawal Agreement, which as I’ve pointed out is like the Withdrawal Technique in that despite the promises made, it usually involves no actual withdrawal.
We have been herded for nearly a year like scared children towards the EU’s treaty, which imprisons us forever in the EU – it is what they wanted all along, and they have used our government, our MPs (with a few dozen honourable souls still resisting as I write), our media, and the craven statists embedded in our institutions to convince us that the EU’s Withdrawal Agreement represents freedom.
In this coming week, all but a few dozen stalwarts will crumble, and then the only question is whether enough Labour europhiles will cross the House to pass this grotesque betrayal and inflict it on the British people.
At that stage, I wonder whether our cries of fury and anguish will fade into silence, or swell into carnage?
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QotD: George H.W. Bush
Way back in the olden thymes, conservatives during the Reagan years had a real fear that the Rockefeller Republicans would not only undermine the conservative agenda, but find a way to corrupt the Reagan administration. It was an unwarranted fear. Those Progressive Republicans were a dying force in politics. Reagan was a man of his age so his conservatism does not always make sense to the modern ear, but he stuck to his guns for the most part. He was a politician, so he compromised when he had to.
Then George H. W. Bush was ready to take the reigns of the movement and the party, despite being a Rockefeller Republican. Bush was a Progressive by any measure, but he supposedly got religion in the 1980’s, and to be fair, a lot of people went through that transformation. There were even old Jewish guys, who used to support communists, that were suddenly changing teams to join the new emerging majority. Bush spent a lot of time convincing the voters he was just like Reagan and they had nothing to fear.
The ’88 election was a landslide for Bush and a lot of sensible people thought that he would be the finishing touches to the new conservative majority. He would smooth out the rough patches and put a shine on other aspects to it. His famous pledge to never raise taxes was the cornerstone of his pitch. Wiser heads, the paleocons, saw what was coming, but most did not. That’s why when Bush broke his promise, a year into his presidency, his voters were crushed. Bush was a liar.
History is written by the victors and that means the Left, so we’re always told that Bush lost in ’92 because Clinton was sent by the void where God once existed, to bring joy and bliss to the blessed and smite the wicked. The truth is, Bush lost because the core of his voters rightly saw him as a liar and a fink. Many people I know, including myself, voted third party as a protest. Yeah, it meant a degenerate would win the election, but at least we knew what we were getting. Liars like Bush always find new ways to screw you.
[…]
This brings us back to Bush. He spent the remainder of his presidency trying to rebuild his standing with conservatives. He even scored what was pitched as a stunning victory in the First Gulf War. But, you only get one shot to piss away your integrity and Bush did not miss that opportunity. He entered the general election as a weak incumbent and Clinton used his broken pledge in commercials to remind everyone that Bush was an untrustworthy liar. Imagine that. Clinton beat Bush on the integrity issue.
“The Z Man”, “Donald Herbert Walker Trump”, The Z Blog, 2017-04-07.
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