A CONSERVATIVE RESPONSE TO THE EVENTS OF THE LAST WEEK

I should say at the outset I did not vote for Trump either time.   In 2016, on a prior blog I wondered whether the nation was ready for someone who had been a former star on World Wide Wrestling.  In spite of that pretty clear position I have had to endure my virtue signaling friends from the left every time defended those things in the Trump Administration which I thought were positive.  And in spite of those scolds, there were several at least six-  

• Economic Growth PRE COVID - As a result of the tax bill in 2017 and conscientious efforts to dethatch our regulatory environment, which had grown quite thick over the last several administrations we had real economic growth for a couple of years.   That was after several prominent economists claimed GDP growth was over. The numbers were impressive and NO they were not a continuation of the very slow growth (the slowest recovery in the nation’s history) coming out of 2009.   One of the most important parts of that growth was that for the first time in several decades those at the lowest income ranges experienced real growth in wages.  That improved the GINI coefficient materially.
• The Tax Bill - while I don’t think 2017 was as good as 1986, it did some important things.  It reduced corporate taxes to a level more closely approaching taxes in other developed countries.  That helped to repatriate some capital back to US shores.  It simplified taxes so that only a tiny portion of the taxpaying public need fill out the long form.  For me, one of the things which annoyed many governors was the reduction of the state and local tax deduction which offered HUGE subsidies to the VERY WEALTHY in HIGH TAX STATES. (Emphasis added!).  Ideally this should be eliminated entirely to improve tax equity.  But at least that was a start.
• The revocation of net neutrality (a last minute attempt by the Obama administration to redefine the Internet as a public utility and apply 19th Century regulatory rules) helped lower costs for all of us and actually improve speeds right at the time that we were learning ZOOM skills.
• His mideast policies materially improved the prospects for reduced tensions in the Middle East - with the recognition by several Arab nations that conceded Israel’s right to exist.  I believe, although I understand that many on the left disagree, that moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem was a positive step.
• Getting COVID Vaccine in Place - In spite of the nattering of his critics he was able to mobilize a real effort to get a vaccine for COVID into production in record time.  His critics claimed it would not be done and they were wrong.
• JUDICIAL APPOINTMENTS He made a series of very good judicial appointments including three members of SCOTUS and a bunch throughout the judiciary.  

That is not to ignore the numerous negative parts of his administration.   On Thursday I had a conversation with my Spanish tutor and she commented that the President was like a singer - (in Spanish it is not as funny as in English) because he was always singing “Me,me, me, me, me.”   Trump showed himself remarkably unable to rise above the personal and the petty.  Whether his critics were also unable to do that is not relevant.  We should expect that our president can operate at a higher level than even his antagonists.   Politics has been debased, not just because of Trump - but it certainly was not uplifted by his example.

We had a couple of politicians who rose to the occasion this week.  Mitch McConnell's speech on the floor of the Senate on Wednesday was one example.  So was the Vice President's letter explaining why he would not countenance ignoring the limited role of accepting the electoral college ballots from the states.

Beginning on Saturday and continuing to Wednesday things went downhill.   In two very stupid moves, Trump destroyed his legacy.   Let me address each separately.   On Saturday he hectored the Georgia Secretary of State in a phone call which only an idiot would assume would not be made public.  Trump won in part in 2016 because his opponent made comments about “deplorables” in what she thought was a private meeting.  Why would he not understand that his call would immediately become viral?   As Important is the notion that election results can be changed by fiat.   For me, the elections I cared about, including three ballot initiatives in California; reducing the democratic majority in the House which included the election of some very good and thoughtful conservatives including several women to counter the “squad”; and the election of a county supervisor in our home district played out well.

I believe there were irregularities in the 2020 election.  We rushed into electronic and vote by mail without serious consideration of how to do it well.  That being said, I do not believe that the sum total of those irregularities resulted in a defective result.  Biden won.  If there were ever any energy to think more carefully about improvements to election procedures, Trump’s phone call and his actions on Wednesday doomed any serious discussion about those issues.   Quinlan and I voted from Mexico using a federal procedure which requires verification processes but then is pretty simple.  Insuring the integrity of the electoral process is critical to confidence in government and Trump’s actions assures that the country won’t spend much time before the next election trying to improve the process. 

The call on Saturday materially affected the results on Tuesday in Georgia.   Mind you that I did not have high regard for either GOP candidate, but I do admire the legislative skills of McConnell over those of Schumer.   Ossoff is a near perfect exemplar of George Bernard Shaw’s quote on political figures ““He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.”   And while Perdue was not significantly better he would have contributed to a restraining force on excesses that are now going to be less restrained.

Perdue and Loeffler did themselves no favor by pandering to Trump by expressing support for the $2000 stimulus boondoggle and by pledging to take the extraordinary step of voting to make the certification process more than it is intended in the Constitution.

But then came Wednesday.   I believe very deeply in the First Amendment and in the provisions for the Right of Assembly and although I don’t accept the premise of a rigged election, I would have fully supported the right of my fellow citizens to Assemble to express their views.  What I don’t agree with is the right to anarchy.  

In the same vein I reject the nonsense perpetrated by the left to defend the anarchy in cities like Seattle and Portland and the wanton destruction of property and the pathetic notions of “defunding the police”.   If there is reason to look at police powers and to modify them to current conditions, then do it in an orderly manner.   Contrary to the bizarre statements of the Mayor of Seattle, the takeover of a major portion of the city, was not part of a “summer of love.”

The President’s remarks were close to incendiary.   Those by Rudy Guiliani went significantly more over the line.   The call to combat should be prosecuted.  

So how to we get to reconciliation as the President elect has promised.   For me there are a couple of quick steps that Biden could take which would point us in the right direction.   First, the President Elect should announce that he will drop his Twitter account.  The NYT on Sunday morning had an article detailing how much Trump relied on Twitter - during the last four years he tweeted more than 11,000 times a day. In recent weeks he has tweeted more than 200 times a week.   That is absurd.  It is not as if the president does not have access to news outlets, even if the claim that Trump faced a barrage of hostile lefty journalist (which I think for the most part is true).  But don’t we hire a President to do more important things?

The last job I had in DC was working for Bill Simon.  One Saturday afternoon, we scheduled a press conference to announce something we were doing to respond to the Arab Oil embargo.    I had the duty to write Simon’s opening statement, and as a joke I did a single sheet which said, “We actually don’t have anything to announce but we just wanted to see if you would show up!”  Luckily Simon thought that was funny and I also wrote a real announcement about our news.  But the WSJ reporter on our beat showed up in Tennis Whites.  There is nothing to suggest that things have changed; a president commands attention.  I grew quite tired of the self righteous “journalists” in the White House press room who believed that their role was to make the news.   But even with those challenges the President has what TR called the “bully pulpit” to shape the news cycle and it should not be in 240 character tweets.

A corollary to the first suggestion is that we need to take down the mini-Rasputin who parades as a CEO of Twitter.  He and the head of Facebook are entirely too full of themselves as protectors of our system instead of grubby jerks trying to make a. Bucks without regard for the long term consequences.  If you have not seen the excellent NETFLIX documentary called the Social Dilemma, you should.  The best way to negate their profound attempts to control our lives is to simply use them left.  A good friend on the left, about a month before the election said she was considering dropping out of Facebook.  That sounds like a good idea to me, although I have not yet followed her lead.  Did you ever wonder why the root word for Rasputin’s “service” is twit?

Second, many politicians could benefit from re-learning the “pottery barn maxim” of politics - if you break it you bought it.  Trump and many Governors around the country should have relearned this in the year of COVID.   There are times when an elected official can bring stability to an uncertain situation.   And there are also times when respected experts need to be brought back down to earth because they try to express opinions as expertise.  But the stream of consciousness briefings that Trump and his fellow executives offered was oftentimes laughable.   Especially, when their actions and their pronouncements did not mesh.   Too many politicians thought “do as I say not as I do is acceptable.”  It is not.  From my perspective the ham handed interventions by elected officials actually allowed experts to quash discussion of alternatives to the prevailing orthodoxy.

Finally,  I am not sure how it should be accomplished but Mr. Trump should not be allowed to complete his term.   From my perspective, the best alternative is to have the Vice President invoke the 25th Amendment.   A rehash of the absurd impeachment process that we experienced from sanctimonious politicians like Adam Schiff and Gerald Nadler would not help toward reconciliation and would reinforce the concerns that a good portion of our population holds against the earlier process.  But the country needs to respond vigorously to the incitement to anarchy and it needs to happen before inauguration day. 

UPDATE ON THE BOOK 

I have retained an editor to work through the manuscript.  As a looked at the current version it is a bit too long.  So I spent the two weeks at the end of the year doing some more revisions.   A couple of friends have read chapters and made some good suggestions.   There are two questions that I have been thinking about.  First, adding photos to the book adds complexity.   I have thought of putting up a set of webpages that would be referenced in the Print and E-Book format which would point the reader to the photos by chapter.   

Those changes will delay getting Of Course It's True Except for a Couple of Lies into print until later in 2021.  But from my perspective it will be a much better book because of the changes.