Introduction
My grandson has informed me of Hanlon’s Razor, which states “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” I was previously aware of the sentiment, but not the attribution. These are words to live by.
But of course we should also keep in mind the fact that stupid people can be malicious also.
Let’s Get To It Then
This was a chuckle-headed political move so audacious in its serene sense of self-approval and self-congratulation that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. Things were already looking like a red tsunami in the mid-terms, with the House likely to be a blow-out, and the Senate very much in play, and so then some high-level mugwump in the DOJ said, and I quote, “Let’s try to make the Senate a blow-out for the Republicans too.”
What they are trying to do is kneecap Donald Trump so that he can’t run again. The pressure on the AG to indict Trump for something, anything, related to J6 has to be enormous. The fact that the pressure is coming from their nutroots base doesn’t make the pressure feel any the less, and hence the raid. What this is likely to turn out to be is that the J6 investigations bought all this expensive well-drilling equipment, and all they have to show for it to date is a long row of dry holes. What this raid on Mar a Lago was for, in all likelihood, was a hunt for some water that they could pour down one of the dry holes, followed by a long piece in the Washington Post that claimed that they had uncovered an unprecedented flow of corruption, sixty gallons a minute. Ostensibly the raid was over whether or not classified documents had been brought there improperly from the White House (!!!). What they were almost certainly after was some sort of retroactive justification for all their J6 nonsense. And an indictment, which they would then argue makes Trump an ineligible candidate.
That is the goal, but they remind me of that CIA plot to assassinate Castro with an exploding cigar, or that other time the NSA tried to take out the Road Runner with that anvil purchased from Acme Anvils. That was the meaning behind the rye-donk-ulus impeachments, the hard partisan use of our intelligence agencies, the put-up job of the Russian dossier, the Mueller investigation, and then the J6 hearings, which by all reports are like sitting out in the heat in a lawn chair in order to watch your grass grow. Like watching the grass grow in late August, which, if you didn’t follow the simile, is like staring at a bunch of short vegetation doing mostly nothing.
I am speaking here as an objective political observer. I am no Trumpian. But I fully understand how and why such magisterial monkeyshines help to create so many Trumpians. It does not matter that I might prefer someone else other than Trump. It does not matter that my desires run more in the vein of a Burkean statesman. It does not matter that my head is crammed with lofty political ideals. No. Whatever I might think, the brains behind the progressive left have decided to take a header into the maelstrom of “doing whatever they can to advance the narrative and person and prospects of Donald J. Trump.” This is what a derangement syndrome can do to you. It turns the quivering brains of high-powered political operatives into a soupy kind of jelly, with green mold on the surface.
Seriously? Raid a former president’s home? For glaringly obvious partisan reasons? Let’s have a look-see at that warrant, shall we?
Unless they had probable cause (with accompanying photographs) for believing that Trump was having Blackwater mercenaries kidnap teenagers from their holding cages on the southern border, so that he could use them as unwilling and weeping organ donors, selling their livers and kidneys to Colombian drug lords and Saudi princes, unless they had something on him like that, I say, this bay-of-pig’s breakfast is one premium grade disaster for the Left.
Which is clear evidence that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Watching political professionals orchestrate something like this kind of knocks the wind clean out of you. People are actually receiving salaries for having come up with this thing. They went into meetings, in air-conditioned government buildings, and in those meetings this raid was approved—kind of like the movie studio meeting that cleared Waterworld. The word gobsmacked comes to mind. Of all the boneheaded, obtuse, dopey, short-sighted, dunsical, imbecilic, ninnyhammerish, dunderheaded . . . oh, never mind.
Which means that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Electoral Deathmatches
Four years ago, I wrote on how we should be really reluctant to prosecute the losers of elections, even if they were really bad people, for that is the pathway that runs southwards towards Central American banana republics. Far from cleaning up elections, you are simply guaranteeing that they are going to get a lot dirtier.
Hillary deserves to be in jail, no question in my mind about it. If she were to receive a fair trial, it would be chokey for her. But the problem is that this creates a really bad liturgical pattern for elections—if you lose, it is off to the Big House with you. And then, after this pattern gets well-entrenched, the victors decide that they don’t want to waste any of the people’s money on feeding you there, so it is off with your head. And that means that every election becomes the equivalent of a death match, and so everybody pulls out all the stops, no holds barred. Ta da! You have yourself a monkey house democracy.
But as Kurt Schlichter is fond of telling the progressives, “You are not going to like the new rules.” The new rules he speaks of are the rules that they themselves hand-crafted out of their own lofty ideals and totalitarian impulses. But a free man, a man informed by the dictates of natural revelation and the principles of liberty that came down on tablets of stone from Sinai, is a man who wants to craft the kind of political order that would not present a severe threat to him or to his people, even if it were to be captured by his adversaries. We used to live there. We don’t live there anymore.
This is a principle that simpleton politicians of both the right and the left do not grasp. If you are a “conservative” who voted for the Patriot Act, you were putting what kind of tools into the hands of the likes of Joe Biden? And if you are a progressive, blinded by your hatred of that man Trump, you go and do something like this. I mean, crikey.
How Might “This” Bite Them?
In an earlier post I gave credit where credit was due on the overthrow of Roe. I applauded Trump, for keeping his promises, and I acknowledged McConnell for his role in keeping Garland (the mastermind behind the Mar a Lago debacle) off the Supreme Court. I also mentioned Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and all of her flatterers, and who kept her clinging to that Supreme Court seat like it was her last breath.
But alas, I failed to mention the key role played by Harry Reid, destroyer of the Senate filibuster. He grabbed at a short-term political opportunity, not recognizing that the rules he was altering at that time were soon enough going to be under the control of the opposition. And son of a gun, that happened. Just like everybody in the world should have anticipated. Because of that fatal mistake, a stupid mistake from their perspective, we had Dobbs handed to us—like it was at some Buckingham Palace garden party, on a platter covered with fresh cucumber sandwiches.
So this raid on Donald Trump’s private residence, if it was done for some cooked up partisan Mickey Mouse reason, is a raid that gives Donald Trump free rein, if he ever acquires political power or influence again, to throw an awful lot of swamp creatures in jail, for an awfully long time. If he had done that in 2016, he would have been seen, rightly, as the destroyer of norms. But if he doesn’t do it now, he is going to be seen as a supreme idiot.
And So Again, Don’t Take the Bait
With all the stupidity budgeted for, it is quite possible that a handful on the Left are playing a deep Alinskyite game. This means that we have to leave room for the possibility that some in the leadership of the Left are not being stupid, and are gambling everything on a very risky move. They have decided to shoot the moon.
Given what they have been willing to call an “insurrection,” it is crucial that conservatives, between now and November, refuse to take the bait. Do not do anything that might be misrepresented in this way—you know, all the kinds of things that leftists get to do in Portland. Not a peep. Internalize your outrage over what they are doing. Bottle it up. Stuff it. Wait until election day, and then drive down to the polls, staying well under the speed limit as you do so. When you arrive at the polls, go into the booth, smile grimly, and make it a point to vote out any politician who ever once in his life smiled at a Democrat.
To summarize my musings on this subject, I mean, golly.