Posted on March 30,
2024
Cranial Tumbleweeds
Shrinkflation, the real RINOs, no to
normalcy, etc.
by
Daniel
Clark
* If Donald Trump wins this year's election, and the Red
Chinese have not yet invaded Taiwan by his inauguration, that will mean they
were intimidated by the steely gaze of our fearless Commander-in-Chief, Joe
Biden. Sorry, Donny, but you're the one
who invented this argument.
* At almost exactly the same time that President Biden
started railing against "shrinkflation," so did the Cookie Monster, in a social
media post from an account operated by the Children's Television Workshop. In spite of the commercial success of Sesame
Street, the CTW still receives a percentage of its income from the
taxpayers. So why are we paying Muppets
to coordinate with the Democratic Party on its political messaging?
* Twenty years ago, the Cookie Monster declared, "a
cookie is a sometimes food," and started eating fruits and vegetables. Now he complains that "me cookies are getting
smaller!" As long as he's being a good
Democrat, why doesn't he just admit that he can't be trusted to feed himself,
and be thankful that some benevolent power has saved him from being exploited
by Big Cookie?
* Never mind smaller cookies. Wait until he finds out he can't have an
Eskimo Pie anymore, cuz justice!
* Don't you wish we could be safe in assuming that the
Cookie Monster doesn't vote?
* Of course, we already knew Cookie Monster was a
Democrat by his grammar. A proud Head
Start graduate, no doubt.
* After the GOP won control of Congress in 1994, they
held hearings about defunding PBS.
Democrat congresswoman Nita Lowey put on Ernie and Bert hand puppets and
begged bloodthirsty Republicans not to suck the life out of them. Just in case you thought the level of
political discourse had never been lower than it is right now.
* She still brags about having done that, by the way.
* For the president and his party to complain about
shrinkflation only demonstrates their economic ignorance. Food producers are shrinking their products
as a cost control measure, to mitigate the impact of inflation. They are merely reacting to the problem, not
causing it. When Democrats complain
about this, they are acknowledging that inflation is having a negative
effect on consumers, even as they argue that it's not.
* In fact, shrinkflation makes inflation less
conspicuous, and therefore less of a political issue. Putting fewer potato chips in the bag and
selling the bag for the same price is less noticeable than raising the price of
a bag of chips. If Biden had any sense,
he would be quietly thanking those responsible.
* If you're going to run against the incumbent
president on the issue of inflation, it is not helpful to also promise a ten
percent tariff on all goods imported from anywhere in the world. If there is a single competent person in the
Biden campaign, we can expect to see Donald Trump's recent quote, "I'm a big
believer in tariffs" on a lot of billboards in the coming months.
* The degree to which the GOP has gone adrift can be
seen in its adoption of the traditional Democrat "peace dividend" paradigm of
budgeting. Anymore, it is typical for a
Republican politician to argue that we should not be spending money on [enter
international conflict here] when we could be spending it here at home. Do the Republicans really think we are
underspending on domestic initiatives?
Funding for defense and foreign assistance should be determined on its
own merits. Either we help Ukraine defend
itself, or we don't. That decision should not depend on how we might otherwise
spend the money.
* How is it that the Trumpies
have suddenly become budget hawks when it comes to Ukraine, anyway? Not many years ago, they were employing the
"crunch all you want, we'll make more" theory of deficit spending.
* Here's a frugal Republican idea: Let's put on a
military parade! Just because!
* As the Biden administration has tragically
illustrated, President Trump's sanctions against Iran had been effective in
starving that nation of the means to spread chaos throughout the Middle
East. This would not be true, however,
if Iran owned Iraq, as Trump claims it does.
Iran could then have simply cannibalized Iraq's wealth, and conducted
its business through Iraq, which had no sanctions against it. The ex-president is rightly taking credit for
the success of his policy, but at the same time he is undermining his own
argument, just for the sake of yet another cheap and baseless condemnation of
the Iraq War.
* For a man so deeply reviled by the press, Trump gets
away without answering a remarkable number of obvious questions. To this day, he says we should have taken
Iraq's oil. How would he go about doing
that? He claims to have deterred Russia
by supplying the Ukrainians with Javelin missiles, so why does he now consider
it useless to arm them with F-16s, Bradley armored fighting vehicles and
Patriot missile defense batteries? What
were the specific provisions of NAFTA that were so bad, and why has he never
bothered to point them out? How can it
be "a terrible thing" to prohibit the killing of an unborn child with a beating
heart? Why should we believe him about
mass deportations, when he made the same promise eight years ago? Reporters don't challenge him on these
things, even though he is a very accessible candidate, and also the one they
hate. Good luck getting answers from
their own party's president, who hides and runs away from them.
* Instead, they ask Trump lots of obnoxious,
repetitive, irrelevant and extremely biased questions, like why hasn't he
denounced white supremacy enough times to satisfy them. If he is elected president again, it will be largely
(or is that bigly?) because a vote for him is a vote against these people.
* It's also a vote against the unethical left-wing
prosecutors who have turned him into a martyr.
It's no coincidence that Trump wasn't polling so well when the
Mar-a-Lago documents case was dominating the headlines, because that is a totally
needless scandal of his own making. His electoral
prospects have improved dramatically, however, since the state of New York began
using the legal system to mug him.
* Granted, the phrase "excessive fines" in the Eighth
Amendment is a relative term, but if $454 million doesn't qualify, then nothing
does.
* If you think this outrageous penalty is justified
simply because you really, really dislike Donald Trump, then you are exactly
what the Eighth Amendment was designed to thwart.
* The Eighth Amendment is most often cited for its
prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishments," but this only applies if they
are both cruel and unusual, and not simply either/or. Punishments, by their nature, can usually be
argued to be "cruel," but if they are not also unusual, that's okay. Our founders' concern was not that criminals
be treated more gently, but that justice be applied equally under the law. If the standard punishment for a certain
crime is twenty years in prison, but we're so mad at a particular offender that
we decide to feed him to alligators, that is a violation of the Eighth
Amendment. Electrocuting a murderer,
when that is the prescribed punishment to fit the crime, is entirely
permissible.
* Many people's default position seems to be that
America is universally hated. That's why
the idea that our soldiers would be greeted as liberators in Iraq was so
ridiculed, even as it was actually happening throughout most of the
country. If the terrorist offensive that
was mislabeled "the insurgency" had really been a popular uprising, our forces
would have been too badly outnumbered, and lacking in allies among the population,
for the surge to have succeeded.
* If it annoys you to be reminded that the surge
succeeded, ask yourself why, and don't let yourself off with any weak excuses.
* It cannot possibly have escaped the attention of all
of the Iraqi people that the Americans came and did exactly what they said they
were going to do. Anybody who believed
America was somehow going to plunder that nation's oil, or forcibly convert its
people, or any of the other scaremongering nonsense that was being circulated
at the time, surely realizes by now that it was never true.
* People who snottily say "mission accomplished" as an
ironic criticism of President Bush don't know what they're talking about, nor
do they want to. For starters, the
banner that said "Mission Accomplished" when he spoke on board the USS
Abraham Lincoln referred to the particular mission of the crew of that
carrier, and not the totality of America's mission in Iraq. He did say that "major combat operations" had
ended, which was a totally reasonable conclusion to draw at the time, but in
his speech he gave a very realistic assessment of how much more work there
remained to do in Iraq. The conveniently
underexplained criticism that is embedded in "mission accomplished" is that he
had declared victory too soon and abandoned the fight. Nobody really believes that.
* There was a president who prematurely
declared an end to America's mission in Iraq, chalked it up as the greatest
foreign policy success of his presidency, and impetuously withdrew our forces
from that country with tragic consequences.
His name was Barack Hussein Obama.
The truth be known, the people who feign anger at Bush for supposedly
declaring an end to the conflict would have been only too happy if he had
really done so, like Obama did. After
all, "ending" wars without any satisfactory conclusion is exactly what they are
always demanding.
* Besides, there indisputably had been a mission
accomplished by overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
Does anyone care to deny that?
* The fact that President Bush never came right out
and said things like that is part of the reason for Trump's popularity. When Trump fights back against dishonest media
narratives, he does not always do so honestly himself, but at least people see
him doing it.
* After all those years of harrumphing by foreign
policy experts that America could never win "the battle for hearts and minds" in
Afghanistan, we have yet to hear any apologies.
None of those think tank reports that shouted, "Taliban stronger than
ever" had been remotely accurate. If
they had been, the Afghan people would have had no rights for the Taliban to
abolish when it resumed control. Nothing
is more repugnant to the Taliban than women writing and interpreting law in an
Islamic country, but that party had become so powerless that it failed to stop them
from sitting on Afghan courts and legislative bodies. There was even a woman on the Afghan supreme
court. In other words, the war had been
successful, right up until the moment we gave up. There are a lot of people who should have to
answer for that, but nobody is even asking the questions.
* People who criticize Vice President Kamala Harris
for doing a poor job as "border czar" are completely missing the point. Harris has never had any particular
competence in this area, or any desire to do the job, nor was it ever expected
of her. Assigning that role to such a
completely unserious person was simply President Biden's way of illustrating
how completely unseriously he takes the issue.
* In other words, Harris is merely an instrument of
Biden's spite. When she cackles, that's
really the sound of him giving us the raspberry.
* So much for that empathy thing.
* Both sides of the debate over the Ukraine funding/border
security compromise bill were illogical.
To oppose the bill because President Biden already has the power to strengthen
our borders by executive order is a self-defeating argument. To the contrary, it only highlights the need
for consistency across administrations, which is absent when so much power
rests upon the unilateral actions of the chief executive. Biden's argument, on the other hand, is that he
wants to secure the border, but needs the Republicans to compel him to do so in
spite of himself. That's an example of
what his old boss might have called "leading from behind."
* The only issue Harris really cares about is
abortion, as she demonstrated by making an unprecedented campaign appearance at
a Planned Parenthood clinic in Minnesota.
If America loves abortion, as we have been told we do ever since the Dobbs
ruling, then why is the one politician who most closely identifies with the
cause so incredibly unpopular?
* Harris has since received an invitation to visit a
pro-life crisis pregnancy center, which there is very little chance of her
accepting, and that's a shame. At least
the people there would be willing to show her exactly what it is they do.
* Before abortion became a leading left-wing political
cause, movies that dealt with it were refreshingly candid. Classics like Alfie, In the Heat of
the Night and The Godfather, Part II made it perfectly clear that an
abortion is the killing of a human child.
Exactly no information has since been discovered that would cast any
doubt on that conclusion.
* The National Republican Congressional Committee has
concluded that it was a big mistake for the GOP to concede abortion as a
"Democrat issue" in 2022, and is encouraging its candidates to campaign on it
this time, and respond to Democrat distortions and smears. Sounds good, but it's not clear how many GOP
candidates exist anymore who are equipped to do that. Look at the characters who lost all those
costly Senate races two years ago.
Mehmet Oz, Blake Masters and Don Bolduc did not even convincingly pretend
to be pro-life, and Herschel Walker's credibility problems were well
documented. Republicans cannot continue
to pretend that "populism" is a legitimate alternative to a philosophical core,
and then actually expect results.
* If it seems like populism is predominantly
identified with the political left, perhaps that's because it is little more
than a form of group identity politics.
A populist leader is one who appeals to a large group of people, whom he
often identifies in demeaning, stereotypical terms (e.g., "the little people"
or "the masses"), in opposition to a far smaller group ("the one-percenters" or
"the privileged"), which is identified as the enemy.
* The term "RINO" has become a populist epithet, as we
can tell from the fact that it has been stripped of practically all meaning,
other than that it refers to a Republican who is disliked by the person who is
speaking. For those who don't know, the
acronym means "Republican In Name Only," and used to be accurately applied to
political phonies like Arlen Specter.
What we have now is a former member of the Reform Party, and his
not-so-merry band of Libertarians, routinely denouncing lifelong mainstream Republicans
as RINOs.
* Will conservatives please stop giving Bill Clinton
credit for things he said as president, just for the sake of favorably
comparing him to Joe Biden? It doesn't
matter that Clinton said abortion should be "safe, legal and rare," because we
know he didn't mean that "rare" part, and he didn't really care about "safe"
either. If he did, he would never have
vetoed the partial-birth abortion ban, which he did twice. His true position, in support of abortion at
any time for any reason and as often as possible, was completely
indistinguishable from the one that Biden holds today.
* The other Clinton quote that is being fondly
recalled is, "The era of big government is over." Had he ever meant this, it would have been a
lament, and not a triumphant declaration.
Long before Vice President Biden's big blankin
deal, it was Clinton who attempted a government takeover of health care. The diagram of all the new bureaucracy his
wife's plan would have created looked like the inside of a transistor
radio. Obviously, he was not celebrating
the demise of this policy when he made that remark.
* Remember Clinton's plan for Universal Savings
Accounts, or USA Accounts, as he called them (which would really stand for
Universal Savings Accounts Accounts, but who's
counting?). This redistributive system
would have subsidized each person's savings with taxpayer money on a sliding
scale, with low-income earners receiving three times as much as they put in. Every individual earning under $50,000 would
have been given $300 to seed his account, meaning that each person in this
group would have had $1,200 to start out with.
That's not a savings account.
It's simply a transfer of wealth, by way of a new entitlement
program. Mind you, he proposed this in
1999, three years after declaring the era of big government to be over.
* George W. Bush attempted to reform Social Security
by allowing younger members of the workforce to opt out of the system, and
divert their own payroll tax money into accounts that they would own and
control. The aim was to gradually wean
America off the unworkable, fraudulent system that is now in danger of
crashing. To those who have come to
dominate the Republican Party, Dubya is the epitome of the "go along to get
along" Republican establishment, whereas Donald Trump is the bold
anti-politician who's not afraid to shake up the status quo. At least on this issue, it is Bush who was
the daring if unsuccessful visionary, and Trump who is going along to get
along.
* Seriously, have you listened to what Trump has to
say about Social Security? He sounds
just like those Election Day phone calls we used to get from Ed Asner.
* Donald Trump has already served one term as
president. Almost the entire Republican
Party fell in line behind him eight years ago and has groveled at his feet ever
since. He has now taken over the
Republican National Committee, and installed his own daughter-in-law as
co-chairman. If Trump is not the
Republican establishment by now, then nobody is.
* In a republic, we get the government we deserve. Following the chaotic and borderline
dictatorial presidency of Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Republican Warren G. Harding
promised a "return to normalcy," on which his vice president and successor
Calvin Coolidge delivered. This year,
the normalcy candidate was Ron DeSantis.
It turns out most voters do not want to return to normalcy. So we won't.
* It's easy to see why DeSantis lost the
nomination. He bounces his head when he
talks, and allegedly wears platform shoes.
Good thing none of the general election candidates has got any flaws
as serious as those.
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press