Tea at Trianon: Will Trump Win Again?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, October 17, 2020

Will Trump Win Again?

From PJB at The Lawton Constitution:

The question this has raised is no longer whether Joe has “lost a step” — few deny that — but whether he retains sufficient mental acuity to be a decisive leader of the free world for the next four years. Two weeks out, however, voters seem not to care, or rather not to care enough to reject the Biden-Harris ticket.

The issue has been Trump. And the imperative for the president and his campaign remains to persuade the nation of several truths:

Biden is not physically or mentally up to the job. He will not be able to stand up to the radicals in his party who have extensive plan to enact in the next two years and a real possibility of doing so. [The bold is mine.]

If Biden wins, they will insist that the Senate do what Barack Obama told them to do: Abolish the “Jim Crow relic” known as the filibuster, and use 50 Senate Democrats to enact an agenda more sweeping than FDR’s New Deal. Of what does that agenda consist? To shift the goal from equality of opportunity in race relations to equality of results — in income, wealth, power. Reparations for slavery. Pursue the Black Lives Matter demand to “reimagine policing” and to “defund the police.”

On immigration, open an immediate path to citizenship and the ballot box for DACA “Dreamers.” End deportations. Grant amnesty to all 11 million to 22 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. Abolish ICE. Open America’s borders to new and higher waves of immigration to make America the most racially, ethnically, socially and culturally diverse society in the history of man.

Pack the Senate by extending statehood to Puerto Rico and D.C., adding four new Democratic senators and making us a bilingual nation. Pack the Supreme Court by adding two new justices. Raise taxes on payrolls, personal incomes, corporations, capital gains and estates. Accelerate an end to carbon emissions by halting all offshore drilling and ending any reliance for energy, on coal, oil, gas or fracking. Free education for all from prekindergarten through college. On and on the agenda runs. But again, without the abolition of the filibuster, a GOP Senate minority could block this agenda that is designed to create a new American nation unlike the one we have known.

No, this is not the French Revolution. (Read more.)