The changing nature of 'victori spolia'
The Friday Letter / No. 544 / June 9, 2023
Yes, I know. Last week’s headline should have read “Ready, fire, aim.” We correct this stuff on the website, which you can access by clicking the “online” button at the top right.
“In the old days of war,” the Brave search engine summary explains, “the winning army pretty much got to loot the countryside and take what (it) wanted – wealth, harvest, women, whatever.”
The earliest known reference we could find of “To the victor goes the spoils” is an 1832 speech by US Sen. William Marcy of New York explaining why the winning political party gets to fire all the patronage appointees and install its own.
Some things rarely change, as Barack Obama reminded Sen. McCain in 2008: Elections have consequences. Delivering on his promise to “fundamentally change America,” Obama introduced the modern post-Constitution era, whose roots trace to Woodrow Wilson a century earlier and carried forward by FDR and Lyndon Johnson. Now, Joe Biden's puppeteers have ratcheted up this war on liberty to levels unthinkable even during Obama's presidency.
The century-long unraveling of our Constitution was made possible only by the voters' willingness to accept it. Elections have consequences.
Like other free nations, the US extracts the spoils of victory only in her politics, not in war. As Gen. Powell told the World Economic Forum (how ironic) in 2003, we ask for only enough land to bury our war dead.
In domestic politics, the spoils of war have taken a sinister twist not seen before. On May 26 the Rushingbrook Children's Choir was invited by two of South Carolina's Republican congressmen, William Timmons and Joe Wilson, to perform all four verses of the “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Statuary Hall of the US Capitol.
Enter the Capitol Police. Early in the rarely-performed third verse, the police intervened and shut down the performance, explaining that “singing the Anthem could be considered a form of protest.”
The choir director, David Rasbach, was flabbergasted. “We are all Christian people, and we know that all things work together for good for those who love the Lord,” he said in a story reported at The Blaze. “We're just gob-smacked. We’re just a little choir of kids from Greenville who nobody knew anything about except Greenvillians who came to our concerts, and even then we never even had full houses. And now we’re performing on national news.”
(The “national news” reference is to President Trump's invitation to have the choir perform at an upcoming campaign rally, and invitations by Fox News and NewsMax.)
The police made a ham-handed attempt to blame the jack-boot thuggery on a Congressional staff member (thoroughly debunked) and offered an insincere apology. But like most of the left's tactics, the damage had been done.
The communist left – that would be the Democrat Party – makes no pretense of its intention to destroy the country. It's doing a remarkable job.
Decades from now, depending on who gets to write the history – that is, who gets the spoils – historians might look back at the Twenties in utter bewilderment. They will try to answer a question that has no answer. How, for instance, could a criminal justice operation charge one former president with a felony he most clearly did not commit and overlook another president who clearly did?
One needs little knowledge of the law to understand that if a president has the right to declassify documents, then the president has committed no crime in declassifying them. (Nor did he refuse to secure them properly and relinquish them to the government when asked.)
Nor does it take a legal sleuth to see a crime when a vice president – who has no authority to declassify anything – carelessly leaves sensitive classified documents lying around in his garage which he had no authority to remove from the White House, unguarded with no security and with access by his son, the conduit of bribery payoffs from the Communist Chinese Party.
Nor to understand how a sitting vice president and his family received millions of dollars from the CCP to influence American policy, with no ramifications. Or how political operatives loyal to the permanent state repeatedly lied to Congress without even the slight possibility of arrest.
Or why a grieving mother was arrested for planting flowers at the Capitol in honor of her murdered daughter at the hands of police while anarchists who burned American cities, trapped police in their precinct quarters and committed murder escaped punishment.
It is difficult to contemplate how future historians will demystify this mystery.
They will have to dig into the culture of our 21st century times to understand how all major institutions – the law, academia, news and entertainment media, almost every large public corporation, non-government organizations (NGOs), government unions, and professional sports – were under the control of one political party. To control information is to control everything.
And until we the people figure how to wrest that monopoly control from the permanent state institutions, we make no progress in the quest of freedom and liberty.
The Capitol Police is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the ruling party, the Communist Democrats. Democrats make no attempt to conceal their motives. They don't need to, because they have the entire propaganda apparatus at their disposal.
Younger Americans are especially suseptible to the official lie coming from the government and its partner institutions that white people are evil, that Christianity is an evil terrorist movement, that our nation was founded on slavery and that no amount of reparations will ever be enough.
They are taught this in the government schools. It continues at the university, Tic-Toc and other media where young people get their information.
“. . .The whole apparatus for spreading knowledge – the schools, the press, radio and motion picture --” F.A. Hayek wrote in The Road to Serfdom, “will be used exclusively to spread those views which, whether true or false, will strengthen the belief in the rightness of the decisions taken by the authority; and all information that might cause doubt or hesitation be withheld.”
Short takes on the news
Breitbart
An illegal alien from Venezuela, 34, was charged with murdering a woman in El Paso, Tex., just one day after Biden's Homeland Security Department released him into the United States. Police said both had pierced the border at the same time and ended up in a motel room together. He fled the scene but was captured and is being held in the Tarrant County jail.
The Lancaster Patriot
Local police arrested Damon Atkins of Reading, Pa., for standing across the street from a city-sponsored homosexual privileges rally in Lancaster and reading a Bible verse. He was handcuffed and charged with disorderly conduct.
The Daily Mail
Kavanaugh joins the Supreme Court's four liberals in a 5-4 decision striking down Alabama's congressional districts, which guarantee only one black Member. Alabama is about 25% black. . . Louisiana and Missouri are close to outlawing sex mutilation procedures for minors, bringing the state total to 21.
Breitbart
Slow learners. Bud Light partners with Coca-Cola USA, Toyota, and Old Navy to sponsor a homosexual festival June 17 in Flagstaff, Ariz. . . . The Air Farce celebrates “Pride Month” with a graphic of an airman saluting a rainbow-colored flag.
One America News
The City of Dallas threatens to fire any city employee who refuses to use the “preferred pronouns” of employees, including those who claim a sex other than their own. . . Minnesota will grant 100% free college tuition to illegal immigrants.
Quotes for today
For Biden, “debates were banned to protect the president from talking himself into deadends, lapsing into gibberish or doing a face plant in prime time.” – Michael Goodwin at The New York Post
“There is now a new name for moderate Democrats – squish Republicans.”
– Kurt Schlichter at Townhall.
Recommended reading
"Only one Republican candidate gets results”
Michael Barone at The Washington Examiner
“Who(m) do the Democrats replace Biden with?”
Kurt Schlichter at Townhall
To contact Steve: stephencombs@substack.com. The Friday Letter is published in the op-ed section of USSA News. See updated versions at our website, fridayletter.us.
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