When options are few

The Friday Letter / No. 488 / April 15, 2022
Good Friday / Passover begins at sundown

Updated at 10:35 a.m. EDT Saturday with additional reporting

On Armistice Day 1947, Winston Churchill said, “Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. . .” Were he living today, Ronald Reagan might say the same about the Republican Party.

The Republican Party is preferable only because the alternative means certain ruin of the most successful society that ever existed, a society that has eliminated more poverty and created more personal wealth and more liberty than any other in history.

But the Republican Party is a complete mess, its ruling elite ensconced in the establishment, anti-Trump camp with its close ties to the corporatist Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable, former President G.W. Bush and 43 alumni of his administration, professional sports, major U.S. corporations, Big Tech, and Big Pharma. Watching the country go down the toilet is preferable, in their view, to having an outsider continue to shake up their cozy little arrangement of enriching themselves at the expense of the working man. These folks are really Democrats, though many of them cling to the fantasy that they aren't.

Count among them not just the three Senators we mention almost weekly – Romney, Murkowski, and Collins – but Tillis, Burr, Cassidy, Portman, Toomey and some others. (Thankfully, four of these are retiring.) Conservatives can't get a leg up because they have to fight off the Socialist Democrats with one hand and Establishment Republicans with the other.

We've been preaching for months that Trump's loss was a combination of ballot fraud and media propaganda that brainwashed ill-informed voters into believing that Trump is a monster who should be imprisoned. Aiding in this effort was an organization called Republican Voters Against Trump (rvat.org). It's hard to know whether they were really gullible Republicans who were duped or just Democrat actors who lent their names to the dirty tricks campaign.

Read what self-styled Republican “Dave” from Pennsylvania had to say on RVAT's website: “Every day Donald Trump stays in control of the government, puts our nation at risk.”

Never mind that Trump was never really in control of the government. After four years in office he hadn't finished fumigating the swamp. But we'd like to ask “Dave”: How is Biden working out for you?

And then there is “Jim” from Maryland: “To the cabinet, to the Vice President, as a Republican I'm asking: do the right thing. . . enact the 25th Amendment.” Our crack research team has been looking around feverishly but we can't seem to find where “Jim” has called for the 25th Amendment to be dropped on Joe Biden. “Jim,” we are told, is a Republican. So is Mitt Romney.

Finally, there is “Joel” from Massachusetts. “Joel” says that “Trump, personally, must be held responsible for the death and destruction at the Capitol.” Now the problem here is that there was only one killing at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd murdered an unarmed female protester on the other side of a window who posed no threat to him or others. Byrd has never been charged, never brought before a grand jury, never suspended, never investigated. Byrd, by the way, has priors, including leaving his Glock 22 pistol in a restroom of the Capitol visitor center in 2019. Affirmative Action beneficiaries are apparently immune from serious scrutiny.

The good news is that working people – including a low percentage of blacks and an emerging majority of Latinos – have fled the Democrat plantation. They are the future of the Republican Party, the party of Trump and DeSantis.

Newt Gingrich, come on down!

Gingrich has been urging Republicans to craft a manifesto similar to the Contract with America he engineered in 1994 that gave Republicans control of the House for the first time in 40 years.

“I am totally with Kevin McCarthy and with Rick Scott, both of whom have come up with positive ideas,” Gingrich told John Solomon's podcast at Just the News. He said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's plan for the upcoming midterm election makes his leadership “as bad as” Nancy Pelosi's leadership in the House.

Gingrich criticized McConnell's leadership style of “Don't tell anybody what you're going to do, and then I'll go into a room and I'll make all the decisions.” Gingrich diplomatically failed to mention that McConnell is an anti-Trumper who, if allowed to keep his post, will seriously erode our chances of taking back the White House in 2024.

Gingrich cited the example of a 3,200-page bill that “only they and their staff gets to figure out what's going on. That's not representative government.”

“At a moment of turmoil and confusion and enormous pain, the American people deserve a Republican Senate and a Republican House that tells us before the election what they're going to do, then actually does it so we can hold them accountable,” Gingrich said.

Republicans have an outside chance of removing McConnell as their Senate leader, but only if voters first replace the Senate’s double agent liberal Republicans with constitutional conservatives.

Election fraud update

The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday heard challenges to rules that allows election operatives to harvest and deposit ballots into drop boxes, in violation of state law. “There are only two ways to return an absentee ballot; you mail it or you deliver it in-person to the clerk. And a drop box is neither of those, which is why they’re not allowed,” said Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty senior counsel Luke Berg, who is arguing the case. . .

New York's lieutenant governor was arrested Tuesday on federal campaign finance violations, the Washington Free Beacon reports. Brian Benjamin, a Democrat, is accused of trying to funnel illegal contributions into his failed campaign for New York City comptroller. Benjamin succeeded Kathy Hochul when she replaced Andrew Cuomo as governor. . .

Tennessee's secretary of state scuttled an attempt by Republicans to keep a Biden loyalist off the GOP primary ballot for Congress in the 5th District. A law, which took effect without Gov. Bill Lee's signature, requires congressional candidates to live in the state for three years before running. The ruling notes that the bill became law after the filing deadline for the primary election, and will not affect the 2022 election.

A woman called Morgan Ortagus recently moved to Nashville to run for the seat held by Democrat Jim Cooper in the Democrat-majority district. Upon leaving as a spokesman for the State Department at the end of the Trump Administration, Ortagus publicly pledged her loyalty to incoming President Biden. Strangely, Trump endorsed her over the conservative candidate, Robby Stark. Mr. Stark did not respond to our request for comment.

Short takes on the news

Former VP Pence spoke to a full-house crowd of 800 at the University of Virginia, despite faculty and the student newspaper’s attempt to keep him from speaking, Campus Reform reports. The student newspaper calls Pence’s speech “hateful” and “violent.” Pence spoke about keeping the torch of freedom alive. . .

New Mexico is paying college tuition and fees for illegal immigrants, using federal Covid relief funds, the New York Times reports. . .

Just hours before the beginning of Passover at sundown Friday, the New York Times published an op-end piece calling for the elimination of God, Breitbart reports. . .

Trump will endorse Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate, American Greatness reports, enraging Vance's establishment opponents. The election is important in that it will decide who replaces anti-Trump liberal Republican Rob Portman, who is retiring. . .

Washington Post columnist Max Boot worries that a free society as we know it is about to end. “I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter,” he wrote. “He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less” . . .

Alabama's legislature passed, and Gov. Kay Ivey signed, a law preventing outside funding of election operations with so-named “Zuckbucks,” widely seen as corrupt influence by Mark Zuckerberg of the 2020 election in several states that awarded their electoral votes to Biden, The Federalist reports. . .

Unelected bureaucrats at the Securities and Exchange Commission voted 3-1 to require almost all publicly traded U.S. companies “to not only calculate and report their own greenhouse gas emissions but those of their suppliers, customers, and logistics operators,” Patrick Tyrrell writes at The Daily Signal. Accounting firms are hiring thousands of employees in anticipation of the compliance rules, which will trigger huge new costs that will be passed along to end customers. “We are not the Securities and Environment Commission,” commissioner Hyster Pierce said in dissent. The U.S. leads industrial nations in reducing greenhouse emissions in the last several decades. . .

Biden's handlers order the Justice Department to investigate Tesla in retaliation of Elon Musk's purchase of more than 9 percent of Twitter. Conservative commentators are urging people to buy Twitter shares and assign proxy voting to Musk, and we do too. For full disclosure, we bought 50 shares on Thursday for just such purpose and urge another million or so of our fellow citizens to join us. Never mind that the share price began falling immediately after our $46-a-share buy. Oh well. . .

In Pennsylvania, a volunteer fire company in Delaware Company disbanded after some of its members were accused of using racial slurs recorded at the end of a meeting, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports. The local district attorney wondered if the speech could be criminal but later thought better of the idea. Meanwhile, people served by the volunteers have lost their fire department, but at least they are no longer subjected to hurtful speech. . .

Democrat U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia raised $13.6 million in the first quarter for his re-election campaign, outpacing Republican hopeful Hershel Walker's $5.4 million, The Kansas City Star reports. Warnock is a racial bigot and former preacher whose inflammatory sermons railed against whiteness and white people.

Recommended reading

A welcome break from partisan politics, this piece by Phil Mushnick at The New York Post is too good to pass up. It's sports writing as its best, this autopsy of a dreadful baseball broadcast of a Mets-Nationals game and a blistering account of how Jim Nance and other golf announcers groveled over Tiger Woods and his “courageous” 47th place finish in the Masters. We send this out this week to all subscribers, free and paid.