This weekend will be filled with Super Bowl and COVID-19 news. At least, if you follow CNN, that’s all that seems to be happening in the world.
But hey, what’s this link to “Myanmar?”
Oh, never mind, just that Myanmar is blocking some social media websites.
I wonder what Global Times thinks of Myanmar?
Oh, a cabinet reshuffle? Sounds like something pretty boring. Let’s head over to Al-Jazeera.
Whoa.
Myanmar just had a coup. After actually having elections in 2015, and seeming to be trending towards democracy, Myanmar took a huge step backwards. The military, led by General Min Aung Hlaing, was losing influence as more people voted for the National League for Democracy party, which is led by the current sitting president, Aung San Suu Kyi. Instead of continuing to pull the levers of power in the background, General Hlaing instead arrested Aung San Suu Kyi and is posed to take over completely. It’s likely because his current post in the military ends this summer, and he’s positioning himself to be “elected” President.
All of this is real news, and a real foreign policy challenge for the United States, as China is more than happy to let the Myanmar military remove a democratic government on its border. But as illustrated above, you would never know about it unless drilled down deep into non-traditional media sources. My list of media includes the BBC (https://www.bbc.com) and Al-Jazeera (https://www.aljazeera.com/). BBC has really good non-U.S. news, and Al-Jazeera is great for south Asia and African news. I don’t trust either on their U.S. or Israel reporting, but that’s OK, I have other sources for that.
The days of being able to just get all the headlines from CNN or Fox News are past. News, especially non-US news, is increasingly filtered out, despite its importance. Start adding BBC and Al-Jazeera to your list of daily news sources, recognizing where they fall short.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
A post by Da Tech Guy himself last week got me thinking about Chicago’s legendary newspaper columnist Mike Rokyo. Yes, he was another of the greats in journalism who didn’t have a college degree. For most of his life Royko was a steadfast liberal, but his blue collar roots made him suspicious, for good reason I’d like to add, of left-wingers. Yet Royko was a harsh critic of the Boss of Chicago, the first Mayor Richard Daley, as well as the Cook County Regular Democratic Organization, better known as the Chicago Machine. Still, Rokyo understood why rank-and-file Chicagoans kept the Machine in power.
I’ll return to Royko in a bit.
The January 6 protest in Washington will forever be remembered as the Capitol Riot because of the 1,000 or so hooligans and loons who stormed the Capitol building. But the great majority of the protesters didn’t riot and they had valid reasons to question the vote count, and yes, to also be angry about those results.
News reports of the fraud allegations regarding the November election are typically partisan. The mainstream media calls claims of vote fraud “baseless,” conservative media, Newsmax for instance, is more forceful.
President Joe Biden, before he went on his unprecedented flurry of executive orders pushing far-left causes such as cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline and banning new oil and gas leases on federal lands, was calling for healing.
A good start for healing would be a bipartisan congressional committee investigating 2020 vote fraud allegations, such as dead people voting, abuse of mail-in voting, and the like. Here’s are few more: Were ballots in Georgia tallied after party observers left? Why were votes counted at Detroit’s TCF Center after people were told to depart and the windows of the building covered? Were election integrity standards sacrificed every place else to protect voters from COVID-19?
There may be plausible reasons for what occured in Georgia and Detroit and other places, such as Arizona, where some are crying foul.
Maybe the 2020 vote count was quite accurate.
Or perhaps not.
What’s the harm in finding out? After all the Democrats and a special prosecutor spent three years investigating Donald Trump’s “collusion” with Russia. They might have been better off tracking down post-death Elvis Presley sightings. It’d be worth a laugh at least to see crazy California Democratic congressman Adam Schiff analyzing the lyrics of Mojo Nixon’s novelty tune “Elvis Is Everywhere.” He’d wonder, “Did Elvis really build Stonehenge?”
Because there are only a few weeks for investigators to look into vote fraud charges before a winner is sworn in after an election, having an honest and secure ballot count is crucial. Scandals take a long time to be exposed. It took ten months for Watergate to break wide open and Richard M. Nixon, no relation to Mojo Nixon by the way, didn’t resign the presidency until two years after the Watergate break-in.
We’re not off to a good start with the 117th Congress. HR 1, which means that it is the first bill proposed the the new Congress, will broaden the use of mail-in voting and the vile practice of ballot harvesting if made law.
The latest snowstorm here in the Chicago area is winding down as I write this post which gets me thinking of Royko and the devastating winter of 1979. After Daley’s death in 1976 the Chicago City Council chose Michael Bilandic, the alderman in Daley’s ward, as his successor. It’s generally believed Bilandic was selected to be a placeholder for Richard M. Daley, the Boss’s son, who would then run in 1983. It’s a long story worth telling but not now, but Richie Daley would finally become mayor in 1989, serving until 2011, while destroying Chicago’s finances.
Bilandic, on Chicago standards, was a decent and hardworking man, whose character flaw was that he assumed everyone else was too. Snow removal after a major January snowstorm that came after a couple of smaller ones was not handled well by Bilandic, who was lied to and misled by other city officials when they told him everything was fine. Meanwhile Jane Byrne, a minor player at City Hall who was fired by Bilandic, challenged the incumbent in what was seen as a longshot bid in that year’s Democratic primary. Her initial core support was the Democrats’ progressive wing, then known as the Lakefront Liberals. Rage over the botched response in digging the city out of the snow gave Byrne her opportunity to pull off an upset and she ran with it.
I remember a Chicago Sun-Times Royko column from that year where he wrote somthing along the lines that Byrne wouldn’t beat Bilandic if she captured 50 percent of the vote plus one. Or if she collected 51 or 52 percent. Her magic percentage, Royko reasoned, was 53 percent.
Really?
That’s because of vote thefts by the Machine, Royko surmised, amounted to three percent of the total each election. Four decades ago crooked Democratic tactics were different. Non-existent people were registered in vacant lots, roving bands of homeless people, which in mock Latin Rokyo labeled hobo floto voto, voted multiple times, and the seeds of ballot harvesting could be found, particularly in nursing homes, even then. Oh, dead people voted. An effective yet dishonest Chicago precinct captain kept a close eye on who passed away in the neighborhood. And when Election Day came–there wasn’t an “Election Season” like now–thousands of Lazurus voters exercised their franchise.
In short, Chicagoans, even those who supported the Machine, didn’t see election results as fair. Ironically back then it was the liberals who were calling for election integrity in Chcago.
Imagine a football game where the NFL commissioner is a Chicago Bears fan. And at kickoff Da Bears have a 7-0 lead. And the referees are Bears backers too.
Byrne won that primary and prevailed in the general election over a hapless Republican, but the Machine, with some new faces in power, had the last laugh over the Lakefront Liberals as she set herself up as a new Boss. Royko eventually called her “Mayor Bossy.”
Back to the present.
Has America reached the point where the Democrats, because of mail-in voting, ballot dropboxes, and ballot harveting, possess that three-percent advantage in elections? Let’s throw in non-citizens and illegal aliens voting. Will Republicans need 53 percent of the vote to win? 55 percent?
If HR 1 becomes law will we ever have another Republican president? Will the system perpetuate the permanent Democratic majority that the leftists dream of?
And if tens of millions of Americans don’t trust the results of elections our republic is in peril.
Okay, I admit, the headline is provocative, and absolutely click-baity. But stay with me here. In two weeks the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump will begin. Presidents of course can be impeached by the House and removed from office for committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
There’s just one obvious problem here. On Wednesday Joe Biden was sworn in as Trump’s successor.
The Holy Father was accused of a grab bag of crimes, including perjury, seeking to be the bishop of more than one jurisdiction, and coveting the papacy. Because he was unable to speak in his defense, a deacon was appointed for that task. Formosus was found guilty, he had three middle fingers cut off–the fingers used for blessings–and buried in an obscure cemetery not befitting the Bishop of Rome. His body was quickly exhumed and then dumped in the Tiber River.
If the prior paragraph doesn’t make complete sense it’s because Formosus, after a five-year papacy, died in 896. His successor was pope for just two weeks, the next pope was Stephen VI, an enemy of Formosus. He called for what historians label the cadaver synod. Stephen ordered the first exhumation of Formosus. His corpse was then dressed in papal robes, propped on a chair, and the conviction process began as there was certainly no doubt of the verdict, despite an earthquake during the trial that might have elicited a few doubts among Vatican officials.
Just as the guilty verdict of Formosus was set twelve centuries ago, so was the House of Representatives’ vote to impeach Trump a second time, just one week before the end of his term. Trump’s chances for an acquittal in the Senate are much better. In essence, the second impeachment process against Trump is his cadaver synod. It’s about making a political statement and playing to the base.
The justifications for the second impeachment from Democrats vary, but the primary goal seems to be preventing the former president from seeking another term in 2024. Another reason for impeaching and removing Trump from office, now moot, was that he possessed the nuclear strike codes. After the first Trump impeachment, House speaker Nancy Pelosi, knowing that the odds of the Senate voting to convict Trump were remote, called the lower chamber’s vote “an impeachment that will last forever.” Presumably this will be a second impeachment that will last forever. Oh, and it’s a splendid way for Pelosi and the Democrats to tar the Republican brand.
A third run for the White House, in my opinion, is unlikely for Trump. The former president will be 78 in 2024; yes, that is the same age as Biden, who is clearly an old 78. Three years is a long time for people in their 70s. And in the last 100 years no president who was defeated in a reelection attempt has tried to regain the White House. Only one, Gerald Ford, has seriously considered it. And Trump, again in my opinion, damaged his brand in the last weeks of his presidency by his slowness to condede defeat, his hostile phone call to the Georgia secretary of state asking him to change the election results there, and the riot at the Capitol–which by the way the president did not incite. And the riot, the destructive work of about 1,000 conspirary theorists and other screwballs, was not an insurrection. While Trump is a clearly a unique politician, political moods change. In 1980 Americans weren’t clamoring for Gerald Ford–they wanted Ronald Reagan.
The Trump cadaver synod is a two-minute hate for Democrat politicians and a way, perhaps for the final time, to fill their campaign funds in the name of Trump, and a hate that is being cheered on by the anti-Trump media, who will soon see a drop in readers and viewers now that their enemy is out of office.
In other words Impeachment Part Two is a waste of time.
As for Formosus, his body was recovered by a monk and buried–for the last time–in St Peter’s Basilica. His accuser, Stephen VI, was pope for little more than a year. After the cadaver synod Stephen was imprisoned and then strangled to death.
As for voters, a much more civil revenge will be to return the GOP to majorities in both houses of Congress.
I’m not a fan of killing babies. There is just something so inherently wrong with taking a small, innocent child and murdering them in cold blood. Maybe its my Catholic upbringing. Maybe its my experience fighting so hard to keep a kid, only to lose them after heart surgery. Maybe its because I actually enjoy (most) of the time with my kids. Or maybe its a combination of all these things and more. I don’t really know. But murdering young babies, including unborn ones, is pretty awful.
Murdering babies is so awful that its pretty high on my list of “things I care about when I vote for someone.” Other things high up on the list include not infringing on gun ownership, insisting on following the rule of law, and avoiding dumb overseas conflicts while stepping in when needed to maintain good international order when needed. There is a lot in the middle. For example, I can be persuaded on different economic models, so if one is a bit more “left leaning,” but it has some data behind it, I can be talked into setting down my Ayn Rand novel and trying something new.
I’ve had this world view for quite some time, and then Donald Trump became President. Increasingly, when asked how I could ever vote for such a vile human being, I would find myself saying “I know he’s not a nice guy, but…” Recently, my wife almost had the same argument with a friend, who challenged her on her views on abortion. My wife had written a long response, including the obligatory “I don’t like Donald Trump either, but I agree with his views on abortion.”
When I read that, something clicked in my brain, and I asked out loud “Why do we feel we have to defend Donald Trump’s personal life?”
I’m not related to Donald Trump, nor do I have any control or influence over his decisions. As a politician, I voted for him ONLY based on his positions aligning with my own on a variety of matters. That’s it. His personal life doesn’t mean anything to me. Neither did any previous President’s life.
Almost every politician engages in some ugly behavior, and the ones that don’t seem to simply don’t get caught or highlighted by the media. John McCain dumped his wife for a younger, prettier gal. Joe Biden swam nude around female Secret Service agents and can’t seem to keep his hands to himself. Plenty of elected officials engage in insider trading and abuse their elected position for money. I’m opposed to all this behavior, and it disgusts me when I see it. I’m also not voting for these people to spend time around my kids. I’m voting for them to advocate and legislate for the policies that I agree with, which will cause me to vote for people I don’t like personally.
That vote doesn’t mean I have to defend their personal decisions. After reading my wife’s response, I recommended she take out all the defense of Donald Trump and simply ask “Why are you claiming to be a Christian and yet think its OK to kill unborn children?” Because, really, that’s what it is about.
The next time you hear yourself saying “I don’t like Donald Trump’s tweets/behavior/rhetoric/bombastic nature/etc.” stop yourself. Stop defending Donald Trump’s behavior. It’s not your job to do so. Stay focused on why him, or any other elected official, earned your vote in the first place.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
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