Thank You For Your Service
But first, some hard questions and truths.
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I need to open with something other than what the title is referring to and this is tough because it involves a number of people I consider friends, i.e not just friends in politics, but actual friends.
I just have to ask: what were you thinking?
There were real issues about the election. Mark Levin articulated a number of them over the past few months. Judges changed procedures. Secretaries of State sent absentee ballots to everyone. Elections are supposed to be run under a set of rules passed by democratically elected legislatures. But Democrats ran to court and got progressive judges to change those rules or had progressive elections entities or Secretaries of State change them too.
It’s like running a race for President based on the Electoral College and then saying never mind, we’re going with the popular vote. The whole strategy would have been different had it started as a popular vote election. Just ask Hillary Clinton who ran a popular vote campaign despite the Electoral College being in place.
There are legitimate concerns there. Now, to be fair, some of what happened came about because of a global pandemic many people were not taking seriously. A lot of what happened was upheld by Trump appointed judges as proper and reasonable. But there are still legitimate concerns.
Instead, Republicans spent most of their time screaming about fraud when the Trump legal team never, ever, ever claimed fraud in court. Republicans spent time claiming voters had voted who should not have. As of today, more than two months after the general election, the GOP has never presented actual names. In their most credible case in Georgia, the President’s team dismissed the case.
To be sure, some fringe websites have presented names, but their information is bogus and has been debunked.
But time and again, instead of focusing on legitimate legal concerns, the GOP focused on false krakens led by Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Lin Wood. It’s like the GOP campaigned for an Academy Award against Gladiator by putting Rudy in a speedo and filming him with an iPhone while he is flinging his TV remote control yelling “Are you not entertained?” Then some conservatives demanded state legislatures throw out the Electoral College members selected by votes of their citizens — a move that, had the Democrats done it in 2016, would have outraged Republicans.
Instead of exercising any level of humility, Republicans either believed a bunch of lies and would not accept any facts to the contrary or they simply didn’t care and decided to build an army of lies to overwhelm and defeat the truth. Either way, with a clown show of characters straight out of B-Movie casting for Sharknado 27, they failed to persuade the majority of the public that they had real claims.
But they persuaded some, whipped them into a frenzy, told them to fight, fight, fight, and held a rally in Washington. WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU PEOPLE THINKING WAS GOING TO HAPPEN?
No, I am not sympathetic to you over major corporations deciding not to give you a penny. No, I am not sympathetic to you getting your internet social media accounts canceled. No, I am not sympathetic to you having your rising career in politics ruined.
You tried to undermine a lawful election, sold a bunch of well meaning and caring people a bill of lies many of them believed while you all knew better behind the scenes, and saw multiple people die in a storming of the Capitol after encouraging these people with fists in the air and atta-boys.
What the hell did you think would happen?
Conservatives are not getting cancelled — seditious a—holes are getting canceled. They are not victims. You are not a victim. This was bound to happen because you overplayed your hand and your action is causing a reaction. It is an equal and opposite reaction. Trying to cancel a presidential election causes a cancelation rebound.
I have written repeatedly and consistently, including yesterday, about my concerns over cancel culture, the left’s power imbalance, the ability of tech companies to silence Christians and conservatives, etc. I have consistently said it was wrong and conservatives need to stand together. I have consistently opposed it and worry now that what you did is going to make it really bad for a whole lot of people who weren’t even with you on canceling the election.
But it really is damn hard to make a coherent case against this after a bunch of you inspired a mob to storm the United States Congress where multiple people went in looking to kill members of Congress. Spare me the special pleadings about the kind souls who just got caught up in the crowd and meant no ill will.
Everything — from the storming of the Capitol to people getting killed to social networks banning you to corporations not giving you money — everything is a logical consequence of you people lying relentlessly for two months and taking advantage of American patriots who care deeply for the country and fear for its future. You preyed on them and turned many of them into a mob. Now you are reaping the whirlwind of your own actions. Unfortunately, the whole of the conservative movement will be even further damaged in the fall out. Every policy goal will be tied to those who stormed the Capitol. Every goal will be undermined by claims of sedition.
Shame on you even as you act like you have none. Shame. What the hell happened to the conservative movement? Are any of you self-reflective at all? Do any of you realize what you did caused what happened? Oh, and don’t be mad at me. I’m just asking questions.
Now to the main event…
Thank You
The progressive left is currently demanding some sort of truth and reconciliation commission. They claim that anyone who supported or worked for Trump must account for the sin of supporting Trump before being allowed to integrate into society.
For the past four years, many of the same people have sought to shame, disparage, and otherwise demonize anyone who worked for Donald Trump. Many of them advocated for all good people to walk away from Trump and abandon him to the fringe.
Well, for the past week, we have seen exactly how that would have worked out.
For four years, the President has been surrounded by a remarkable list of rock solid conservatives from Mick Mulvaney to Kellyanne Conway to Russ Vought to Larry Kudlow to Rick Perry to Nikki Haley to Mike Pence and so many more. They helped restrain the President, direct the President, steer the President, and more often than not were able to mitigate, contain, restrain, or redirect his worst impulses.
These people deserve our thanks.
Like it or not, President Trump was lawfully elected in 2016. Had he been surrounded the whole time by Rudy Guiliani, Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn, and the insane clown show of people who’ve made all the wild assertions about the election, we can see just how bad it would have been.
The credible conservatives who worked for the President made him succeed where he could have easily failed on a variety of fronts, steered many competent nominees to confirmation, and helped shape a lot of sound public policy at the regulatory and legislative level.
They deserve our thanks, not our scorn, and if you cannot acknowledge that I don’t think you are being sincerely intellectually honest or fair. This past week, with a President isolated and not listening to those voices, we saw the worst case scenario.
Mike Pence deserves a special thanks. For four years, a great many people who claimed former respect for him, heaped scorn on him for daring to be the Vice President. They concocted elaborate fictions of what Pence could or should do. But Pence stayed loyal, gave sound advice, and did what he could.
Last week, when push came to shove, Mike Pence chose the American constitutional order and now some of the President’s supporters want him assassinated. Mike Pence deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He deserves our praise. He is the man so many of us knew he was and now others can see it. When the moment came that he had to act or fold, he stood strong.
Thanks to all of you who served this Administration and thank you Mr. Vice President.
Why are you complaining about Mike Flynn? He was set up by the FBI. They played the man and ruined him.
Trump's team screamed about fraud without ever claiming fraud in court because the real play was ALWAYS to get state legislatures to simply disregard the election results and award their electoral votes to Trump. The frenzy that the base was whipped into by the fraud claims was intended to provide cover in the form of a political environment where state legislators might better justify what they had done. (If this sounds like just another conspiracy theory, I would love to hear another explanation for why fraud was never even presented in court.) Though cynical, unprincipled and indeed, un-American, had the election come down to just one or two states. it might well have worked. Mere state legislators may not have withstood the pressure that we saw brought to bear on the national legislature last week.
I am by no means a fan of Mitch McConnell, but he got it exactly right with that stuff about sending our democracy into a death spiral. He has seen this phenomenon himself in relation to the filibuster, where the Democrats' use of the "nuclear option" for certain nominations led Mitch to nuke it for Supreme Court nominations, which will almost certainly lead Democrats to eventually nuke it altogether. In the same fashion, if Republicans in either Congress or the state legislatures were to take this presidential election out of the hands of voters, Democrats would do the same thing the first chance they got and soon, we might as well not even bother with presidential elections.
And then there was Mike Pence, along with people like Brad Raffensperger and those two Republican legislative leaders from Michigan who Trump summoned to Washington. All chose country over party in refusing to dishonor the will of the American people, as expressed through our democratic process.
I have been sorely disappointed by my Republican brothers over the past four or five years. Now that the mask has been ripped from your eyes and you see just how dangerous Donald Trumpism is, keep on doing the right thing. Lindsay Graham may have said it best:
"Enough is enough."