RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/11/11/desantis-2024-think-again-n1645202

It should be clear by this time that popularity has nothing to do with electability. Trump filled rally after rally in state after state with countless, full-house, full-stadium crowds, and such numbers do not lie. There really was a red wave in the midterms, but it was macro-engineered to a trickle, as should have been expected. The scam of  “malfunctioning” voting machines, the shortage of paper ballots, the tsunami of mail-in and late ballots, the temporary closing and slow-downs of polling stations, and so on would have been sufficient to determine an electoral result. 2020 was an early run for 2022, which in turn should be regarded as a template for 2024. I am absolutely sure that the Dems are now, even as we speak, preparing favorable ground for the next presidential election. As Stalin is reputed to have said, “It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.” To make Trump responsible for Democrat malfeasance is wholly misguided.

DeSantis is now the favorite among many Republican voters and almost all conservative commentators for the Party presidential nomination. Such passionate advocates seem to have missed two essential points:

In a rigged electoral system, no Republican candidate, not even DeSantis, can be expected to win a national election. DeSantis cruised to victory in Florida because, as governor of the state, he had the means and the authority to ensure a clean election. But he would be helpless against a massive crime organization, aka the Democrat Party, which effectively controls the electoral infrastructure, the physical apparatus, the paid loyalty of election workers, and the federal agencies that oversee the process. If the system is not repaired and made answerable to the people, there will never be a Republican president again.
Should DeSantis run in 2024 and lose — which is increasingly likely in the current adulterated circumstances — the sequel would be devastating. Florida would be at the mercy of the next gubernatorial race since DeSantis is a unique political figure and could not be readily replaced. Additionally, DeSantis himself would have become a kind of displaced person, neither an American president nor a state governor. An invaluable political talent would have been sacrificed to the untutored enthusiasm of his supporters. If the American republican experiment is now in dire straits, it would then be expeditiously destroyed. A slim hope will have become an utter disaster.

Trump has obviously made his mistakes. As Alicia Colon writes on American Thinker, “There is no question that Donald Trump is a flawed human being like most successful businessmen.” She goes on: “Whenever I read the complaints from Trump haters, it’s all about his personality, his tweets, his misogynism, his sexist remarks, blah, blah, blah. This is infantile, high school criticism that has no place in political punditry.” Similarly, as J.B. Shurk writes, everything that the establishment class “has fraudulently peddled against Trump—that he’s imperious, mercurial, uncouth, unworthy to hold office, a Russian spy, a warmonger, an insurrectionist, a ‘denier,’ a criminal—is nothing but an endless barrage of psychological warfare directed against MAGA voters.”

Trump’s flaws of character — and who is without them — do not alter the fact that Trump is an indomitable fighter and the most successful president in recent history. His ego is concomitant with his strength; the two cannot be separated. To turn against him now and indulge in gutter journalism, righteous schadenfreude, or in considerations of realpolitik largely because a number of his chosen endorsements succumbed to a corrupt and rigged electoral machine is a sign of conservative defeatism and, in some cases, of self-enamored mobbing. We were quite happy with his major and unprecedented policy successes: making America energy-independent, restoring the manufacturing base, revisiting trade deals to benefit American workers, creating a surge in employment and prosperity, laboring to put a stop to illegal immigration, appointing conservative judges, rebuilding a depleted military, and establishing renewed American pre-eminence on the international stage. Now we are ready to consign him to the golf course. How quickly gratitude turns to recrimination.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/the_fbi_report_weve_long_needed.html

The actions of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been questionable as of late under the leadership of Christopher Wray.

We could dive back into the way the bureau acted upon raiding former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this year.  But their actions go much deeper, with reports about surveillance and even spying on emails of private American citizens in the hopes of finding criminal activity.

There’s about to be a spotlight shining down on the FBI.  House Republicans have released a 1,000-page report that details just what’s wrong with the FBI, thanks to a number of former agents-turned-whistleblowers who detail just how bad things have gotten there.

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation, under the stewardship of Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland, is broken,” the report explains.  “The problem lies not with the majority of front-line agents who serve our country, but with the FBI’s politicized bureaucracy.”

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee detail the report as “the first comprehensive accounting of the FBI’s problems to date, which undermine” its “fundamental law-enforcement mission.”

People could say this is a political move that will serve Republicans going into their elections, but that’s an easy dismissal when the report actually takes a look at something concrete: the problems within the bureau.

And there are problems.  They are hard to ignore.  A number of whistleblowers who understand the inner workings of the bureau’s office have noted that its leadership is “rotted at its core.”  They also seem to highlight what they call “a systematic culture of unaccountability,” consistently utilizing “rampant corruption, manipulation and abuse.”

The gist of the report explains how the bureau has been consistently biased against conservatives, investigating the actions of former president Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans with little to hold it back.  Not to mention the Bureau is out to “purge” employees who have even the faintest of conservative views, fearing they’ll have an effect on its direction.

Furthermore, the FBI is holding back the facts on the effectiveness of constitutional-carrying citizens.  These are people who have stopped a number of active shooter events.  However, the FBI’s “official” numbers aren’t nearly as high as what’s actually happening.

https://www.city-journal.org/ron-desantis-rules-for-political-success

On a disappointing night for Republicans, Governor Ron DeSantis crushed it in the free state of Florida, lapping his challenger, Congressman Charlie Crist, by close to 20 points. Before DeSantis’s emergence, Florida used to keep us wondering whether it would turn blue or red until the wee hours on Election Night or, in the case of the 2000 election, for weeks thereafter. But it was clear well before midnight on Tuesday that Florida had turned solid red. From Portsmouth to Puget Sound, Republicans interested in replicating DeSantis’s “win for the ages” should learn from these eight rules.

Stay on offense. Given the mainstream media’s leftward tilt, Republicans are often stuck playing defense. As president, Donald Trump called the media the “enemy of the people” but also seemed to crave their approval. DeSantis, by contrast, rewrote the Republican playbook by staying on offense virtually nonstop for four years. He refused to bend or apologize for anything he said or did, even when the media called him “DeathSantis” for keeping the state open during Covid or mischaracterized his Parental Rights in Education law (falsely smeared as “Don’t Say Gay”). As he said in his victory speech on Tuesday night, “We took the hits, we weathered the storms, but we stood our ground, we did not back down.”

Every week, or so it seemed, the governor took the fight to a new target: woke corporations like Disney, intransigent teachers’ unions, Big Tech, liberal judges and prosecutors who refused to follow the law, or “sanctuary-city” leaders who “embraced” illegal immigrants—as long as they didn’t settle in places like Martha’s Vineyard.

You can create your own majority with the right approach. When DeSantis took office, Democrats enjoyed a small voter-registration edge statewide, but now Republicans hold a commanding 300,000-voter lead. He undoubtedly won over some native Floridians, but probably the much bigger factor here was his effort to inspire like-minded conservatives to move to Florida from blue states. (And perhaps this helps explain, in part, why Gretchen Whitmer, Kathy Hochul, and other embattled liberal governors survived.) I moved to Florida from Oregon in 2019 to some degree because I admire DeSantis and his approach to governance, so I count myself a member of this movement.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/democrats-mail-voting-midterms-fix/

I have been thinking about the phrase “the fix was in.” What it means is that a certain result was predetermined. It carries with it a suggestion — but only, I think, a suggestion — of something, if not quite illicit, then at least not quite above board.

Why have I been thinking about that pregnant phrase? If you said “the midterm elections,” go to the head of the class.

I have no idea whether there was anything corrupt or underhanded about the election, notwithstanding the Caligula’s horse moment of John Fetterman’s election to the United States Senate. It was odd, no doubt, that the people of the great state of Pennsylvania elected a mentally incompetent trust-fund leftie who never saw a dead baby he didn’t like. But perhaps, like Caligula, who is said to have made his horse a consul, the people of Pennsylvania did it out of spite, just to show that they could. Or maybe Fetterman’s elevation to the 100 club is just an illustration of the old observation that anybody — and I mean anybody — can rise to the top in America.

Of course, by “anybody,” I do not mean “anybody.” I mean anybody with the approved left-wing attitudes.

But I digress. Let’s return to that “fix” I mentioned above. What was the determinative fix in the 2022 midterm elections? Early, mostly mail-in, voting. It is perfectly legal. But it undermines a fair and open electoral process. Were I a Democrat, I might even say that it “threatens our democracy.” Why? Because it allows for the wholesale manipulation of the vote. It also dilutes the integrity of an election by transforming it from an event into a process.

I should add that “mail-in ballots” is an equivocal term. It can mean different things in different contexts and in different states. The practice is obviously open to more interference and manipulation than same-day voting is. So extra safeguards must be put in place and scrupulously followed if such interference and manipulation is to be avoided. Some states do this. Florida is a good example. Other states do not. Apparently, about 1.4 million people asked for mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. Around the same number voted early by mail in Arizona, compared to just shy of half a million on Election Day. Were all such ballots carefully checked to ascertain the identity and eligibility of the person casting the vote?