Fear and Loathing ain’t Beanbag! (or) Beware the Idiots of March!

“May you live in interesting times!”–Ancient Chinese curse, probably apocryphal, definitely  germane.

They were candidates once, and young…

“Politics ain’t beanbag,” Richard Nixon famously remarked, and indeed, the elective process in these United States has never been clean, courteous, or open minded. Every era of our history may be argued to exhibit copious amounts of political tom-foolery mixed with downright underhandedness–and yet, the primary season of 2016, for reasons both grand and picayune, stands apart from any similar  contest in recent memory.

Who are we calling idiots? Well, not everyone in the game–but even the most awe smitten observer of the Republican pack–or ardent admirer of the Democratic duelists–will admit, if candid, that idiocy is rife amongst the ranks– even if we might not agree on specific idiots. But it would be pusillanimous of us to avoid naming any of them, and since it is always safest to slander the dead, as Clifford Irving observed, we begin by examining the bloated carcasses of those formerly beamish valiants now strewn along the bloody trail. To the left we will espy the remains of Lawrence Lessig. Professor Lessig cannot be an idiot because he teaches law at the Harvard Law School  But on the other hand, he was foolish enough to run for president (as a Democrat, of course) and it is only due to his manifest and complete irrelevancy that we spare him closer scrutiny.

And there’s what remains of Lincoln Chafee, whose rugged independence always made him indistinguishable from a Democrat, and who in fact became a Democrat after obtaining Rhode Island’s Governorship. Following a lachrymose term during which his chief accomplishment was renaming the Christmas Tree in front of the State House a “Holiday Tree,” Lincoln’s popularity declined precipitously. He was realistic enough to forget running for a second Gubernatorial term, but oddly deludable concerning the American presidency.  He announced his candidacy on June 3rd, 2016, and withdrew on October 23rd following an embarrassing debate performance, a plunge in contributions, and research confirming widespread disinterest in his existence.  We suspect Lincoln (now in semi retirement as  a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies) is probably an idiot.

And there’s Jim Webb! Webb, a retired Marine and recipient of the Navy Cross, served as Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy and built the 600-hull fleet. He switched to writing novels, received an Emmy for news casting, taught literature at Annapolis, made a few films, and became a fellow of the Harvard Institute of Politics. We suspect that’s where Jim broke bad and became a Democrat. This might suggest that Jim is an idiot, but we assure he isn’t. As a Virginia Democrat he ran for the senate and won. His senate tenure was unorthodox, like so much of his earthly sojourn. In fact, we believe Jim’s natural contumacy rather than any political instinct led him to run for president, but he dropped out on October 20, 2015.  Webb seemed astonished by the diligence with which the liberal media set about ignoring him. He shouldn’t have been. His flamboyant-but-straight-shooting style threatened to resurrect the dreaded “blue dogs,” and nobody at the DNC wanted that–especially after Reid and Pelosi worked so hard exterminating the species while imposing Obamacare on the rest of us. Webb also threatened Hillary’s right flank– so he received zero coverage until he withdrew. He now insists he will not vote for Hillary, but might consider Trump.  Webb’s not an idiot; just a rugged individualist who all too often leads with his adrenaline gland…a principle that often works better in combat than in politics.  

“And here’s a little something I wrote while I was crippling the oyster industry…”

The next carcass is Martin O’Malley’s. As mayor, Martin so enthusiastically oversaw Baltimore’s municipal deterioration that waves of appreciative, blue-state Marylanders clamored to make him governor.  As governor, O’Malley excelled at wearing cut off t-shirts, posing with his guitar for photographers, and boasting about job creation. But O’Malley was actually disastrous for Maryland’s job market despite extravagant bestowals of Obama dollars. He “created” only 5,000 jobs during 96 months in office (and that’s assuming he created those jobs).  According to Forbes, O’Malley was dead last for jobs creation behind “any other current or former gubernatorial presidential contender in the field.” But let’s be fair: two-thousand of the aforementioned jobs may well have been created…by Washington. Federal bribery resulted in large segments of the state’s industry shifting to the manufacture of “green” energy products. O’Malley helpfully mandated that no less than 2 percent of Maryland’s electrical power be squeezed from solar sources.  

Search these United  States thoroughly and you’ll never find a newspaper more devoted to spreading unalloyed left-wing balderdash than the Baltimore Sun.  It is therefore all the more astonishing to find so progressive a rag making room for a story critical of their boyish, guitar strumming governor. But lo, it seems that even the egregious Sun can only slop so much lipstick on some pigs before abandoning the effort as futile. In April, 2015, the Sun admitted that O’Malley’s job creation was an artifice attributable to federal subsidization, not the Governor’s touted economic prowess. The paper also acknowledged that when federal outlays decreased in 2011,”Maryland’s gross state product plateaued, dropping the state to 49th in annual growth,” and that once federal infusions were reduced, “Maryland’s poor economic diversification became apparent.” Also, let it not pass unremarked, O’Malley is a rapacious gun grabber in the grand liberal tradition. The Governor announced his bid for the White House on May 30th, 2015, and seems not to have fully recognized the absurdity of the idea until February 1, 2016, when he called it quits and limped back to Annapolis.  And why did O’Malley, who isn’t Black, isn’t a huggable relic from the radical ’60s, and who isn’t female, think he had a chance of beating Hillary in the primaries? Simple– he’s an idiot. But he plays guitar, did we mention that?

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The carnage on the right is no less horrible. Take Lindsey Graham for instance. Lindsey was silly to think he could win a bunch of primaries despite the lengthy list of betrayals he visited upon his own base, not to mention such baneful optics as dining  with Obama while Rand Paul filibustered against drone attacks on Americans, countenanced by the FAA Reauthorization Act.

Readers may have dismissed it from mind, but on May 18, 2015, Graham slipped into his faux-conservative livery and announced his candidacy on CBS’s This Morning, assuring viewers he should be the perfect president because “the world is falling apart.” His most memorable  statement during his  short-lived campaign consisted of telling a CNN interviewer that Donald Trump was a jackass, after which he returned to CBS This Morning to reiterate his belief that Donald Trump was a jackass. Lindsey failed to gain sufficient support to qualify for the CNN debate in August, but he was admitted to the secondary debates on CNN and CNBC in October despite polling  a consistent 1 percent. He surrendered to reality on December 21, 2015, “suspending” his campaign and threw his support behind Jeb Bush. It is probably unnecessarily cruel to relate that Graham’s full throated endorsement made not an iota of difference in Jeb’s own miserable poll numbers—but we are all about the details here at WOOF.

How many were going to the Reagan Library?

Several of Jeb’s promotional efforts seemed ill-advised.

Long after such worthies as Carly Fiorina and Rand Paul exited, “Jeb!” (the artist formerly known as Bush) remained in the game despite an equally lackluster reception and a far less appealing campaign platform. Of Jeb it seems fair to remark: Never have so many placed so much confidence, influence, and treasure behind a surefire nominee only to achieve  exactly “nada” as the candidate might say. The Republican establishment, insulated from its own grassroots,  saw fit to toss Jeb into the maelstrom without a moment’s thought given to real-world dynamics. Unlike Democrats, the GOP has long professed embarrassment at its own base, beginning with the cursed McCarthyites, and thence to the cursed Goldwaterites, and thence to the cursed Reaganites, and, of course, nowadays all those God-awful Tea Party yokels. This weirdly schizoid policy has long been one of rhetorically praising the “big tent” while snubbing any voter to the right of, say, Susan Collins. But this time, the yokels were ready to rumble.

The embarrassing hayseeds in flyover country were keenly aware of Jeb’s support for Common Core and its insidious assault on their children’s educations. They’d heard him insist that illegal aliens crashing our border did so as “an act of love,” and they knew he told Reuters he was guided by the no-nonsense political philosophy of “a moderate Republican who still has conservative principles,” whatever that means. Into the bargain, his support for the NSA’s collection of metadata and the full corpus of the Patriot Act completely alienated the libertarian right.  Too, Jeb often addressed Hispanic audiences in Spanish promising to enact “immigration reform,” which the yokels were pretty certain translated into abandoning the concept of lawful entry and condoning the unchecked flow of illegals across our southern border.

Despite entering battle with the fattest war chest in primary history, Jeb never won a primary. He spoke to rooms of half-dozing oldsters and infamously begged them to “please clap!”  When journalists realized  he carried toy turtles around in his pockets, handing them out to kids and telling them, “slow and steady wins the race,” they had a field day. And when Jeb tweeted a photo of a turtle crawling across somebody’s lawn and exclaimed, “I met a joyful tortoise on my way to the Reagan Library,” his gravitas was pretty much shot entirely.

Gamely, Jeb barnstormed South Carolina calling it his must-win state. It was here he vowed to stop Trump and emerge victorious. Ever the optimists, both FOX and the liberal media agreed. But even with brother “W” and his mom campaigning for him and the remainder of his $100 million campaign fund fully invested,  Jeb went nowhere. Trump won a substantial victory with Rubio a distant second, and Cruz finishing right behind Rubio. Confronted with a humiliating single digit showing, Bush finally took the hint. He suspended his campaign and told a cluster of morose supporters, “The people of Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina have spoken, and I really respect their decision.” If he had evinced a fraction of that respect going in, he might have done a whole lot better—provided he didn’t mention turtles.  (Turtles are idiots.)

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Coughing, cackling, and barking we go…

The DNC expected to coronate Hillary this year without a ripple of dissent; but Bernie Sanders, who initially seemed an antic figure mimicking serious competition, became a thoroughgoing nuisance by January.  Enough super delegating to rig the scoreboard, some phenomenal luck, such as winning six consecutive coin-tosses to settle district balloting, and the fact that her “Southern Firewall”  held, kept Mrs. Clinton in the lead; but not without Bernie’s motley cadres at her heels.

“Arf, arf, arf, arf!”

Hillary is an awful campaigner by any standard, but her 2016 game is particularly weird. Besides her usual repertoire of fake rural accents and deranged cackling, she seemed to choke on her words in Iowa and New York, and made a point of barking like a dog in Reno.  Her uncontrollable coughing spasms generated numerous rumors (as did her prismatic horn rims).  An additional coughing spasm struck her on March 12th, while sermonizing on the sacred obligation to throw more money at our failing schools, and lasted four minutes—longest yet. Hillary’s “special glasses” last adorned her brow during a campaign event at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. Some say the glasses mitigate long-term effects from her Benghazi concussion. Huma Abedin’s emails describe Hillary as “easily” and “often confused,” but Huma married Anthony Weiner, so she is obviously extremely confused and may not be a reliable judge.

Big Love (the other hugging incident)

Yes, somebody photoshopped this picture, but so badly that we touched it up a little in the name of quality journalism.

The next bit of gobsmackery was Chris Christie’s baffling endorsement of Donald Trump, who had only recently denounced him as duplicitous in the George Washington Bridge scandal and mocked the big guy’s 2012 “hug”of Barack Obama–a partial embrace immortalized by photographers while Christie and Rappin’ Preezy cavorted seaside in the wake of Super-storm Sandy.  Trump thundered, “When I saw it, I said I think he’s going to vote for Obama. Honestly, it was terrible….Obama went to New Jersey and…he was like a little child, Christie….he was like a little boy: ‘oh, I’m with the president.’”

Yet there stood New Jersey’s biggest and most tragically unrequited Bruce Springsteen fan, suspending his campaign and pronouncing himself thrilled to be in Fort Worth endorsing Trump, who he suddenly remembered was a decade-long family friend who would keep his word, restore the nation to greatness, and whom he now perceived to be the “only Republican running who can defeat Hillary Clinton.”  For his part, Trump suddenly remembered that the man he’d been lambasting as the commie-hugging little boy cum “Bridgegate” conspirator who cost Romney the election, had been “a wonderful governor,” and a “standout for many years.” Trump’s eagerness to praise those who praise him is no secret–but what was Christie’s motive? Some believe he’s angling for the vice-presidency, but Trump knows his own preternaturally sudden conversion to conservatism is problematic for millions of voters whose doubts would hardly be assuaged should he tap the supersized RINO as his running mate in Cleveland.

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Mitt scolds the Trumpeteers 

Now, voters; you know you’ve been silly!

On March 3rd a deeply troubled RINO establishment, stripped of  champions like Lindsey, Jeb, and Christie, sent Mitt Romney out to carefully and patiently explain to to all the silly voters why Donald Trump “has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president.”  WOOF doesn’t doubt Mitt’s sincerity, and he made some solid points–but the GOP’s dopey certitude that Romney would leave Trump supporters slapping their foreheads and exclaiming, “Gadzooks, what fools we’ve been!” was risible. Even stupid people don’t like having their intelligence insulted–and a lot of Trump’s supporters (witness Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and Bill O’Reilly) aren’t even stupid. Mitt’s homily ricocheted, of course, functioning as a de facto pep rally for its intended victim.

Don’t shoot, G-men, don’t shoot!

Meanwhile, the FBI is reportedly amassing ever-more lurid and damnatory evidence of treasonable misconduct by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton despite which Loretta Lynch’s Justice Department will not lift a finger, leading to rumors that Valerie Jarrett may once again have issued a stand-down order. However we’ve also learned Hillary’s personal computer geek recently received immunity from prosecution. This only occurs when a grand-jury investigation in progress–and this presupposes a suspect about whom the jury is even now hearing testimony. Dast we assume that it’s Hillary?  More on this as developments warrant! (See what we did there?)

The frost is off the bumpkin! 

Bill Clinton is losing his mojo. It began during the 2008 election when the newly Obama-crazed media discovered for the first time that Bill was a liar, a perjurer, an adulterer, and even, for a week or two, a racist. It doesn’t help matters that the once boyish Bubba has aged poorly, resembling at this point a stooped, slim-wristed, nearly-androgynous oldster whose Viagra-swollen eyes bulge eerily beneath a matronly helmet of fastidiously cosseted hair– hair so white it amplifies the pallor of Slick Willy’s dissipated physiognomy. And when Mr. Clinton gets angry (which is more and more often, we’ve noticed) the effect is trebled.

Oversights happen. The press forgot to keep Bill’s flame alive, so busy were they propping up the real first Black president. Today, millennials look at Bill Clinton and see the rickety old perv who gave Juanita Broaddrick a fat lip, sexually assaulted Kathleen Willey, paid off Paula Jones, and lied to the entire country about Monica Lewinsky. They don’t see Huck Finn in a power tie when Bill walks in the room; they just see a douche bag.

Bill when he was cool–nobody minded his sax addiction either.

Recently, Bill was in the midst of lying his brains  out on Hillary’s behalf in front of an audience in Bluffton, South Carolina, when a former Marine interrupted him. “The thing is,” the Marine pointed out, “we had four lives in Benghazi killed and your wife tried to cover it up.”  Even more horrifying than this surreal breach of the official liberal immunity credo was the fact that perhaps a third of the room cheered the at this point, and there was no Don Lemon to insist on going to commercial.  The Marine continued elaborating on Benghazi and Mrs. Clinton’s falsehoods, until Sheriff’s deputies hauled him out of the room. Clinton shouted “Do you have the courage to listen to my answer?” (This to a United States Marine, mind you), and “Don’t throw him out. Shut up and listen to my answer. I’ll answer it!” But the deputies had by then dragged the man out of the gymnasium. Clinton caught his breath and after a moment’s refocusing, defaulted to the vast-right-wing-conspiracy defense, shouting, “Can I just say something? That’s what’s wrong! His mind has been poisoned by lies and he won’t listen!” This is where a swell of cheers and applause always used to reach an affirmatory crescendo, but the magic is gone—the frost is off the bumpkin. Some other guy yelled “Bullsh*t!” only without the asterisk, and a lady jumped up and shouted, “Hillary lied over four coffins, she lied and she lied to those families. So all those families are liars?”

“Will you listen to my answer?”

“Will you listen to my answer?” the Bubba pleaded; “Did she lie?” the woman demanded; “Are you afraid of my answer?” countered Clinton; “No I’m not afraid because I know you’re going to lie,” the woman responded, at which point she too was seized by Sheriff’s deputies and dragged from the hall while Clinton continued to roar, “Why are you afraid of my answer? Will you let me answer?” But the Bubba was drained–atremble with barely suppressed rage, one raspy voice marooned in a gymnasium awash with murmurings and angry bursts of dissent. These reminders that his glory days were behind him seemed to leave Clinton adrift. Perhaps this is why, as Olaf Ekberg reported in the American Mirror, “Clinton never did answer.”

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When scary things happen to good liberals….

Alison Howard, fighting the insanity of it all.

It seems to have started in San Francisco where pioneering psychologist Alison Howard discovered a substantial number of patients succumbing to a previously unheard of affliction resembling a standard phobia but with a tincture of culture-related panic disorder thrown in.  And while the exact nosology of the problem remains elusive, the cause is apparent: Howard’s clients have it in common that their fragile liberal psyches cannot cope with the existential threat of Donald Trump. Less severe cases report obsessing over such concerns as “What …happened to Trump during his childhood…to make him such a bad person?” Others are more traumatized than quizzical, wrestling with the perceived dissonance of it all. “We’ve been told our whole lives not to say bad things about people, to not be bullies, to not ostracize people based on their skin color,” Howard explains. “We have these social mores and he breaks all of them and he’s successful. And people are wondering how he gets away with it!”

Menninger miffed by McCarthy and Mike.

Liberals also sought counseling in the wake of George “W” Bush’s victory over John Kerry in 2004, remember? Actually, psychology’s valiant struggle to cope with the expanding threat of political and ideative diversity is traceable to earlier manifestations. Readers who are long enough in the tooth may recall that during the crest of McCarthyism in the early ‘50s, psychiatric heavyweight Karl Menninger, (Director of the famed clinic that bears his name) became so innervated by Joe’s “sadism” that he found it necessary to take pen to paper and complain to Senator Frank Carlson of Kansas, that “many people delight in the vulgarity, irresponsibility, and, to my mind, viciousness of Senator McCarthy…” which Menninger proceeded to associate, however oddly, with the success of detective novels by Mickey Spillane. (In fact, the author and the Junior Senator never met, although Spillane once opined that McCarthy was “a slob,” which Joe really kind of was, when we think about it.)

Menninger seemed driven to expound on what he considered a malevolent consanguinity linking the author and the Junior Senator, and he expressed particular dismay over Spillane’s best-seller One Lonely Night in which the fictional hero, Mike Hammer, guns down 40 communist spies with a Thompson submachine gun. (In the manuscript, it was 80, but Spillane’s publisher thought 80 was too gory.)  By way of emphasizing this tenuous linkage, Menninger no sooner finished his ardent denunciation of McCarthy than he added, as if the one thought naturally begat the other,“over twenty-four million copies of these various Mickey Spillane books have been snapped up by someone!”

A loosely held together person…

Clearly, the willingness of America’s psychotherapeutic professionals to serve as champions of the progressive cause predates the rise of Donald Trump. And Before you dismiss all this with a sneer, gentle readers–before you shrug off the magnitude of Trump-centered anxiety in the present epoch–consider the very real cost  in human terms! According to Washington Post reporter Paul Schwartzman:

• Emma Taylor lies abed restively in Los Angeles where she reports: “I literally can’t sleep because I just thought about how Trump may actually win the Presidency and now I’m having a panic attack.”
• Another Californian explains: “He’s extremely reactionary and that’s what scares me the most. I feel totally powerless and it’s horrible.”
• Whitney Royston, a 30 year old resident of Littleton, Colorado confides, “If he were to become president, I fear that our world would come tumbling down.”
• Nancy Lauro, 52, an art teacher, sits at her computer in Brooklyn, frantically Googling information on how to become an Italian citizen should Trump become president—or, she thinks, possibly a citizen of Ireland because it turns out they speak English.

When Trump syndrome strikes!

Judith Schweiger Levy, a New York psychologist, reports that she is currently rendering assistance to a “middle-aged business woman” who made the traumatic discovery earlier this month that her sister is thinking about voting for Trump. Worse still, Dr. Levy admits that she, too, is developing symptoms, telling the interviewer, “I’m starting to feel anxious just talking about him.” Levy is not alone. Psychologist Mary Libbey of Central Park West describes similar abreactions. Couching her analysis in concise, professional terms, Dr. Libbey explains, “I’m terrified that he could win. His impulsivity, his incomplete sentences, his strange, squinty eyes — to my mind, he’s a loosely held together person.”  Loosely-held-together Personality Disorder isn’t in the DSM, however, so it’s hard to confirm the diagnosis.

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Ted eats a bug?

So what was that glowing white blob that appeared on candidate Cruz’s lower lip in the widely circulated video from the recent FOX debate?  Whatever it is/was, the Senator swept it up with a deft flick of his tongue, and appeared to ingest it.

With no superior insights available, not even any  “Barker Street Irregulars” reporting in, we have no recourse but to repeat the current internet speculation, which goes as follows: ONE: Ted ate a bug–although it would have been a strange bug–possibly a louse. One site speculates on the existence of albino tics, but we checked and they don’t exist. TWO: One Holly Anderson took to Twitter to opine that the mystery item was a chunk of styrofoam packing peanut. Holly does not follow WOOF on Twitter, (we checked) so we can’t vouch for her judgment. THREE: While opinions on Reddit are legion, the booger theory has established a substantial lead, but this may be because the booger theory is the most immediately cringe inducing and most Reddit posters are unemployed cellar dwellers who obsess over things like boogers routinely. FOUR: It might have been a tonsil stone– this theory is gaining in circulation since it was originally proposed by someone named Ana on The Young Turks.  We don’t want to look into tonsil stones, though because they sound really disgusting.

Marco pops a pill

Marco Rubio has several times been observed furtively popping as-yet-unidentified pills into his mouth. The fact that he attempts to get away with this while on camera in the midst of minutely scrutinized debates suggests he either desperately needs the pills to control some medical condition, or that he is succumbing to some irresistible addictive impulse. If the pills are truly innocuous, let’s say breath mints or Rolaids—why fish them from his pockets during  televised debate segments? Yet a video of the his last FOX performance shows Rubio sneaking a pill into his mouth, and the Senator has been glimpsed popping pills often enough that rumors are growing in number and floridity.

Opinions on Twitter range from “pills keep his body from rejecting the control chip implanted in his brain,” to  “he’s popping Xanax or Beta Blockers, which explains his robotic bullsh*t!”  But popping benzos on camera seems ill advised and, one might hope, unnecessary. Beta blockers are sometimes used to address the nervousness associated with public speaking, and, one would assume, debating Donald Trump. Diabetes might require pills and explain the candidates preoccupation with chugging designer water—but again, why not appear on stage with your blood sugar already stabilized? Or has the Senator entered the brave new world of “nootropics,” or their not-so-distant cousins, amphetamines? “New-tropics” like Provigil are marketed as speed without the consequences—no crash, no addiction—just extra energy, wakefulness, and heightened mental acuity. Nootropics, like amphetamines, are available in pill form and can result in thirst and dehydration, especially when abused. Is Rubio sharpening his brain with Provigil before wading into eristic combat? Perhaps, although a less charitable blog might note the absence of any conspicuous result.

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Hillary denies being one…

You can see why they call the show “Hardball,” right? Oh, wait….

No wonder the Democrat debates draw comparatively paltry ratings. The field is two people, one an overt socialist, and the other a costumed, dissembled socialist who cannot, when asked, name a single distinction between herself and any other socialist. “What’s the difference between a socialist and a Democrat?” Chris Matthews asked Her Magnificence (to coin Tina Brown’s goo-goo-eyed cognomen for Mrs. Clinton) on Hardball, realizing in that awful, frozen moment that he had accidentally bollixed his guest. Readers who are not liberals may be slow to comprehend how often the progressive mind actually subscribes to the very flummeries its propaganda machine heaps upon liberal politicians. Thus Matthews may have fallen into the trap of supposing that Clinton was the brilliant, accomplished lioness described by the lickspittle media. Surely she’d have an answer at hand, or be able to compose one after a moment’s thought.  But alas, nyet. Her magnificence was utterly flustered. She defaulted to, “Well, I can tell you what I am. I am a progressive Democrat.” Again Matthews asked, “How’s that different than a Socialist?” Mrs. Clinton explained, “I’m a progressive Democrat who likes to get things done…” Matthews said “Okay… well, see, I’m asking you. You’re a Democrat, he’s a Socialist. You — would you like someone to call you a Socialist?” Hillary fired back, “But I’m not one.” Matthews’ eyes grew glassier. He began massaging his frontal lobe and murmured “Okay…” but Mrs. Clinton sought to clarify the matter further by adding, “I’m not one.”

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“As Maine goes…”

“At least he means it!”

And then came Maine, where most residents outside urban areas hold arguably right-of-center views (witness the election and re-election of Paul LePage as governor) but so pride themselves on fierce Yankee independence that they are immediately duped by any leftist wearing Bean boots and plaid claiming to be an Independent (especially if he configures his bumper stickers to replicate the MOXIE logo, as did the wily Senator Angus King (Independent, read: Democrat). Predictably, therefore, Maine handed Sanders his 4th primary win…while Maine’s Republican caucus opted for Ted Cruz.  Bernie’s rumpled, threadbare style appeals to “indy” liberals who’ve wearied of sticking up for a pack of incorrigible liars whose policies invariably fail; especially when the liars have been at it so long, so clumsily, and so loudly, that people are noticing.  Is it any wonder Bernie  appeals to voters ignorant of the mathematical ludicrousness of his prescriptions? Historically, such prescriptions invariably conduce toward  hell on earth, but folks like a guy who honestly says he’ll lead them there.

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Hillary’s nomination= President Trump?

Could Bernie Sanders prove tougher than Hillary for Trump to beat in a general election? To examine this relatively heterodox viewpoint, WOOF visited the effete sanctums of Salon and checked out Steve Almond’s article, “Hillary will never survive the Trump onslaught: It’s not fair, but it makes her a weak nominee.” Almond is a Bernie supporter  whose analysis might therefore be regarded as biased—although he professes great admiration for Hillary as well. Hillary, he insists, brings too much baggage to the table to survive a clash with Trump. Worse, Almond worries that “no matter who the GOP nominee is, the battle plan against Hillary will be the same: a tawdry and unrelenting re-litigation of all the phony scandals cooked up by the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ that she identified nearly two decades ago.”

Mr. Almond wisely avoids revisiting the context in which Her Magnificence excogitated that lurid term, preferring to enumerate the sundry “phony scandals” we at WOOF, in conjunction with “vast” numbers of right-wing co-conspirators, apparently “cooked up.”  These include: “Whitewater, Travelgate, Troopergate, Lewinskygate…Vince Foster Murdergate… the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Pardons… Benghazi, the private email server, [and] the Wall Street speeches.” Wow, we’ve been busy! But Almond also warns that the “dark corporate money and talented propagandists aligned against Hillary will make the Swift Boat Veterans look like toy soldiers.” …So, they’ll look like John Kerry? That’s sad.

“Dark corporate money and talented propagandists aligned against Hillary” (file photo)

One additional impediment, Almond notes, is “the reality…that Hillary is among the most hated politicians in America.” Almond’s article seemed a rarity at first, but suddenly a bumper crop of articles and essays sprang up echoing his sentiments. For reasons that remain semi-mysterious, more and more liberal opinionists are issuing dire warnings that Her Magnificence cannot prevail in a general election. WOOF would congratulate Almond on his courage in presenting the bellwether piece on this theme were it not for the fact that he ends his bold monograph by assuring his readers that, “None of this is to suggest that Hillary won’t beat Trump, if they wind up as the nominees.” What?  Either Almond’s editor insisted on a more Clinton-friendly postscript, or the author got to the end of his piece and decided he’d been wrong the whole time, in which case, shouldn’t he have torn it up?

Bernie’s blues

Curses! Foiled again!

Which reminds  us: Bernie  has consistently performed better than anyone expected in Democratic primary contests. But it never seems to help much. The liberal establishment networks continued to portray him as a laughable, idiosyncratic wannabe tilting at windmills even as Hillary (whom they extol) seems to emerge from every discomfiture another few delegates ahead.  Bernie took Michigan 50 percent to Clinton’s 48 percent, despite the fact that every available poll showed Clinton with an insurmountable advantage, often as much as 20 points. But just when the battling Bolshevik from Vermont almost broke a smile, Hillary turned in a phenomenal win in Mississippi, grabbing 83 percent of the voters to Bernie’s 16. This placed La Clinton in the lead with more than 200 pledged delegates. When Bernie racked up primary wins in Colorado, Minnesota, and Oklahoma (okay, that was weird), Hillary’s southern strategy held like a stone wall.  Southerners tend to detest socialists, which is why Hillary wears a pantsuit and calls herself a progressive, which was good enough for Democrats in Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

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Trump: The real terrorist!

News item: Bill Ayers hates Donald Trump. Can we go home now?

On March 11^th Bill Ayers (socially acceptable Weather Underground terrorist, Obama groomer) entered the nominative fray by organizing an anti-Trump protest at the University of Chicago. Ayers addressed approximately 9,000 leftwing supporters, inveighing against Trump whom the protesters’ signage branded “the real terrorist.”  WOOF regrets we cannot locate a pull quote from Ayers’s remarks, because one would surely contribute to the drollery of this post, but the main question is: who would instigate such a freak show? The obvious double dative by which detectives would arrive at a suspect is Cicero’s famous inquiry “cui bono?” or “who benefits?” The answer is Trump. After all, nobody who attended the protest is likely to vote for anyone other than Bernie Sanders, everybody there already hates Trump, while vacillating voters throughout the American homeland are doubtless galvanized into solidarity with Trump at the mere sight of Ayers once again jackassing it up for the media. Subsequently, a couple of Trump appearances were cancelled because the unemployed proletarians  were rioting.  And  again, this will serve mainly to rally undecided Americans to the billionaire’s campaign.  However Trump arranged this, whether by subtle manipulation or outright financial disbursement, it was a brilliant gambit.  Ayers, you sucker!

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Sister Sarah is not amused!

Just ahead of the March 10 debate on CNN, Ted Cruz saw fit to borrow a phrase from Rush Limbaugh, telling a CBN interviewer that. “Donald does well with voters who have relatively low information…”  The Senator may have meant to recruit  previously benighted  Trump fans, brought thus to sudden wisdom, but in the event he merely ignited the ever-coruscative Sarah Palin, who took to her Facebook page and lambasted Cruz for his efforts. “Ted Cruz’s insinuation reeks of all the reasons America knows ‘the status quo has got to go,’” raged Sister Sarah, adding. “Cruz’s latest dig strays from humorous into downright nasty. Cruz is right, though – independent, America-first, commonsense conservatives supporting Donald Trump ARE ‘low information’ when it comes to having any information on Cruz’s ability to expand the conservative movement, beat Hillary Clinton, unify or lead the nation.” Yipes! There was a lot more, too, but you get the picture. Sarah Palin is all in when she’s in, and she takes her partisanship seriously. Palin ended her diatribe with the nastiest obloquy one can hurl at a conservative icon, to wit: “Ted Cruz is just like any other politician!” So there! At least Sarah’s beautiful when she’s angry!

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Pretty reporter mauled by ape?

Michelle Fields, wronged, or wrong?

Okay, next, Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields claimed she was assaulted at a March rally by Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who, she said, grabbed her and forced her from the stage as she approached Trump to ask a few questions. At first, it seemed cut and dry: Trump’s ape of a campaign manager roughed up the pretty reporter for trying to do her job. But then came Lewandowski’s denial. He insisted he’d never touched Fields, whom he dismissed as “totally delusional.”  And video? In one of those oddities that seem to characterize this primary season, despite myriad cameras recording the event, no footage of the occurrence depicts the alleged tussle with sufficient clarity to permit a conclusion. True, The Daily Beast posted video, announcing it “shows the moment Lewandowski grabbed Fields,” except the video, in our famously unbiased view, is so mirky it might as well be said to show the lady in the polka-dot dress aiming a revolver at Bobby Kennedy–because we can’t see that happening either. Breitbart, of course, demanded an apology from the Trump camp.

Incriminating video? We can’t even see the grassy knoll.

Fields next accused the Trump bunch of traducing her good name, telling FOX’s Megan Kelly, “They released a statement calling me a liar. They have basically done a character assassination on me. They’re linking to blogs with conspiracies about me, and they’re not telling the truth.” Worse, by Sunday, Fields began to suspect her own company’s support was eroding.  She tweeted that Breitbart was suddenly refusing to defend her character or vouch for her professional credibility– so she quit her job. But before you conclude that an attention seeking reporter misled the public in an effort to gain notoriety only to be found out by her employers who withdrew their support whereupon she affected to quit before the axe fell– well, consider the next turn of events…

Shapiro walks.

Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro (whom WOOF considers a solid conservative and an asset to the cause) not only packed up his desk and bade his incredulous co-workers adieu, he next issued a statement averring that “Breitbart News not only stood by and did nothing outside of tepidly asking for an apology, they then attempted to abandon Michelle by silencing staff from tweeting or talking about the issue.” Shapiro added that “[Andrew Breitbart’s] life mission has been betrayed, Indeed, Breitbart News, under the chairmanship of Steve Bannon, has put a stake through the heart of  Andrew’s legacy.” Yipes! Fields next filed a criminal complaint against Lewandowski in Jupiter, Florida near the site of whatever did or didn’t happen. WOOF will continue to report developments in an utterly neutral fashion (perhaps for the first time ever) unless we discover that by staunchly defending Fields we might induce Trump’s campaign to offer us a substantial cash “donation” to switch sides–to which idea we should simply like to say we are not entirely ill-disposed.

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Possible child molester endorses Trump!

Trump’s views of his competitors change a lot–perhaps you’ve noticed.  Ted Cruz went from being a nice guy to a horrible man whom nobody likes. Obama went from being exactly what the country needed to the worst president ever. Hillary went from being “very, very capable” to “evil,” although we suppose those two concepts are not mutually exclusive. People can also improve themselves, meaning that reprobates can attain virtual sainthood once their views and remarks advance Trump’s interests. Example: former presidential candidate Ben Carson was elevated in the immediate wake of his endorsement of Trump, which occurred shortly after Carson’s withdrawal from the race. Trump only weeks earlier berated Carson’s autobiography as implausible, asking aloud, “How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?” He called Carson a liar, and threw in “pathological” for good measure, insisting during one interview that  “It’s in [Carson’s ] book that he’s got a pathological temper, that’s a big problem because you don’t cure that … as an example: child molesting. You don’t cure these people. You don’t cure a child molester. There’s no cure for it. Pathological, there’s no cure for that.” Well–Carson was at least correct that Trump misunderstood the word pathological, and was right in saying the billionaire hadn’t actually called him a child molester.  Still, it wasn’t until he endorsed Trump that Trump realized Ben Carson was  “a terrific guy, loved by everybody…just really liked and respected by everybody.” In Carson’s transformation, surely, hope may be found for each of us earnestly seeking redemption.

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Dangerously religious?!

On March 11th, countless devotees of Drudge were shocked by a headline proclaiming: ‘TED IS THE ANOINTED ONE!’ HOLY GHOST VIDEO REVEALED; DAD SPEAKING IN TONGUES; SUPPORTERS ‘LAY HANDS’ ON CRUZ AT RALLY!  Curious clickers were shunted to a conspiracy-oriented link denouncing Cruz as a closet Pentecostal (yipes?) who only pretends membership in the First Baptist Church in Houston to deceive his gullible supporters. Worse still, if that’s even possible, the site revealed Cruz’s wife was raised by Seventh Day Adventists! But it gets even worse! The article references a Pew Research Center study proving Pentecostalism “emphasizes such practices as speaking in tongues, prophesying, divine healing and other miraculous signs of the Holy Spirit” and these psychotics are scheming to take over America and turn us into a fundamentalist theocracy, and Cruz is their means to this end!  (A kind of Melchizedekian Candidate–see what we did there?) And as if this wasn’t horrifying enough, there’s video! Drudge’s headline ballyhooed shocking scenes of Cruz engaged in all manner of depraved rituals. Per Drudge, we expected  at bare minimum to witness the Senator jabbering in tongues kissing  rattlesnakes, chugging cyanide, and declaring himself the reborn Elijah– or maybe John the Beloved–or at least John from Cincinnati, all the while flouncing about in lurid robes like some Pentecostal Aleister Crowley amidst The Babalon Working…maybe sporting a pyramidic headdress adorned with the all-seeing eye of Horus…maybe knifing a hapless goat? We barely possessed the gumption to witness such a paradigm-shattering expose, but summoning all our courage, we clicked the arrow!

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Rascally Matt

Darn that rascally Matt Drudge! Not since theater-goers paid good money to attend the premier of Plan 9 from Outer Space has any production fallen so pathetically short of audience expectations.  Not only were zero goats sacrificed, the videos provided nothing more traumatizing than a melange of activities that would shock nobody even glancingly familiar with fundamentalist or evangelical practices. Cruz never lays hands on anybody, but we watch as he receives a blessing from Pastor Gaylon Wiley, who baptized Cruz and converted his parents from atheism.  Cruz is seen receiving  a laying on of hands, but this is no dark ritual by which Pentecostal  cult leaders imbue their minions with powers of mass deception—it is a practice common to many sects of Christianity and to many forms of Judaism. It is also routine in the Mormon Church, although Drudge backed Mitt Romney without reservation in 2012.  Sarah Palin was raised in a Pentecostal denomination, which fact never alarmed Drudge–and only last September Donald Trump received an ecumenical laying on of hands by clerics asking God to direct his actions.  We guess Matt missed that event– but we know he can’t be everywhere.

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KKK for Hillary!

Grand Dragon Quigg– at least we think it is–it’s difficult to say for sure….

A certified  Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan’s California chapter, who bears responsibility for recruitment in the western United States and presumably speaks for all the Klantons (not a typo) under his authority, has declared wholehearted support for Hillary. “We want Hillary Clinton to win,” insists Klansman Will Quigg, explaining, “She is telling everybody one thing, but she has a hidden agenda. She’s telling everybody what they want to hear so she can get elected…[but] once she’s in the presidency, she’s going to come out and her true colors are going to show.”

Sadly for those of us not in the loop, Grand Dragon Quigg (whose initiative will surely see him elevated to Grand Wizard shortly) is unwilling to say precisely how he came upon his knowledge of Hillary’s “hidden agenda,” or even what that agenda might be.  Should Quigg see fit to enlighten us, we will immediately inform our readers. Meanwhile, we counsel a level head and a tranquil demeanor. After all, whatever Hillary Clinton’s secret agenda may be, assuming it exists at all, it is almost certain to be superior to the one she’s promoting publicly.

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Donald ascendant/ Kasich reborn!

“This is me, in whom I am well pleased!”

On Tuesday the 15^th, Donald Trump won Florida, humiliating “Little Marco”and walking away with all 99 delegates, leaving the “favorite son” to bleed out. The Donald also found favor in Illinois and North Carolina. Despite this, the previously ignorable John Kasich found cause to wax ecstatic, reanimated by his first ever primary victory (in Ohio, where he happens, coincidentally, to be governor). He told reporters he was now in it to win. Lovers of the Kafkaesque will enjoy monitoring the sudden outbreak of seemingly serious discussion on cable news networks to the effect that Kasich, having finally won a primary, is suddenly Trump’s major competition for the nomination. The intellectual validity of such discussion is on a par with say, a round robin of newscasters earnestly mulling over the likelihood that planet Nibiru will collide with Earth this summer–but by now you’ve probably noticed the media are fantasy prone.

Wait, is that line from “Key Largo,” or “Little Marco?”

With the grey dawn of March 16^th came an additional casualty report—the demise of Little Marco. We have long felt that when this (pretty much inevitable) moment arrived, the candidate should make the shortest speech yet uttered by any politician suspending a campaign—we thought it would be admirable, campy, and quick,  if he just stepped up to the microphone and quoted Edward G. Robinson’s classic last line from Little Caesar (Warner Bros., 1931), namely, “Oh, mother of mercy—is this the end of Marco?”  Okay, yes we know–Robinson’s character was Rico, not Marco, but the facile wit of the paraphrase plus the uncanny parallelism surely justifies the adaptation.

Symbolic of the entire RINO delusion, Rubio really believed he would take Florida handsomely—whereas he only succeeded in preventing Cruz from gaining momentum, and ensured victory for Trump, whom he purports to loathe. With classic RINO timing, Rubio blocked Cruz from pulling ahead in several states, and decided to get out of the way only once he’d rendered the Texan’s odds nearly prohibitive. Even more irksome, Rubio ignored our Edward G. Robinson idea, opting instead to condemn America’s immersion in “the politics of resentment.”  Such politics, Marco cautioned in parting, could only fracture our communities, divide our citizens, and “leave us as a nation where people literally hate each other because they have different political opinions!”  The young Senator seemed strangely unaware of the fact that President Obama accomplished all of that years ago.

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The walking dead…

Kasich and Sanders have something in common besides loathing Donald Trump–both men are determined to go the distance despite having no perceptible path to victory. Some say Sanders will stay in the fight because he loves getting campaign donations. Can it be? The austere, Aveo driving socialist has a history of dipping into campaign funds for nepotistic enrichment.  He once handed his wife $150,000 and told the Federal Election Commission it was a “consulting fee.” And that was before he was raising the big bucks. Consider this: Although Bernie’s recent clean sweep of Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii barely diminished Hillary’s advantage (she remains in front by 280 pledged delegates and 440 superdelegates), it performed a different but perhaps equally important function. As the New York Times noted, “the wins are likely to bestow on the Sanders campaign a surge of online donations,” greatly enhancing his ability to advertise for even more campaign donations. (But hey, at least he’s honest.)  Kasich, on the other hand, mainly loves Kasich, with a kind of amaurotic self-absorption. The RINOs adore his faux-conservative history of aisle-crossing, compromise and accommodationism and want him kept in play as a possible means of toppling Trump the Barbarian. This will, of course, only ruin Cruz and advance Trump, but RINOs (okay, Rhinos) are not particularly intelligent creatures and often forget why they’re charging in the midst of the charge.  We looked it up.

Run, run, it’s the Great Uniter!

Ewwww, yuk!

On March 16 the willfully phlegmatic John Boehner, whom we all fervently hoped we’d heard the last of, materialized like a conjured Tulpa in Boca Raton, Florida. Regarding the primaries, he puffed, “They all had a chance to win, none of them won. So I’m for none of the above. I’m for Paul Ryan to be our nominee!” Wuhh? Okay, true, the convention may arrive without anyone landing the 1,237  delegates necessary to secure the nomination and true, this may trigger a brokered convention—but we carefully counted Paul Ryan’s delegates so far, and -he doesn’t have any.  Oh, and as soon as he “learned” Boehner nominated him, Ryan (aka “none of the above”) dashed to a CNBC microphone to recite, “I’m not running for president. I made that decision, consciously…I don’t see that happening. I’m not thinking about it.”  And if you don’t find that string of prefabricated mendacities absolutely side splitting, you just don’t know funny! Prepare yourselves, gentle readers, to be “saved” by Paul Ryan, “the great uniter.”

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More March madness…

• March 17, Bernie the Battling Bolshevik concedes that Hillary won the Missouri primary—which everyone else already knew.
• March 21,   Bill Clinton exhorts a roomful of Hillary supporters to “put the awful legacy of the last eight years behind us.” Does that include his wife? Bill is now missing from the campaign.
• March 21, Mitt Romney endorses Ted Cruz, accusing Kasich, whom he endorsed in Ohio and now un-endorses, of staying in the race solely to deny Cruz the nomination.
• March 22: Prior to the primary, Trump predicts the people of Utah will shun “Lying” Ted Cruz because “Mormons hate liars!” Utah responds by handing Lying Ted all its delegates in an avalanche of apparent support for mendacity!
• March 22: Trump counter punches by sweeping Arizona with more delegates than Utah—and that’s no lie.
• March 22: Hillary prevails in Arizona’s primary, whereas feisty old Bernie grabs Utah and Idaho. Maybe Donald was wrong and Mormons just don’t like Clintons.
• March 23: With exquisite RINO timing, Jeb Bush endorses Ted Cruz. Can we slap you now, Jeb?
• March 23, several Barker Street Irregulars in positions to know begin telling WOOF that Hillary is on the verge of being indicted and FBI boss James Comey told Loretta Lynch he’ll walk out with most of his staff if action is not sanctioned…we cannot confirm this, and our prophylactic pessimism restrains us from believing it, but we sure keep hearing it.
• March 24: Ted Cruz takes Texican values to Manhattan’s posh 3 West Club where he sensibly advised New Yorkers to quit electing progressives whose “liberal, left-wing values” denied New Yorkers 16-ounce sodas and baby bottles, drove away business, and sent crime rates soaring. He also made fun of Comrade Bill de Blasio whose consternation was marvelous to behold.
• March 25, Hillary tells Jimmy Kimmel that when elected she will open the files on Area 51 to all Americans, unless national security dictates otherwise, which of course it will. Kimmel shares the common belief that crashed saucers and pickled aliens are hidden there. The UFO party last ran a candidate in 1972 when saucer buff Gabriel Green lost to Richard Nixon. Some see Clinton’s remarks as intended to enlist Green’s old base, but WOOF sees them as ridiculous. Everyone knows they took all the alien stuff to Wright Patterson decades ago!
• March 25: The senior House Republican leadership predicts the coming of President Paul Ryan,(who doesn’t want the job, wink, wink) The way the RINOs tell it, Ryan’s nomination is practically inevitable. Sorting through the leadership’s vast outpouring of magical thinking on this subject, we were unable to isolate a single instance in which anybody made sense.
• March 26:-The National Enquirer claims Ted Cruz had affairs with “a hooker, a teacher, and [several] coworkers ” We won’t believe it, of course, until we hear it from Drudge– but the ooze is spreading.
• March 28: John Kasich announces he is going to walk away with the Pennsylvania primary…and because it’s always fun to close with a joke, here’s this:

As March marches away…

Unwilling to wait for April 1 to tender further proofs of foolishness, Lindsey Graham announced that despite his endorsement of Jeb Bush, (now moribund) and his subsequent endorsement of Ted Cruz, he believes John Kasich would be a much better nominee– except, he says, Kasich can’t win—which sounds like a not-so-good nominee. Graham next told MSNBC  “I think Ted would make it a competitive race,” which seems supportive enough, except when Joe Scarborough asked him “Would [Cruz] make a good president?” Lindsey replied, “No, I don’t think so.” But not to worry! By way of clarifying his sentiments, Senator Graham subsequently announced that any misinterpretation of his comments as inconsistent might as well be dismissed from mind inasmuch as “The GOP will probably lose in 2016.”  One of those misguided news sources that accused Lindsey of inconsistency is a charmingly heterodox blog called FITS News. FITS takes the understandable position that “LINDSEY GRAHAM IS CONFUSED…” but with all due respect, FITS is overthinking the matter. Trust us on this one, gentle readers: Lindsey Graham is not confused. He’s an idiot. 

 

“Donald and Bernie’s Excellent Adventure!”

Remember Condi versus Hillary? 

We’re guessing it did poorly in paperback.

No? Did that battle of the Amazons somehow elude you? Perhaps you missed the briefly best-selling book from recovering Clintonista Dick Morris, who assumed, as did we all, that Hillary Clinton would be the Democrat nominee in 2008, and who wrote at length regarding the advisability of running Condoleezza Rice against her as the Republican candidate. We still have a copy here in the WOOF cave–and it still presents a compelling argument for drafting Condi as the ’08 Republican candidate for the presidency, describing precisely how Dr. Rice will discomfit the former Goldwater Girl, and strut into the Oval Office in her knee-high leather boots, a la Wiesbaden. Obviously, it didn’t work out the way.  Lady Condoleezza made it plain she preferred playing concert piano and watching the NFL to re-entering politics, even as a dazed and disbelieving Hillary was trampled by the “journalists” stampeding to anoint Barack Obama, who–it seems almost quaint to recall at this remove–was going to lower the tides, save our economy, eliminate the race issue, and cause the entire population of earth to turn its adoring gaze toward a fundamentally transformed America. Oh well. And so Morris’s book became a sort of literary curiosity–an academic dabbling in kriegspiel locatable in the one-dollar clearance stack at good booksellers everywhere.

Considering that she probably could have beaten Obama in ’08 but prefered to watch football, we should probably be a lot angrier at her than we are!

Our point being, that publishing an article such as this one, in which we treat Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as the probable, perhaps even the inevitable nominees of their parties in 2016 is likely to wind up on the same scrapheap of literary oddities to which Morris’s tome was consigned.  We are, after all, the same bunch of giddy optimists who published our (former) official  psychic’s prediction that Obama would be driven from office in 2013. Boy, was that embarrassing!  [We manfully link to said embarrassment here, for the sadistically curious]. To paraphrase one of Karl Marx’s least solipsistic musings, the road to humiliation is paved with good deductions, and nowhere is that coinage truer than in presidential politics. Thus aware that we may be bothering the reader with nothing more than a comically meticulous analyses of a seemingly inevitable contest that for any of a thousand reasons may never reify– we nevertheless plunge with characteristic abandon into this screed’s thesis, namely that nominee Trump will probably confront nominee Sanders in an election that will almost certainly determine America’s direction in the 21st century, and thereby, frighteningly enough, the ultimate destiny of the republic.

Amid the charred debris left by Obama’s executive rampage, two completely distinct American futures may be descried.  The nation may return to first principles and embrace the vision of the founders, or it may succumb to the fuming envy of the collectivist rabble and devour itself in a masochistic frenzy of purblind sloganeering and  self-destructive redistribution after which only the elites will have bread, or a private jet out of here. We will presently discuss our concern that Bernie Sanders seems far better equipped experientially and ideologically to ensure the latter outcome than Trump does the former–but first, a word about the madness of crowds!

A word about the madness of crowds…

Colonel Tom Parker (Presley’s manager) may not have read much Carl Jung, but he knew a psychic epidemic when he heard one!

In 1940 Carl Jung wrote that the “”Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.” Considered even for a moment, the observation seems almost superfluous in its patency, doesn’t it? And yet most psychic epidemics, though not exactly predictable, are usually comprehensible once in motion. Nobody anticipated the Beatles, for instance, but their music and pop-cultural impact have been parsed by countless social critics to the extent that we might consider them over-explained.  Before Beatlemania, nobody could have anticipated Elvis Presley, but his appeal was no mystery to the carefully observant, including his manager who wearied finally of moronic reporters asking him how he’d succeeded in marketing the young singer so successfully, and drawled, “Gee, I don’t know–when I met the boy, all he had in this world was a million dollars worth of talent!”

We make this point simply by way of remarking that “psychic epidemics,” or what less Jungian observers might call popular crazes, are almost always traceable to somebody with “a million dollars worth of talent.” It may not be the finest or most salubrious of talents–it may be satanic, it may be uplifting and noble. But whether a talent for con-artistry, for emotional manipulation, for bestirring the faithful to rally and proselyte, or persuading 80 million Germans to make war on the Jewish race and the majority of the world– the architect of change is typically that individual or individuals whose talents  trigger an epochal event  And we make this point simply by way of saying that no such generative figurehead seems responsible for the sudden rejection by millions of Americans of the established political orthodoxy. Rather, vast populations of potential voters seem simply and simultaneously to have recoiled at the thought of enduring any further hypocrisy from the perfidious lickspittles of the GOP, or any more guff from the recreants of the establishment Left.  It is difficult to think of another era in American history when so many were galvanized so tempestuously without an identifiable actuator at the eye of the storm.

Something about Bernie….

Socialism’s punk-rock reaction.

To begin with, Bernie Sanders is a relic in the starkest embodiment of the term—he could never be reasonably expected to capture “the youth vote,” but reasonable expectations be damned. Sanders single handedly performed emergency resuscitation on the Left’s most successful canard, namely the belief–clung to with an almost endearing sincerity by vast populations of liberals, especially of college age, that liberalism in America constitutes a revolutionary struggle against the establishment—a student-and-proletariat led rebellion against “the man.” (We should probably pause to mention here that “corporate rule is not democracy!” But you already knew that, right?) So why Bernie–why now? Only because he is the guy who happened by at the moment the tide shifted, the guy maundering on, spouting his adorably retro bombast at the exact moment that hundreds of thousands of American liberals, sickened by the endless gusts of double-speak from their president and numbed by the soulless, poll-driven rantings of Mrs. Clinton, looked  for an option–almost any option–and there stood Bernie. Even liberals grow weary of incessant taradiddle, and after nearly two terms of shameless dissimulation from Clinton, Pelosi, Reid, and Barack,(the godlet who failed), Bernie Sanders shown brightly with that single, distinguishing quality so hungered after by frustrated progressives: He actually meant what he was saying. Okay, what he said was arguably bonkers, but as his supporters interminably remind us, “at least he means it,” and progressives have always been cool with bonkers, so long as it’s  perceptually hip. If Clinton and Obama were liberalism’s tired synth pop, then Bernie Sanders is socialism’s punk rock reaction.

Sanders didn’t need “a million dollars worth of talent”–he didn’t even need to be photogenic or particularly riveting–he just needed to be the closest thing the disenfranchised Left could find to that Old Time Religion–a man of the Left whose radical purity never yielded to the suasions of jet-set trendiness, power ties, glittery soirees or “bankster” confederates. No, Bernie’s paleo-radicalism is true and untarnished– the kind of socialism an anti-establishmentarian can get behind and believe in, and about whom one could say, in the words of one of the disgruntled Left’s most beloved composers, “believing works just fine for me.”  And believing has sufficed, without much additional effort from Bernie, to shove him front and center this political season, the rumpled beneficiary of a national mood that found it’s leftmost mojo rekindled by the grizzled old dude from Vermont. His followers festoon their Volvos and Priuses with stickers extolling voters to “Feel the Bern!” (get it?) as though something about the man were sizzling, or dynamic. The juxtapositional irony is nothing short of hilarious. Bernie inveighs, to be sure–and testily recites the presumed sins of capitalism with an admirable resoluteness. But one cannot think of Sanders and the term pizazz simultaneously–the psyche rebels. Bernie Sanders brought nothing to the game except sincerity, and a brand of dust-bowl-era collectivism that seems freshly thawed from some long-buried cryogenic sarcophagus.

Marxist Demography

To fully understand Sanders’s brand of progressivism, one must first understand that in 1967 (the year hippy idealism began to transmogrify into “Yippee” bellicosity) there were more cows than human beings in Vermont. It is by no means picayune to say that this ratio is no longer maintained. Today, while Vermont still boasts the most cows per capita, human beings are by far the more numerous species. The reader may reasonably suppose this shift to reflect the attractions of Vermont’s natural beauty and legendary philosophic individualism stimulating an infusion of Yankees-manque; but this does not suffice to explain the uptick. No, in order to correctly grasp the bloat of homo sapiens in the Green Mountain State, one must consider that within its 9,616 square miles there exists a booming industry—arguably the state’s leading industry with the possible exception of maple syrup. We refer to what we might drolly call “higher education,” as represented by the state’s 23 colleges and universities currently grinding away in the ostensible service of a mere 630,000 human Vermonters, and a steady influx of pilgrims, ripe for indoctrination.

Wait a minute, are those cows–or sheep? Come to think of it, it works either way!

This explosion in the education biz overtook Vermonters unawares and produced the state’s leftward shift. In 1986 the New York Times remarked upon this veritable seachange, merrily declaring it “…particularly striking because Vermont has for many years been one of the most heavily Republican states in the country, one of only two to vote against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936.” (Gasp!) The Times went on to explain the shift in terms of  “the influx of newcomers to Vermont in the late 1960’s and 1970’s,” and this is not entirely inaccurate, although it entirely misses the point…the point being that a massive enclave of academic propagandists spawned a particularly influential outpouring of Nuevo-Vermonters, one of which was, in fact, Bernie Sanders.

Vermont’s socialist party garnered 11% of the gubernatorial vote in 1912, and then vanished until (surprise!) the 1960s.

To understand Vermont’s plunge into radicalism, one must understand that three cultures (however conflated) emerged from the heuristic cauldrons of Goddard, Bennington, Champlain, Middlebury, Burlington, and Castleton (to name only a few offenders) in the  ‘60s and ‘70s, and these are definable as follows: First, that large body of essentially placid, predominantly stoned graduates or ejectees from the state’s campuses, the majority of whom became potters or bakers or macrame artisans while others secured part time work at  “head shops” or bookstores or tinkered with other suitably bohemian crafts. For obvious reasons of natural or chemically-induced indolence, they never left Vermont—and in a very few instances they became successful—Ben and Jerry are prime examples.

Ben and Jerry are such ardent progressives, they celebrated Obama’s ’08 campaign by renaming their Butter Pecan ice-cream flavor “Yes, Pecan!” Get it?

Next, we have the non-proletarian hippy remnant—the ones who will be shot as parasites if socialism actually makes the headway these naives consider desirable. They are that large body of essentially placid, predominantly stoned graduates or ejectees from the state’s campuses who went directly onto the doles, and who for obvious reasons of dependency, never mind natural or chemically-induced indolence, never left Vermont.

And finally, we have the activists—that dialectically besotted troupe of believing Marxists, Maoists and Trotskyites who abandoned their predilection for bombing post offices and municipal buildings once their side triumphed in Vietnam, whereupon the majority became either university professors, or…politicians.

Young Bernie

Young Bernie and son– daddy’s eyes fixed firmly left!

In fact, Sanders so perfectly fits our description of the political subpopulation of radicalized academe, he could be its poster boy. Examine him, holding his waif, preparing to express what we imagine must have been a highly “relevant”  viewpoint in 1971. He is the embodiment of student radicalism, conforming to every requisite….distinguishing himself from the vast throngs of unwashed hippy stoners with his regulation Abbie Hoffman hair, unruly but above the shoulders to signify philosophical sophistication. Really. (Did you ever notice the crowds at ‘60s protests always looked like Haight-Ashbury hippies but the guy with the megaphone always looked like Sanders?) The glasses are a class distinction too—no frivolous Jim McGuinn/Ben Franklin spectacles for the serious revolutionary—no John Lennon round lenses, either. They always grabbed the horn rims—although admittedly Bernie looks like he picked up a girl’s pair.

Abbie Hoffman–fashion trend setter.

In further conformity with the mold, Bernie is the very model of the liberal neuvo-Vermonter, meaning he wasn’t born there. He came from Brooklyn. In this respect, he did not require the engines of Marxist re-education ensconced in Vermont to ensure his radicalization—it was achieved courtesy of Brooklyn College and the University of Chicago.  Sanders relocated to Vermont in 1964 to write for the Vermont Freeman, publishing such timeless gems as “The Revolution Is (sic) Life Versus Death.”  In his articles he complained bitterly about having to work mundane jobs, joining “the mass of hot dazed humanity heading uptown for the 9-5”  all the while cognizant of deserving more—much more. Fortunately he discovered politics. As Sarah Lyall put it in a recent New York Times article, “he was part of a crowd of like-minded young people who converged on Burlington at a time when America seemed to be rewriting its history on the spot. Students, hippies, labor organizers, trust fund kids, urban escapees, impoverished anti-Vietnam War campaigners…” In other words, Vermont never had a chance.

Bernie and “like-minded young people…converged on Burlington” (NY Times)

“…to say the least not looking good….”

Sanders likes to remember himself as a “freelance journalist” in those days, but he wrote exclusively for the ultra-radical Freeman, without salary, and published (besides his apparently un-newsworthy assertions that all women secretly long to be raped) his critical views on American education (it “gave us Richard Nixon”), the horrors of gainful employment (“moron work”), and the suppressed facts about our national health. In one inspired column he cited studies claiming that cancer results from unresolved hostilities toward one’s mother, and having too few orgasms. Moreover, according to Bernie, “sexual adjustment seems to be very poor in those with cancer of the cervix” (presumably he meant pre-morbidly). In fact, Sanders’s crackpot obsession with the psychosexual origins of organic disease make Wilhelm Reich seem conventional. The aspiring revolutionary and  healthologist also tended to link his medical afflatuses to his yawningly predictable enthusiasm for Cuba, he having discovered (without bothering to visit) that daily living and health standards on Castro’s island were unparalleled–and this, he wrote, owing to the psychosexual health of the island’s inhabitants (not counting, we guess, all the homosexuals slaughtered by Che’s firing squads). Bernie several times expressed chagrin that the facts about Cuba’s blissfully robust inhabitants were “distorteded by American mass media,” (a variety of distortion no longer encountered in Cuba).

Regarding his own country, Bernie took a markedly less approving view. From a literary and philosophical standpoint, Sanders’s quality of work is perhaps best exemplified by his opinion, published in one of his last editorials, that “The general social situation, to say the least does not look good.” Well, we can always agree on something!

Wives and Politics….

Bernie’s son Levi with unidentified comrade.

WOOF knows Bernie married his first wife, Deborah Messing, straight out of University, where they met. The couple relocated to Vermont but divorced after only 18 months, so short a time that Sanders apparently forgot it happened. His Senate biography lists Burlington University President (are you in the least surprised?) Jane O’Meara, as Bernie’s first wife. Indeed, Sanders married O’Meara in a civil ceremony in 1981 on the night he was elected mayor of Burlington, and his official biography describes her as the mother of his son Levi. But WOOF knows she isn’t, which is to say, she isn’t his first wife and she isn’t the mother of Levi.  Sanders apparently forgot that Levi is the child of Susan Mott, whom he forgot even to marry. (We remembered to check.)

Left to right: Deborah Messing, (the forgotten first wife) followed by Susan Mott (middle), whom Bernie confused with current wife Jane O’Meara (right) who is not the mother of Bernie’s son Levi even though Bernie thinks she is, the actual mother being Mott (in the middle),  got it?

But enough about that—suffice it that Bernie, despite numerous political missteps and frustrations, managed to win election in 1990 to the United States House of Representatives where he spent sixteen years militating for the usual sinistral causes on behalf of the Green Mountain state. So heartily did the pot heads, professors, trust fund poets, fashioners of macrame, and makers of native-American dream catchers approve of his performance that he was elevated to the United States Senate in 2006.  In 2012, Sanders was returned to the Senate boasting 70% of the popular vote making him the longest serving Independent in U.S. congressional history (actually a self-described socialist who caucuses–not to shock you, gentle readers–with the Democrats). But the wild outpourings of support his presidential bid is generating speak mouthfuls about the degree to which socialism, that failed European construct that bankrupted the economies of an entire continent, derailed the United Kingdom, imploded the mighty USSR, drove Beijing’s Maoists to reconsider capitalism, and left politicians across the European Union scrabbling for some means of effectuating its piecemeal revocation, is suddenly irresistible to vast numbers of American voters. How did this happen?

If you’re not in the audience, don’t bother watching!

Studies on the Internet purport to prove that if you watch FOX News, or listen to Rush Limbaugh, you’re  an idiot.  These studies offer additional evidence that listeners to NPR or viewers of the Daily Show (a comedy program formerly featuring Jon Stewart mimping, puckering,  and face slapping while reporting the day’s events, thus allowing his audience to infer how to react themselves) are the very best informed. These studies come from places like Fairleigh Dickinson University, whose political science expert, Dan Cassino, demolished the credibility of right-wing news outlets by explaining that his study presents “…solid evidence that if you’re not in that audience, you’re not going to get anything out of watching them.”  Well, there’s the problem!

“Afghanistan? I don’t remember too much about him…”

In reality, our schools have spent decades churning out graduates who cannot guess whom we fought in World War II,  distinguish the Bill of Rights from the Desiderata, or venture a guess as to why we celebrate the 4^th of July. That the NEA and the liberal custodians of university-level misdirection should be denied credit for this intellectual implosion while FOX and Rush Limbaugh grab all the ink, seems the height of injustice…but our immediate point is simply that America’s younger generations are gobsmackingly ignorant.  And the gobsmackingly ignorant, in case you haven’t noticed, are cannon fodder for the liberal establishment’s massive propaganda machine.

Into these empty vessels the twin opiates of ‘who is cool” and “who is stupid” are ceaselessly decanted.  Only in such a cultural miasma, to pick an example, could the idea of James Bond endorsing Bernie Sanders seem cogent.  Yes, Ian Fleming’s commie-shooting cold warrior, at least as currently portrayed by actor Daniel Craig, donated $47,000 to a PAC supporting the Sanders campaign. The PAC organizer, Cary Lee Peterson, perfectly characterized the occasion, exclaiming, “James Bond for Bernie is pretty cool, you know what I mean?”

WOOF goes to see Bernie 

Woofette “C” was prepared to face Bernie without the black bar–but he chickened out.

When the Sanders campaign announced a Town Hall meeting in Portland, Maine–a  Q&A sessionwith the candidate–WOOF promptly dispatched a Woofette to infiltrate the throngs and direct a query or two Bernie’s way. To our tremendous disappointment, the format was changed at the last moment. Because 7,500 supporters mobbed the event, Sanders’s advance team declared a stemwinder from the podium the necessary alternative to a dialogue. Whether this genuinely accounted for the switch, or the attendance of our Woofette was somehow discovered in advance, provoking tactical precautions, we cannot say with certainty. We can say that an hour watching  72-year-old Bernie blasting away to a crowd of utterly enthralled Mainers is about as stimulating as inviting your kookie frazzle-haired uncle to Thanksgiving and masochistically encouraging him to continue fuming about corporations, foreign policy, and global warming right through the dessert course. It would be difficult to imagine anything less inspiring at this historic moment than another socialist bellowing, “All over America, people are becoming involved in this campaign because they want change; Real change!” But seemingly the mass appeal of “change” never changes.

See? It’s a dalmatian! Oh, no, wait; it’s socialism!

Like Obama in 2008, Sanders is effective at reeling off lists of problems that most Americans would prefer to see solved. The Gestalt Psychology is simple: Once he promises change, real change, and points out, for instance, that the middle class is vanishing, the philosophically clueless assume that “change” will fix the problem…as well as any other problems the candidate chooses to gripe about. Like test subjects shown black dots arranged on a page who exclaim, “It’s a Dalmatian!” the crowd in Portland fitted each target of their hero’s spleen to the mental schema of “Change; real change!” Thus armies of believers are assembling across the nation in praise of Bernie, their crazy uncle who just dropped in to share their grievances, teach them some new ones, and promise them free stuff. “Today,”  he growls, “we stand here and say loudly and clearly that enough is enough!” A nation that has just suffered through nearly two terms of socialist restructuring at the expense of its ideals, treasure,  and liberties might hasten to agree. But irony is invariably lost on the humorless.

“The great moral issue of our time…”

Bernie is also mad because “the top 1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent!” He is also mad because women’s access to abortion is threatened (by somebody, we wish we knew who) and because taxes aren’t high enough. He is persuaded (erroneously) that “Republicans believe in abolishing social security and V.A. health care.” He fumes abstractly against such social constructs as  “the gender gap,” and “income inequality” (which exists everywhere on earth, but annoys Bernie exclusively in America). He also promises to correct “grotesque inequality,” which is seemingly distinct from gender inequality and income inequality and which, whatever it precisely means, constitutes “the great moral issue of our time!”

Apparently a $15 minimum wage will resolve this, rather than do what increases in the minimum wage have always done previously, which is to say: cause nationwide inflation, increase unemployment, and further immiserate the poor. But wait, Sanders also wants to “fix” Obamacare– by bloating it into a monolithic government operation servicing  every American, like it or not. He also plans to expand social security and pay for everyone’s tuition at public colleges (so everyone will naturally wish to attend–why not?) and rebuild the entire American infrastructure, give or take a railroad trestle or two, all of which adds up to about $20 trillion in aggregate expenditures.  Not to worry. Sanders’s policy director assures the Wall Street Journal that  tax increases under President Sanders will offset the expense by producing an additional $6.5 trillion over ten years.  No wonder Bernie drives an Aveo! But there is probably no need to concern ourselves overmuch with Sanders’s budgetary psychosis. The candidate has simultaneously discovered that  “America spends too much,” and plans to exercise frugality  by slashing the defense budget so severely that we will probably be a heap of radioactive ash long before the invoice for Utopia arrives.

We would be stupid!

We really appreciate Orwell–nobody seemed to listen to him, either!

To Bernie’s credit, he seems utterly and honestly oblivious of the nonsensicality of his prescriptions—or their failures wherever instituted in the past, or their tendency to conduce toward police-state repression, or the arithmetical daftness of supposing they can be financed by squeezing the wealthy until they flee his clutches, reducing his tax base to his lingering supporters, the majority of whom expect refunds. So much for a middle class, by the way. But the nutty-professor with the fright-wig hair and the finger-wagging intensity seems as lost in delusion as the “Occupy” simpletons, the dotty old hippy chicks and the silver-pony-tailed emissaries of the Birkenstock bourgeoisie who flood his campaign events. Check out the comments on any Sanders website–the assertions and beliefs you encounter will make you laugh, make you cry—make you wonder where people have been for the last 7, no 40 years. Our runaway favorite remains the pithy contribution of a supporter with the ironic handle of “Orwell,” to the effect that, “If we don’t elect him, we would be stupid.”

The politics of apophenia?

Dr. Peter Brugger, Swiss psychologist and father of apophenia.

The term apophenia was coined by Peter Brugger who defined it as the “seeing of connections accompanied by a specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness.”  In a 1958 monograph, Klaus Conrad created the term “apophänie” to describe the onset of psychotic delusions in schizophrenics. Nowadays, however, we seem to be awash in an electorate that experiences routine apophanies, both Left and Right, which is scariest not because the Left is psycho, which has been obvious since the late ‘60s, but rather because the Right now evinces similar tendencies. Here we go:

The Donald on the Lathe of Conservatism

Americans, traditionally, love a brawler, a fact long lost on the carefully coifed and nattily attired solons who form our legislative branch as well as the media opinionists and consultants whose high-society constructivism supplants reality inside the beltway. From Sam Adams to Davy Crockett to Joe McCarthy, it should surprise no one that a bare-knuckled confrontationist can catch fire with the electorate where the oily purveyors of cant cannot.  And yet the elites are astonished whenever a spokesman emerges who is willing to roll up his sleeves and speak plainly. It astonishes them doubly when the rowdy fellow is applauded despite efforts to bring him to heel, following which they typically expend great effusions of wind and ink explaining, mainly to one another, why it isn’t really happening.

Donald Trump has been a conservative approximately as long as Bernie Sanders has been a “populist,” (which is clearly the agreed upon euphemism for him in the Establishment Media), and Trump might well be appalled by a comparison to McCarthy, yet it seems superficially irresistible.  It’s hard to watch Trump extemporizing on stage, each assertion more inflammatory than its predecessor, without recalling Churchill’s joke about “a bull who brings his own china shop.” But so far only Jules Witcover, writing in the doggedly left-wing Baltimore Sun, has called for Trump to be dispatched a la McCarthy. Concerned that “Mr. Trump, [is] arousing the anger of those that share his extreme anti-immigration and anti-government views [and] rallying the like-minded to hijack that process,” Witcover longs for a mensch like the late Senator Ralph Flanders (R-VT) (a venomous cockatrice whose resolution to censure McCarthy was applauded with equal alacrity by the Washington establishment and Daily Worker), someone who will confront the monstrous Trump and bring him low. Witcover concludes that, “Any GOP presidential hopeful who cannot find the courage to denounce Trump does not deserve consideration himself for occupying the Oval Office.” So there!

It’s the atmospherics, stupid!

Jules Witcover: “Mister, we could use man like Ralph E. Flanders again!”

No less amusingly, Democratic congressmen Gallego and Cardenas, (D-Ariz & D-Calif, respectively) are busy petitioning the Obama Administration to forbid Trump’s name from being displayed above his new Washington DC hotel, having concluded that Trump’s first amendment rights should be abridged because his name represents “exclusion” and “intolerance”—which traits, given the logic of the Left, mandate exclusion on the grounds of their intolerableness.

Kerry Eleveld, whose motto “cherchez l’atmosphère” has led to many an insight! 

Not to be outdone, Kerry Eleveld at the Daily Kos writes that Trump is promoting “a freak show”  because he uses “the nativist term ‘anchor babies,’”which besides being nativist is also a “wing-nut phrase.” Eleveld reports that some unidentified customer overheard some other unidentified customer speaking Spanish at a Los Angeles IHOP and shouted “go back to Spain,” for which  gaucherie Eleveld blames Trump, notwithstanding his having no connection to the incident. Eleveld explains that Trump is nevertheless responsible because of his campaign’s “atmospherics.” In fact, reading Eleveld’s piece, one finds oneself worrying that if Trump truly represents the fascistic totalitarian threat the author claims, the Left will need much better accusations than “nativist” and “wing nut” to stop him.

Brother Pat,.thinking biblically.

Meanwhile, on the paleo-Right, Pat Buchanan believes that “Trump should tell the GOP…all options are on the table. And that includes the Samson Option.” In other words, “Trump should tell the GOP that if it disrespects him and his followers, he is prepared to do as did the biblical hero Samson when, blinded and mocked by the Philistines, he pushed the pillars apart and brought the temple down upon the heads of them all.” WOOF remains far too fond of Patrick J. (especially when he pauses to lionize an Israelite from the tribe of Dan) to shrug this off as extremism, besides which, of course, extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice…but we digress.

Sampson going Trump on the Philistines.

A conspiracy so immense?

By exercising Buchanan’s “Sampson Option,” (in other words, by staging a third-party run at the presidency) Trump could very possibly deal the GOP a mortal blow, spawning a political re-alliance on the Right that might supercede the GOP as the nation’s “other”viable party. And that could be a good thing—as natural an instance of political evolution as the fall of the Whigs. But at what immediate cost? It should be recalled that in exercising the Sampson Option, Sampson died too. In 2016, organizing a third party of Trumpites (and Trumpets?) for a lemming-like stampede off the edge of reality (in the grand tradition of Ross Perot) will only vouchsafe disaster.

Probably our fears are unwarranted. They certainly seem easier to dismiss since Trump’s September 3^rd meeting with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus following which Trump announced, “I will be totally pledging my allegiance to the Republican Party,” adding, “and the conservative principles for which it stands,” which addendum seemed slightly to perplex Chairman Priebus…like a plangent echo in the nocturne,  familiar, yet distant and faint.

Reince Priebus: “Hmmmmm…”

Already we hear wailings both left and right that Trump seems invincible—that no amount of rational deconstruction by any number of tut-tutting talking heads can derail him, yet the Donald has occupied center stage in this season’s political jousts for a meager four months. Setting aside the rantings of horrified RINOs who seem incapable of grasping the ire they’ve conjured in the homeland, sizable elements of the authentic Right find it worrisome that a man with no discernable conservative pedigree should assume such an authoritative lead.  Surely, this is an argument that merits our attention.

Trump’s interview in The Hollywood Reporter (of all places, but then again, why not?) sports a cover reading,“REAGAN DID IT AND I CAN TOO,” but frankly, to paraphrase the Waylon Jennings lyric, ‘are you sure Dutch done it this way?’ Reagan came to the governor’s mansion in California with a well established reputation as an ardent and outspoken conservative—the man whose speech on election eve, 1964, pled the case for Barry Goldwater’s candidacy with such compelling eloquence and passion that…well…okay, Goldwater got slaughtered, but the speech was fantastic. Reagan fought the Reds in Hollywood, warned  us about socialized medicine, the dangers of a bloated federal bureaucracy, and the malign intentions of the Soviet Union whenever he could make himself heard. He nearly wrested the 1976 Republican nomination from President Ford before “Jimmy” Carter (formerly the worst president in American history) defeated Ford and showed an astonished nation how much damage unfettered liberalism could inflict.

Mitt Romney in 2012, so upset by Trump branding him a hard liner, he forgot to take the wrapper off his Good Humor.

And when did Trump become our champion in the war against illegal immigration? This is repeatedly cited in polls as his strongest political positive, and yet as recently as 2012 he chastised candidate Romney for his “hard-line” views on the subject, recommending de facto amnesty as the preferable course.  On Bill O’Reilly’s show Trump explained, “You have to give them a path. You have 20 million, 30 million; nobody knows what it is….I actually heard you probably have 30 million. You have to give them a path, and you have to make it possible for them to succeed. You have to do that!”

Trump now opposes abortion, but hasn’t said when his views on infanticide evolved.  A decade ago he insisted (in a syntax worthy of Biden or Pelosi) “I’m totally pro-choice. I hate it and I hate saying it. And I’m almost ashamed to say that I’m pro-choice but I am pro-choice because I think we have no choice.” Perhaps more unsettlingly, during a recent interview with Sean Hannity candidate Trump said he didn’t think funding for Planned Parenthood “should necessarily be cut.”

Trump insists that  “the 2^nd Amendment will be totally protected” when he is president, and his September 18th position paper on the subject mocks  “scary sounding phrases” like “assault weapons.” What does this mean coming from a man whose book The America We Deserve, (2000) emphasizes the author’s support for “an assault weapons ban” and recommends longer waiting periods for gun purchasers? Trump told Ammoland Magazine he is a “Life Member of the NRA and [is] proud of their service in protecting our right to keep and bear arms.” WOOF is willing to believe him, but by “Life Member” we assume Mr. Trump means “Lifetime Member” as distinct from lifelong member. This means he may have joined the NRA a month ago for all anybody knows, but purchased (for the standard asking price of one-thousand dollars) a lifetime membership. If so, it’s a laudable gesture–but no one should confuse it with a lifetime’s involvement.

Every Republican candidate gets photographed with a gun at some point, but you have to hand it to Donald Trump!

Will the man who told Larry King that he was “very liberal when it comes to health care,” and advocated a “Canadian-style program” while applauding his “good friend” Hillary’s drive to institute Hillary Care—and who enthusiastically endorsed “universal healthcare” as recently as 2007, really drive a stake through the heart of Obamacare, as he now promises?

The Donald also demonstrates a lack of macroeconomic insight, despite his conspicuous business triumphs. Regarding taxes, for instance, he told “Fox & Friends” that “one problem I have with a flat tax is that rich people are paying the same as people that are making very little money.  I think there should be a graduation of some kind.”  But in advocating what amounts to progressive taxation Trump is in complete agreement with Bernie Sanders, not the supply-siders who drove the Reagan revolution, nor the Chicago-school monetarists like Milton Friedman who informed the postwar conservative movement.

“Steffy” Stephanopoulos: Fastest proselyte on TV

Social conservatives who see Trump as the man to restore the sanctity of heterosexual marriage will be disappointed to learn of his view that “Some people have hopes of passing amendments, but it’s not going to happen. Congress can’t pass simple things, let alone that. So anybody that’s making that an issue is doing it for political reasons. The Supreme Court ruled on it.”  In fact,Trump has never claimed to be particularly religious and recently acknowledged that he can’t remember ever asking for God’s forgiveness.  In church, he explained, “I have my little wine and my little cracker, and I feel cleansed.” Of course, WOOF doesn’t presume to second-guess anyone’s personal faith, we leave such inherently complex matters to experts like George Stephanopoulos (DNC operative and unbiased ABC newscaster) who famously converted Barack Obama from Islam to Christianity with a single on-air interjection.

In happier days.

Finally, how seriously should we take Trump’s attacks on Mrs. Clinton when he donated substantial sums to her in 2002, 2005, 2006 and 2007, gave $100,000 to the Clinton foundation and placed Hillary in the front row of his 2005 wedding?  Today Trump correctly appraises Her Magnificence as “the worst secretary of state in the history of our nation” and warns that she would make “a terrible president.” But a few years ago he told Howard Stern that Hillary was a “good friend” and a “fantastic senator.” For that matter, he wrote in 2000 that Jeb Bush was “a good man…bright, tough and principled,” and “exactly the kind of political leader this country needs now and will very much need in the future.”  Trump seems only recently to have realized that Jeb is “pathetic.”

Late to vocation?

So will Trump describe his Whittaker Chambers moment—or at least his Zell Miller moment?  Did a blinding flash of epiphanic insight smite him so forcefully that he shed his liberalism, reborn a Man of the Right?  Or was his a spiritual experience of the educational variety, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous? Absent any persuasive narrative, the suspicion remains that Trump simply stumbled upon his current arguments as the result of behavioral conditioning—by blustering long enough and loudly enough that certain themes noticeably evoked positive responses, promoting repetition. Was Trump, in other words, shaped by a simple process of positive reinforcement to issue hard-line foreign-policy avowals or express contempt for Obama’s abuses of the Constitution? What about his newfound passion for calling out left-wing reporters, which now seems to have taken precedence over savaging Megyn Kelly as though she were Hanoi Jane?

Comrade Jane Fonda joins the NVA–but at least she never asked Donald Trump a tough question!

Trump, more than any other Republican, embodies the incendiary fury sweeping the heartland. Fury at a Republican leadership that preaches counterrevolution on the stump and reverts to smarmy accommodationism once entrusted with or returned to power; fury at the president’s blatantly un-American foreign, economic, and social policies; fury at a Department of Justice dedicated to racism and rabble rousing, at an EPA that pollutes our streams, intimidates our ranchers and strangles our energy producers, a Department of Homeland Security that floods our cities with released murderers and rapists whom ICE refuses to deport, a National Security Agency refocused on intercepting every American’s emails except Hillary’s and Lois Lerner’s, an IRS bent on intimidating conservative non-profits, a Department of Education that strives to infiltrate our schools with dreck like “Common Core,” and legions of openly progressive newscasters who thump the drum for this circus of the macabre– and call it the new normal.

_____________________________________________________

Old rules/New rules

Standard wisdom suggests Trump’s numbers may shrivel in the wake of some fatally impolitic utterance. He came close to committing such a blunder when he was informed of the Hispanic homeless man in Boston who was beaten and urinated on by men who claimed Trump influenced their actions. He began well, saying “It would be a shame …” but his mind lurched predictably to the subject of Trump, and he blurted, “I will say that people who are following me are very passionate.”  Yipes. In the days of unchallenged liberal domination of our news media, this would have ended his candidacy just as surely as George Allen, a front-running conservative in pursuit of the 2007 nomination was consigned to oblivion for nicknaming a reporter “Macaca,” which phrase was headlined by the Washington Post as an unforgivable racial slur even though nobody ever heard it before. But Trump cruised through the homeless-man gaffe unscathed. Similarly, several clumsy interactions during the last (CNN) debate did nothing to diminish his standing in the polls.

As a filthy rich entrepreneur with no real political experience, Trump seems immune to the propagandists who hound him. Whenever the media plays “gotcha,” Trump sneers and doubles down. In similar circumstances it is impossible to imagine any of his GOP competitors hanging tough–their advisers would have them issuing clarifications, apologizing for misspeaking, or taking pains to be photographed kissing the apposite babies, rings, or posteriors. If nothing else, Donald Trump has changed the rules. Confronted by, say, Anderson Cooper, who surprised him with some cherry-picked poll results, Trump roared “…let me tell you. The people don’t trust you and the people don’t trust the media. And I understand why.”  He responded to a criticism from Matt Lauer by insisting, “the media just has done such a false number as usual,” and reminded NBC’s Katy Tur that “NBC is so angry at me because they renewed The Apprentice and I wouldn’t do it!” Ouch!

ABC’s Tom Llamas–objective journalist; lexicographical ethicist.

Prevailed upon by the nauseously sanctimonious Tom Llamas of ABC News to stop saying “anchor babies” (because Llamas considered the term “offensive” and “hurtful”) Trump scoffed “You mean it isn’t politically correct and yet everybody uses it.” Asked what term he would prefer, Llamas bleated “the American born child of undocumented immigrants,” and Trump replied “I’ll use the word anchor baby!” The media rushed to emphasize the exchange as evidence of Trump’s insouciance to social justice, but Americans across a wide spectrum greeted it as a fresh breeze in an atmosphere long acrid with progressive double-speak.

Jeb–searching for his inner hedgehog?

Okay, Trump is not a master of the ultimate squelch. That’s apparent. But when one is the only candidate squelching, it hardly matters. As Samuel Johnson said of the dog  walking on its hind legs, “It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” And millions of Americans are delighted to see somebody on the political right stand up to the network poltroons. This fact alone will reshuffle the deck for future elections.  But to Trump’s distinct advantage at the moment, other Republican candidates who rush to adopt the new rules will look like copycats.  Can you imagine Jeb Bush scolding a media babe? The Pillsbury Doughboy might as well  audition to play Sonic the Hedgehog.

To date, Trump has weathered all the barrages without blinking, including the friendly fire he received during the recent CNN debate where, word had it, Jeb was preparing to subject him to a game-ending fusilade of shattering reproofs.  In the event, Bush did little to slow Trump’s momentum. His most assertive efforts to pepper one of Trump’s harangues with a smattering of half-audible counterpoints was met by Trump’s sardonic aside, “More energy tonight, that’s good!“

Cosmic commonalities…

Lindsey Graham, at zero percent a classic case of “forgotten, but not gone!”

Obviously, Bernie and Donald are surprises nobody saw coming, least of all their bewildered competitors. Even Trump betrays occasional hints of astonishment, pausing now and then to rub it in. “Leading the polls is more fun than if you’re in 12th place,” he recently acknowledged, “or like Lindsey Graham in 17th place with zero percent and he’s a senator. He’s actually got zero. How do you do that?” And while Lindsey pouts and Jeb switches to English, their party’s nominative discourse is reshaped by the man Graham called “a complete idiot,” and whom Bush wrote off as “out of the mainstream of what Republicans think.” Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders obliges his Democrat counterparts to increasingly expose their closet radicalism. But there is an asymmetry in this feature of the phenomenon.

Therein lies Sanders’s greatest strength. He can speak to his comrades and exhort them to the barricades openly, without all the mawkish pseudo-patriotism and flag flaunting distractions commonly staged by the nattily repackaged Alinskyites who have populated the Democrat party since it swarmed into congress in the wake of Nixon’s discomfiture. A recent Quinnipiac poll showed that the word most often associated by respondents with Hillary Clinton’s name was “liar.” Bernie doesn’t have this problem—he clearly strategizes that a forthright espousal of socialism can win the day in our post-Obamanation, and he may be right. With every source of news, entertainment and education recalibrated to persuade Americans that Bernie is even cooler than Hillary, he might succeed. After all, Barack Obama won re-election despite the most destructive first term in presidential history, mainly because nearly every source of influence and information relied upon by the average American served as an engine of propaganda advocating that result.

And think of the savings at the convention when they’ll only need one third of the balloons!

Trump’s narrative problem, in stark contrast, is that he imperfectly comprehends the ethos of the American Right. He “speaks conservatism as a second language,” as Jonah Goldberg once said of Mitt Romney—but unlike Romney, Trump speaks it with passion and righteous fury…the enthusiasm of the convert, as the Catholics say. Bernie Sanders is voicing the stale tommyrot of 1960s-era “New Left” radicalism, but he means it, knows it, lives it and breathes it. Trump on the other hand zigs off course intermittently and must hastily zag to starboard to remain afloat.  Sanders repulses criticism by replaying whichever bumper-sticker accusation suits the moment: It’s the corporations, the pentagon, the NRA, the one-per-centers, the homophobes, whatever works. Distinctly, Trump’s belatedly acquired conservatism denies him a ready-to-hand supply of rhetorical chestnuts, obliging him to resort more often than not to the ad hominem attack–a markedly inferior eristic device. Criticize Trump and presto, you’re suddenly stupid, hopeless, fat, ugly, slutty, or out of your league. Over time, this inelegant reliance on prep-school obloquy may become so repellent to voters that Trump will either do some homework or yield the lead to Cruz, Carson, or Fiorina—and while this might be a good thing for conservatism, it could  fatally de-energize the Republican bid in 2016.

     Ed Wynn, RIP

Both men have weird physical traits–Trump’s hair hardly requires mention, while Bernie’s is reminiscent of Ed Wynn in his hay day. Trump is known to have a rotten temper and those in the know agree that Bernie often exudes a somewhat rotten tang, he being too bohemian–or simply too distracted– to bath frequently. Both men blame the established order for the nation’s downhill plunge. Here Trump has the advantage of blaming real villains and promoting real solutions, while Bernie must blame a consortium of bankers, CEOs and jet-set billionaires almost all of whom  are actually liberal Democrats who partnered enthusiastically with Obama’s posse–often in exchange for lucrative government connections. But after all, Bernie’s devotees like to hear “Enough is enough!” not, “We need the same thing, only lots more of it!”

“An actor shot this man!”

After an intensive enquiry, WOOF has debunked the rumor that this button was originally worn by President Lincoln.

Obviously, the Democrat establishment is no happier with Bernie than the Republican establishment ever was with Reagan (or, for that matter,McCarthy or Buchanan) and their mounting panic is obvious. Turning to Joe Biden in hopes of salvaging a presidential election is perhaps the most manifestly desperate political maneuver since Governor Pat Brown strove to retain the governorship of California in the face of Ronald Reagan’s mounting lead by filming a last-minute commercial in which he showed school children a picture of Abraham Lincoln and bade them to remember that “an actor shot this man!”  But even as Biden ponders, polls in New Hampshire show Sanders at 49 percent and gaining, with Hillary at 38 percent and fading like an old tattoo.

Should Sanders manage to wrestle the nomination from Hillary’s clutches (or should Hillary wind up approximately where her friend Martha Stewart wound up on far more diaphanous evidence), the manifest left will wrestle control of the Democrat party away from the long-established peek-a-boo wing and Sanders will be center stage. The issue, however, will not be decided by how many Americans regard Sanders as likable, but by how many, finally, come to agree that “If we don’t elect him, we would be stupid.”

The secret statistic:

In a hypothetical 2016 match-up, Trump now beats Clinton in Iowa by 5 points. But here’s the most shocking statistic of all—and therefore the one you won’t hear reported much, except to be denounced as bogus:  Trump may be polling as much as 25 percent of the Black vote according to a SurveyUSA analysis. If true, this is cause enough (perhaps) to back Trump for the GOP nomination. Consider, gentle readers, that Blacks (for reasons nobody has ever coherently explained) vote solidly Democrat, making up 22 percent of the Democrat base. So if Trump were to cut away a quarter of that vote, the Democrats would lose Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida, bringing many other states into play, and returning sizeable numbers of Black Americans to their party of political origin. Surely this merits a resounding wowsers, irrespective of Trump’s negatives.  Latinos also seem far more receptive to Trump’s message than the pundits and consultants predicted. A recent Nevada poll shows Trump at a 28 percent lead in that state, with his Hispanic support at 31 percent. If this keeps up, the Democrats in congress will be shouting in unison: “Build the fence, build it now!”

So who wins?

Enjoy the moment!

So does Trump beat Sanders in a 2016 showdown?  At the end of July, CNN waxed nearly orgasmic with statistical assessments showing “the socialist from Vermont would defeat the New York real estate mogul and Republican frontrunner…in a presidential general election.” But over at ABC, Trump beats Bernie in a national election. You probably haven’t heard about this, but some clueless wretch at KABC in Los Angeles let slip an “exclusive Eyewitness News nationwide poll” which might otherwise have been conveniently misplaced. The poll, commissioned by ABC, shows Trump beating all Democratic presidential candidates “if the election were held today.”  According to ABC’s poll, Trump narrowly defeats Hillary Clinton 45 percent to 40 as of this moment in time,  edging out Bernie 44 percent to 40 percent. However, he only beats Biden by a slender 44 percent to 42 percent. Obviously, then, Trump is in front, and a blithering idiot is the DNC’s best hope!  (Enjoy the moment!) 

_____________________________________

SEVEN DAYS IN MAY REVISITED–What happens if the government is overthrown by the government?

Remembering Kennedy-era fiction–a half-hearted homage:

Woofketeers, once upon a time in our land there were liberals of the Jack Kennedy type (assuming that JFK may even be regarded as liberal in today’s political mix) and they cared about things. They cared about the Constitution of the United States, and they cared about justice, and they really, really cared about peace, and not having a nuclear war with Russia—they were big on that one. Some of you may recall those days. And many of these idealists were authors whose books always got made into feature films by idealistic liberals in Hollywood; and most of these authors agreed that the greatest threat to their liberal ideals would come in the form of a bunch of well-intentioned but hopelessly misguided right-wing nutcases, probably in the military, attempting to seize control of the government or starting World War III or doing both simultaneously.  Initially, in fact, these authors were not particularly disparaging of such misguided right wingers. They treated them with only slightly condescending sympathy.  Like, in Fail Safe, which taught us that if we didn’t get rid of our nuclear weapons we would probably have a computer glitch and our Air Force bombers, albeit flown by well intentioned and heroic men, would wind up blowing up New York, remember?

Larry Hagman and Henry Fonda in “Fail Safe” (1964) “Darn it, we blew up Moscow–now I have to blow up New York!”

And then we had that intriguing naval saga, The Bedford Incident that showed us that placing our navy destroyers in the hands of dedicated, hard-core patriots would inevitably cause one of them to accidentally blow up a soviet submarine (that was in any case just minding its own business) and cause World War Three….and in case you didn’t get the idea from the book, the movie was even more helpful in clarifying this understanding because it came out in 1964 (the Goldwater vs, LBJ election, right?) and Richard Widmark, who played the misguided but patriotic right-wing skipper, wore strangely incongruous horn rim glasses that were, if you thought about it or absorbed the matter subconsciously, an exact match for Barry Goldwater’s—so, get it? Goldwater meant well too, but you just knew that if he got elected he’d probably accidentally blow up a Russian sub too, and –well—there goes planet earth!  (Granted, some viewers may have gotten the impression that Buddy Holly or B.F. Skinner would accidentally blow up a Russian sub, but Hollywood is over a lot of peoples heads!)

“Oops, we started World War Three!” (You have to see the film to catch the scenes with Widmark in Barry’s horn rims!)

Now, in these days of which we speak, Woofketeers, there lived a young author named Fletcher Knebel, and he wrote a lot of these types of books too—especially the ones where the well-intentioned but hopelessly misguided right-wingers were always going to take over the government for the good of the country because some “weak sister” American president (usually played by Fredric March) was getting too solicitous of the Ruskies so the well-intentioned but hopeless paranoid right-wingers wanted to stop it by any means necessary. And Mr. Knebel’s best work to this effect (although Night of Camp David wasn’t bad either) was definitely Seven Days in May. You may have even seen the flick because even though it’s old and dated in numerous ways, its plot surrounds the Preakness, so it gets played around triple-crown time on the classic movie stations and some of the network affiliates.

Lancaster in “7 Days”– where is he when we need him?

The main hook, or “the McGuffin” (as Hitchcock would say) was the same in the book and in the subsequent movie script by Rod Serling—namely that this egomaniacal Air Force general, played by Burt Lancaster, was going to stage a coup and take control of the government to save us from an arms treaty that would cede nuclear supremacy to the Reds—and this was a Kennedy-era liberal’s worst nightmare…the military take over part, that is, not letting the Reds get ahead. So Kirk Douglass played a Marine officer who found out what was going on and saved America from Burt Lancaster. The constitution was saved, and nobody ever explained why Congress didn’t simply refuse to ratify the treaty if it was so bad—but we digress.

Right-wing extremists were at it again in this subsequent Knebel page-turner!

Our point here, Wooferians, is that for decades and decades a fear was routinely expressed by liberals that the Right Wing, left unchecked, would find a means of dissolving the Constitution and establishing a military dictatorship, or a dictator whose authority was vouchsafed by the military. You may know Liberals who honestly believe (because they tell themselves this, and teach it to one another in school) that the opposite of a liberal is a fascist. This is silly. The opposite of a liberal is a social conservative, and no aspect of the American experiment is more desirable to preserve for a conservative than its foundational documents and their original understanding. We have said so for decades now, but Liberals cannot bring themselves to believe that the amplification of liberalism (which is essentially utopianism) is fascism, or communism—two sides of the collectivist coin. But we don’t have enough space to explain this in detail, so we hope the majority of our readers already get it.  In any case, the proof is visible in events, so one need hardly wax tediously theoretical.

Why can’t presidents just take over the country?    

Well, first of all, it’s not legal, obviously. The executive branch is only one branch of three equally powerful and counterbalanced components of the government. The president commands the military, but he must do so within constitutional limits. One reason no president has ever attempted an authentic takeover of the government has long been held to be that the troops necessary to enforce such a power grab and maintain it through the imposition of prolonged martial law, simply wouldn’t do it. The military after all swears its allegiance to the Constitution, not to the President, who is a duly authorized commander in chief only insofar as he seeks to preserve constitutional writ.  If a president should act against the Constitution, he sacrifices any authority he previously enjoyed under its precepts. Simple right?  But left to its own devices, liberalism seems considerably less enamored of the Constitution than formerly supposed. And President Obama seems especially bent on demonstrating the fact.  Let us quickly review:

The Obamacare violations:

First of all, there’s that mandatory requirement that we buy a product—namely Obamacare–unheard of in the history of our Constitutional Republic, and furthermore that we be fined (or imprisoned, as Nancy Pelosi suggested) if we don’t, which is equally unheard of except that Justice Roberts was nice enough to arbitrarily turn it into a “tax,” which is odd since it didn’t originate in the House, but oh well—and then there’s Obama’s insistence that the individual states increase their Medicare coverage, which he has no legal authority to insist on, but then, he has no legal authority to establish a death panel, either, or as he prefers to call it, “the Independent Payment Advisory Board,” which will be fifteen appointees whose job will be lowering Medicare expenditures—and by the way, IPAB is not subject to external review even though it will control about 13 percent of the federal budget, and kill a lot of grannies. This blatantly violates the separation of powers, but nobody seems to mind…yet.

And speaking of which….

Despite Obamacare being, however absurdly, the law of the land, our Beloved Helmsman has arbitrarily issued over 2000 waivers to federal employees and cronies and big businesses seeking immunity from it. Harry Reid’s state of Nevada got a blanket waiver (no wonder he’s all for it, eh?) and Nancy Pelosi’s favorite gourmet restaurants in San Francisco are exempt—but not because any such exemptions exist in the law—only because Obama waved his magic wand—which wand, to be sure, is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, and seems particularly abusive of the equal protection clause—just sayin.’

The Government Car business

Remember the auto bailouts? Let’s just take Chrysler. The use of TARP funds to bail out auto manufacturers was illegal. Obama then denied priority to secure creditors (shareholders) by paying them only 30 cents on the dollar (but nobody cared because those guys are a bunch of evil rich people and they deserve to be punished) and the skim went to his cronies in the labor unions. But nobody seemed to mind that very much either. Meanwhile, the atrocity that is known as “Dodd-Frank” enabled Obama to engage in un-reviewed power politics as the whim took him in his corporate dealings. It also gave the Treasury Department power to seize banks. It made it possible for the Consumer Protection Bureaus to make up their own laws, and then enforce them in accordance with their personal interpretations. Pretty gutsy, and, of course, totally unconstitutional.

Oily waters.

You may recall that after the Deepwater Horizon disaster erupted (at least partially due to Obama granting safety waivers to British Petroleum in return for their generous donations to his campaign), and while all the networks were shrieking that life on earth was about to end because of oil leaking into the ocean, Obama responded by issuing a blanket six-month moratorium on all oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. When a federal judge struck down the moratorium as “arbitrary and capricious,” Obama simply ignored the judge. The judge found the government in contempt of court, but since Obama didn’t care, the Liberal Establishment Media didn’t care—so nobody cared.

Remember the BP oil spill? It was supposed to end all life in the ocean, which actually never happened–but it did end all drilling in the Gulf.

IRS and the Tea Party

It may be recalled that before he got caught using the IRS to bully Tea Party organizations into inutility, the president had already been caught using the IRS to muzzle political speech by suddenly announcing that certain nonprofit advocacy groups (but only the bad ones that didn’t like the president) would be subject to the gift tax despite the fact that the gift tax was never applied in this fashion to any 501 (C) (4) organization before. When the IRS was confronted, it backed down, but of course we now know it simply moved on to obstructing Tea Party and pro-constitution “non-profits” from receiving the requisite tax status to perform their missions. That the IRS acted at the behest of the administration is blatantly obvious. 

The original Boston Tea Party–boy are those guys going to get a nasty letter from Lois Lerner!

So enough of this, you get the idea—for the first time in American history a president clearly deems the Bill of Rights “a charter of negative liberties” that is inconveniently restrictive of governmental authority and is best dealt with dismissively. It must be admitted here, of course, that “W” Bush famously snapped that the Constitution was “just a goddam piece of paper,” but nobody has flouted such a mindset as casually or as consistently as the incumbent, possibly because Obama could burn the Constitution in the rose garden and the media would restrict their remarks to discussions of his fastidiousness in supervising the attendant safety issues.

SO HERE’S HOW YOU DO 7 DAYS IN MAY –INSIDE OUT!

Kirk Douglas was the good guy officer in “7 Days” because he was loyal to the president–but the good guy officers nowadays would be conservatives loyal to the Constitution– guess Fletcher Knebel never saw this one coming!

See, once you look at the whole Seven Days in May scenario from the reverse angle—the one with good guy conservatives trying to preserve the Union while a bad guy ultra liberal president attempts to take it over and transform it into a banana republic, the whole operation becomes a different proposition. Viewed from this perspective, the task becomes infinitely simpler. Instead of good-guy Kirk Douglas trying to stop the overthrow of the president from the outside, you have instead the president, on the inside, getting rid of everybody who resembles the Kirk Douglas character. Indeed, you have the systematic stripping from the military of anybody who might fail to prove adequately sycophantic when the chips are down. And together with this, you have a massive effort at liberalization occurring within the armed forces in a frantic effort to shift the military ethos toward political correctness and obeisance to the president rather than the Republic.

Goodbye, good men!

“Mad Dog” is WOOF’s favorite leatherneck–but the Obamans may have found him a bit too… authentic?

Why was General James “Mad Dog” Mattis (of what the president would call the Marine Corpse) relieved of his crucial duties at US Central Command overseeing wars in the MiddleEast? Mattis, who is author of the sapient motto, “Have a plan to kill everyone you meet,” will officially retire from the Corps in March—considerably earlier than anticipated. What are his sins? Toughness, outspokenness, and an ironclad loyalty to his country? Most of us also recall the unceremonious removal of General Stanley McChrystal from command in Afghanistan after being quoted in Rolling Stone calling Joe Biden “Vice President Bite-me.” Also, General David Petraeus was jerked home, placed at CIA, and chased into retirement by “sudden” revelations of his infidelities with biographer Paula Broadwell (possibly an early catch by the NSA phishing program) which had the additional effect of rendering him taciturn regarding the Benghazi debacle. And speaking of Benghazi, the firings there included Maj. Gen. Ralph Baker, commander of the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, who was canned last March 28. Baker, was reported to have been fired “because of a loss of confidence.” Really?

General Ham seems to sense time is running out…but why?

Meanwhile, General William “Kip” Ward, was reduced to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and returned from the service, possibly because of excessive spending sprees and an unduly lavish life style. WOOF KNOWS however that both Rear Admiral Charles Gaouette and General Carter Ham, were fired at Obama’s personal insistence for attempting to interdict the terrorist assault on the U.S. mission in Benghazi.  General Ham, it may be recalled, was the first to dismiss the administration’s movie-protest story as nonsense, telling reporters that it was clearly a terrorist assault. Woof also knows that Ham, at least, was preparing to ignore the stand-down order and proceed to the relief of the Benghazi mission when his second-in-command –an Obama sycophant—saw his moment and forcibly relieved Ham of his command, placing him under arrest for insubordination. And WOOF also knows, so you don’t have to remind us (unless you feel driven) that these assertions are widely considered “debunked” because of the White House’s use of ABC News to denounce this version of events as a creation of right-wing nuts (like us here at WOOF). The ABC story stated that Gaouette was “not fired,” but “replaced temporarily” and reassigned to Bremerton, Washington, pending an investigation into “inappropriate leadership judgment.” WOOF scoffs at this incipient noun chain—and at ABC for lacking the creative juice to confect a better cover story.

Meanwhile, over at missile defense command, the two-star general in charge of all Air Force nuclear missiles was fired a week ago in the immediate wake of another high level officer overseeing America’s nuclear arsenal being similarly sacked (no pun intended). Air Force Maj. Gen. Michael Carey was removed from command of the 20th Air Force, which maintains and controls 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles with “mirved” warheads at three separate bases. No reason for Carey’s firing was given by the Air Force, which nevertheless announced what were not the reasons, insisting it had nothing to do, for instance, with  gambling, or the loss of a nuclear weapon, or sexual misconduct. It probably had nothing to do with torturing puppies, either, but they left that out. Carey’s firing comes two days after the Navy announced it had canned a three-star admiral serving as the deputy commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees all nuclear-armed missiles, bombers and submarines for the United States Navy. Vice Admiral Tim Giardina.

Air Force General Carey–hey, at least he didn’t lose a nuclear weapon!

Gardina remains under investigation for alleged gambling improprieties, as opposed to General Carey who you will recall is not suspected of gambling improprieties, although no one has expressly exonerated Admiral Giardina of losing a nuclear weapon or…or…what is going on here, Woofketeers? Is Our Beloved Leader unfairly saddled with the most incompetent military leadership in our national history, or is something else afoot? As firings continue–including such exemplary men at arms as Major General Ralph Baker, Brigadier General Bryan Roberts, and Lieutenant General David Holmes Huntoon, Jr. of the United States Army, and Major General Gregg A. Sturdevant and Major General Charles M. Gurganus of the USMC, the rumors mount that Christians are being deleted from the office cadres, as well as conservatives and those who show an impolitic hostility toward their Islamic adversaries in the middle east.  That a bizarre effort is underway to make the wartime military more Muslim-friendly is well documented.

The Rand Paul letter….

The media have been almost entirely devoted lately to persuading the American public that Ted Cruz is a raving lunatic, it may as a consequence have slipped our memories that only last March they were equally busy convincing us that Rand Paul was a raving lunatic. Paul, it may be recalled, launched a filibuster of sorts during which he had the gall to say the following:

“If there were an ounce of courage in this chamber, I would be joined by Senators from both parties today, saying that no President has the authority to kill Americans without charge or trial.”

Thirteen hours of Rand Paul started a RINO stampede, but earned a re-write from the Attorney General.

So…the media went to work guffawing at the crazy yawp from backward, inbred Kentucky who was so crazy he thought the President might take to killing U.S. citizens right here in the United States without trial.  Now where, the media asked themselves, as they are wont to do, could anyone get such an addlepated idea, and then waste everybody’s time blathering about it on the floor of the Senate when all the grown-up, experienced senators wanted to get on with serious stuff, like approving the politician John Brennan to head the CIA, and clearing the way for amnesty for illegal immigrants without securing our boarders?

And now, another oldie from the Righteous Brothers!

In fact, Lindsey Graham and John McCain ducked out of Paul’s performance in order to dine with Barack Obama. Both men later denounced Paul’s efforts from the Senate floor. Graham averred that asking whether the president has the power to kill American citizens on American soil was “a ludicrous question,” adding. “I do not believe that question deserves an answer.” Really, Lindsey? McCain, however, condescended most asininely (though it was admittedly a close contest), telling a leftist media interviewer, “If Mr. Paul wants to be taken seriously, he needs to do more than pull political stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids in their college dorms. He needs to know what he’s talking about!” Of course, if John McCain had really wanted to be president, he might have been well advised to learn how to fire up libertarian college kids, not fawn over his opposition with such incomprehensible alacrity. But more to the point, what evidence did McCain possess suggesting that Paul didn’t know what he was talking about?

Eric Holder contemplates Paul’s letter of February 20.

Where, in fact, did the raving lunatic yawp—er—Senator Paul, get such a crazy idea? From Obama’s criminal Attorney General himself, in fact, none other than the infamous gun-runner, Eric Holder. The media knew this, of course, but they didn’t care to discuss it, thank you. WOOF on the other hand, feels like discussing it.  See, Rand Paul wrote to Eric Holder, asking him if the blanket authorization by Obama to use drones to assassinate American citizens included American citizens right here in, oh, say, Kentucky. Or anywhere else outside the beltway. Specifically, Paul inquired whether the president “has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil and without trial.” So if Paul didn’t know what he was talking about, this was Eric Holder’s opportunity to say so.

Instead, Holder answered Paul on March 4th, and did so in an apparent fit of atypical honesty. His letter read in part:

“The question you have posed is therefore entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur, and one we hope no President will ever have to confront. It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution…for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States.” [Readers may view the entire letter here]

So…just out of curiosity…what happens if we’re going too fast?

To put an end to Paul’s rantings, presumably on the theory that somebody somewhere might report on their basis if they continued, President Obama prevailed upon Attorney General Holder to contact Paul a second time, so Holder wrote Paul another letter on March 13^th saying “”It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: ‘Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?’ The answer to that question is no.”

This didn’t come to Holder’s attention the first time he answered the question? (Which was not, just for the record, an “additional question.” ) Nonsense, of course it did—he just altered his response to shut Paul up—the first letter was the truthful one.  Only in the sinistral cosmogony of the Liberal Establishment Media could such malarkey from the Department of Justice pass without notice.  And by the way, when, since Lee’s surrender at Appomattox,  is an American “engaged in combat on American soil”? One rather suspects the answer is, when President Obama says he is.

So long as they just spy on us and don’t blow us up, we’re probably okay…right?

Why William Burroughs was smarter than Graham or McCain:

It seems uncomfortably obvious that the current administration is giving serious consideration to a variety of actions, military in nature, that would perpetuate Our Beloved Helmsman’s stay in office. It seems equally obvious that the awesome information-gathering abilities of the National Security Agency have been turned inward—repurposed as instruments of domestic surveillance. The NSA is now focused to an unprecedented extent on probing the quotidian business of average Americans. Phone records, Facebook pages, Internet browsings, email exchanges, telephone conversations, and now medical and mental health information have all been garnered and stored. This is the behavior of a totalitarian regime, or an administration bent on transitioning into one.

The Bill of Rights was MIA!

Military officers, particularly those with combat experience, and especially those with observably patriotic instincts, have been weeded out of the chain of command, and the Secretary of Defense is complicit in this endeavor. Also, Obama now has a political crony (and fellow Islamophile) situated at the helm of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan having won confirmation once Paul yielded the floor in the wake of Holder’s disingenuous second letter. (Oddly, when Brennan took the oath as CIA chief, he swore allegiance to the Constitution with his hand upon an original copy of the 1787 Constitution. This may seem charmingly patriotic until one considers the fact that the 1787 Constitution did not yet contain—the Bill of Rights. And why not the Bible, Director Brennan?)

And while we’re on this subject, why has NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) ordered large numbers of assault rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition? In case of giant squid attack? Why is the Department of Homeland Security now the proud owner of 1.6 billion rounds of ammo, not to mention 2,717 mine resistant urban-assault armored vehicles, many of which have already been observed and photographed patrolling the streets of hometown, USA?

“Good shooting, Agent Johnson–looks like you got him right between the eyes!”

Meanwhile, the Internet is ablaze with the notion that the American military is going to deliver us from Obama by staging a coup, and an amazing number of citizens seem enamored of this idea, Certainly WOOF cannot condone such anti-Constitutional thinking, save, of course, as a countermeasure to any unconstitutional power grab by President Obama—but we aren’t anticipating such an event…at least not a provable one.  We consider it far more likely that Obama has cleansed his High Command of potential troublemakers, and is poised to impose martial law as a means of advancing his power beyond its legal limits.  WOOF worries about this stuff a lot!

Comrades!

How ironic that Nebel’s vision of the presidency being overthrown by right-wing militarists during seven days in May has transmogrified into the current possibility—a Red/Islamist takeover of our government by a communist president of the United States, aided and abetted by an American military under the command of politically motivated generals and admirals. Would such a salient stand any chance of success? All would depend on the swiftness and ruthlessness of its execution, and the degree to which our armed forces might in fact assist or resist the effort—but WOOF insists that even now these questions are being seriously pondered in the Oval Office, and to a large extent acted on through the preparations noted in this article. It may be entirely correct to argue that the majority of American troops would refuse to turn their weapons on fellow citizens–but it seems evident that steps are being taken to rig the chain of command and adjust the odds.

We are, of course, notoriously paranoid, dear readers—but given the weight of circumstantial evidence, it begins to seem less psychotic to assume the worst than to ignore the facts! Come January of 2017, when the Obamas graciously turn the White House over to the newly inaugurated POTUS, (preferably Christine O’Donnell, but, in the event, to whomsoever), we solemnly pledge to publish our profound apologies for suspecting the worst in this matter.  In the meantime, we will persist in suspecting the worst. It was the beatnik author William S. Burroughs, gentle readers, (whose literary and epigrammatic skills WOOF joins Michael Savage in admiring) who once remarked that:  “Sometimes paranoia’s just having all the facts!”

William S. Burroughs