Dilbert creator Scott Adams tweeted this week: ”The country’s energy is strange. Everything is amped up in every direction. Something big is coming.” He’s rarely wrong about such things.
Adams said he doesn’t know what that something big is, but I’m hoping it is a major shift in America’s political tectonic plates. I may be looking too hard for it, but I, too, feel it in my bones.
Infrastructure Faceplant
For one thing, the wacky spending program the Democrats were proposing and fiddling with seems to have hit the shoals, trapped between the far left and the more moderate senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. Even the leftward Politico cannot spackle over the dilemma, a dilemma that is the only thing preventing Democrats from turning our constitutional republic into a totalitarian socialist economic mess in which only the most authoritarian and corrupt rule over a greatly impoverished citizenry.
For the second time in less than a month, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team had to delay a vote on Senate-passed infrastructure bill amid progressive opposition, denying President Joe Biden a much-needed win as Democrats’ bigger, $1.75 trillion social spending plan also remains in limbo.
This Can't Be True
“I think it’s wholly apparent that today was not a success,” said Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger, whose state has a high-stakes gubernatorial showdown Tuesday that Democrats were hoping to boost with the infrastructure vote.
“Because people choose to be obstructionists, we’re not delivering these things to my state or to the rest of the country,” the swing-district Democrat added. “I guess we’ll just wait because apparently failing roads and bridges can just wait in the minds of some people.”
Democrats slunk out of the House chamber embarrassed -- furious at the liberals who dug in and a White House that refused to pressure them to relent -- and openly fretting about the long-term repercussions, given the tough climb they face in the midterms.
Virginia Gubernatorial Race
Terry McAuliffe, who was supposed to be a shoo-in for a second term as governor of Virginia, seems to be in a lot of trouble. Good polls can only measure general sentiment in my view, but all that I’ve seen show that sentiment has rapidly shifted in favor of his opponent Glenn Youngkin. To my mind, McAuliffe’s fatal miscalculation was to stand with the teachers’ unions, the obstructive, dictatorial Loudon County school board against the parents. Northern Virginia is heavily populated by tech and professional federal employees who in recent years have tended to vote Democrat, but these are people who can be expected to be concerned with the public school education of their children, and McAuliffe, reflexively tone-deaf to such concerns, placed himself perilously on the third rail. recommended by Mgid Mgid LifeVac What To Do When You're Alone And Choking Learn more
How bad is his campaign going? It could hardly be worse. So few people have turned out in places like Arlington, Virginia, that he’s skipped showing up at the final rallies -- rallies designed to snowball voter support. At one of those rallies. Pharrell Williams, a noted hip-hop singer and music producer, told the crowd it’s okay if they vote for Glenn Youngkin -- not something I’d think the rally organizers wanted to hear.
The odious and discredited Lincoln Project tried to help McAuliffe by staging a pretend white nationalist display for Youngkin. I suppose, because they were torn between trying to pay honor to diversity while smearing Youngkin, they included a young black man in the mix of demonstrators, immediately undercutting the message of the scam that this was a white nationalist demonstration. In fact, one of the “white nationalists” was the financial director for Young VA Dems. About the same time this ploy flopped, others reminded voters that McAuliffe had defended the present Democrat governor of Virginia Ralph Northam’s appearance in blackface costume, and it turned out that McAuliffe’s spokesperson (who also worked for the Harris and Biden campaigns) had posted racist tweets in 2012. Just as #MeToo backfired -- this week against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, now charged with a misdemeanor sexual offense against a staffer -- the cancel culture mining of ancient racist comments is now backfiring against the Democrats who had made this something of a cottage industry.
Days later, McAuliffe was charged with accepting an illegal laundered $350,000 contribution from a Sri Lankan businessman.
The National Legal and Policy Center is asking the FEC to "promptly investigate" whether the contribution to the Virginia gubernatorial candidate violated federal laws prohibiting campaigns from accepting political donations from foreign nationals.
"Terry McAuliffe has a history of accepting foreign contributions. The FEC must fully investigate these serious charges that he accepted $350,000 in illegal foreign contributions for his current campaign," said Washington, D.C. attorney, Paul Kamenar, counsel to NLPC, who drafted and filed the complaint with the FEC.
LycaTel LLC, owned by Sri Lankan-British national Allirajah Subaskaran, gave McAuliffe $350,000 in July, the Free Beacon first reported in early October. The company is a New Jersey subsidiary of Subaskaran’s U.K.-based telecom conglomerate, which boasts a complicated web of offshore businesses and has been the subject of tax-fraud and money-laundering charges in France.
(Of course, as you imagine, Northern Virginia voters, whose main source of news is the Washington Post, will know little of such things, as the paper actively supports McAuliffe and buries these stories, so if you know any please send them the link to this.)
If, as I hope, McAuliffe loses, it will mean a gut check for those Democrats heading into a 2022 reelection fight. It tells them that people are sick of this craziness and their own careers are in danger. I expect that since their personal political careers are the first of their interests, self-seeking congressional Democrats will cut their strings to the loonies in the Squad and the Sandernistas.
Changing the Climate
Ostensibly to chat with the Pope about such theological issues as climate change -- apparently the latest religious belief superseding what most people consider Catholicism -- President Biden (who reportedly took 800 staffers with him to the Climate Conference in Glasgow, Scotland) cruised through Rome in an 85-vehicle motorcade.
What more could you ask to show how seriously Biden takes the issue of greenhouse gases and fossil fuels?
Speaking of “serious,” how can you not laugh at a president so stupid that he said, “When you buy an electric vehicle, you can go across America on a single tank of gas figuratively speaking. It’s not gas. You plug it in.” Sure, you do, and you have to plug it in every few hundred miles and wait for hours for it to charge unless somewhere someone has invented some very very long and sturdy extension cords. And, of course, plugging it in requires electric power from somewhere, and there’s a substantial shortage of it because of the same loony energy policies that are now forcing up gas and electric power prices around the country and the world.
Immigration Follies
Thousands of aliens are heading toward the border to join the more than one million who already illegally crossed under this administration, and, almost entirely unvetted, have been transported around the country. Citizens, many of whom jumped through years-long hoops to satisfy what is still immigration law totally ignored by this administration, are incredulous at the latest report, as Roger L. Simon explains:
WASHINGTON -- The Biden administration is in talks to offer immigrant families that were separated during the Trump administration around $450,000 a person in compensation, according to people familiar with the matter, as several agencies work to resolve lawsuits filed on behalf of parents and children who say the government subjected them to lasting psychological trauma.
“The U.S. Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services are considering payments that could amount to close to $1 million a family, though the final numbers could shift, the people familiar with the matter said.”
$450,000 a person? This when millions of actual taxpaying American citizens are suffering, barely able to make ends meet during the pandemic, and inflation is on a record pace. Not even Anthony Fauci, allegedly the highest paid government official, makes that much, at least in salary.
Psychological trauma? How about causing psychological trauma to a whole country at once? Never in my life have I heard anything so insane.
No matter how hard the mainstream press tries to bury such things, ordinary voters cannot miss the fact that the administration’s idiotic policies and tinkering already have resulted in supply shortages, higher prices, higher energy costs, and terrible schools that are miseducating their children and undermining parental authority. Just as bad, all this would lead to even higher taxes. They’re waking up and that means to me that the ground is shifting under the Democrats’ feet. That is “something big.”