The Bellweather- First Report: We are Still Winning

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2018 election, Conservatism, Constitution, Democrat Party, Elitism and Class, President Donald J. Trump, Progressives, Republican Party establishment

(Pixabay)

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

This is the first of our Bellweather Reports, published on an “as-needed” basis.

(Note our weather vane and the direction it is flying.)

We are still winning. 

They are still losing.

We are still mounted on horses. They are still afoot.

And Donald Trump still works for us, and not us for him.

Donald Trump understands this relationship, and that They, and we all know who “They” are, are trying to get to Trump by driving a wedge between the President and us.

They are coming unglued right now because of their inability to move the needle about our resolve.

My purpose here at VassarBushmills.com is to help you by-pass the gossip and trivia that is found on Twitter and the vast majority of media printed and televised news stories.

I can find no profit to our end-game in trying to super-analyze the Mueller investigation, or wonder out loud why so many criminals in the deep state are still unindicted. Since their crimes are so evident, there simply is no basis to believe our people up on the horses aren’t aware of as well.

I have to believe there will be a final accounting, albeit not on a schedule that suits many of your temperaments.

This is because we are not allowed to listen in on their private discussions and plans, and to make up for, have tried our hand at clairvoyance in order to relay what those plans are.

Frankly, I’m weary of this.

Much of what I read on Twitter now are the “cri de Coeur” of many, including some very fine analysts who seem suddenly to have thrown up their hands in despair, not because this final accounting hasn’t begun, but because it hasn’t occurred according to their timetable.

If you want something really difficult, try to design a mass invasion of France, with daily changes for 6 months, w/o benefit of computers.

If you enjoy this as sport, fine, but this is what I bypass on Twitter and the associated links, for there is nothing relevant there that will affect the final outcome.

(I plan to publish a short outline about how I read social media without allowing my spine to be curved and causing us to lose the War in Vietnam, which we did by the way. Twitter may have some value but needs to be de-cluttered.)

[…]

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Toward a “Theory of the Man”

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Conservatism, Constitution, Democrat Party, Elitism and Class, law, President Donald J. Trump, race and culture, Ralph Northam, Republican Party establishment, theory of the man, universal theory

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

For almost everyone who pops up in the news, I have a general theory of that person, beginning with how they got in the news in the first place.

If WAPO or New York Times said something approvingly about them, my starting point is likely to be a minus -1. Disapprovingly? Plus +1. The media is my built-in bias meter.

But that bias can quickly be corrected if it turns out that what WAPO or NYT said was factually true. It would not change my overall opinion about either of them unless they actually got the facts right several times in a row, which indicate they may have changed their bias on a given subject.

Neither have in over 50 years.

A personal Theory of a Man or Woman is not something you generally publish. It’s an internal mechanism to remind yourself that there are rules of critical thinking, as opposed to giving over to raw emotion. It’s a reminder of who you are, not who an updated Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell is. You’d be surprised at how many so-called conservative writers have never engaged in this simple practice. It should be a regular as morning prayers. Only those under 45 don’t even know it exists.

I did a complete-180 on one Theory of a Man I had, in 2013, when hall of fame conservative George Will came down to Virginia on behalf of one of his life-long employers, WAPO, to do a hit piece on Ken Cuccinelli, in his race for governor against the unindicted Clinton skid-greaser, Terry McAuliffe. No fan of the Democrats, mind you, Will put his support behind an empty-suit Libertarian (these are easy to hire in any state election D’s think can be made closer). and indeed Rob Sarvis was the difference maker in that election. This allowed Will to come out of the closet about religion, allowing that Christians, (Cuccinelli is Roman Catholic) are worse even than the Left’s atheism, with which George Will agrees.

My theory about George Will, totally flipped, so I am de-e-elighted to see that just by Donald Trump living and breathing in the White House, George Will rarely draws a “Theory of the Man” consideration by anyone anymore. Irrelevant.

Every person should have a “theory of the man” process embedded in their minds. For one, it’s a shield against raw emotion, and the high degree of probability that our emotions can cause us to say or do something irrational that will cause other people to alter their theory of us[…]

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Trump Directs his SOTU to the PEOPLE

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Conservatism, Constitution, Democrat Party, Elitism and Class, Media, President Donald J. Trump, race and culture, Republican Party establishment, SOTU2019

Source: @RepAnnieKuster/twitter.

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

On paper the State of the Union Address has been from the President, the Chief Executive, to the other branches of Government, telling them how the country was faring.

The People, the object of the Constitution, (don’t forget) only learned what the President had to say about the State of the Union through the Media, who, for most of those years, served as a go-between the People the Government. A quaint notion, I’m sure.

For the longest time, into my lifetime, the print media, newspapers, were the sole means of communicating to the People what the President said.

Then came radio (1920s) and now television, since the 1950s.

I can’t say when the SOTU became little more than a banquet speech by the company president to his board of directors, but for the most part it was rarely directed to the People as a vehicle to either encourage, persuade, or fire them up. Ronald Reagan stands out in this regard because in his eight years in the White House, every thing he achieved with Congress’ help was done with the opposition wing in charge of the Congress. Reagan’s only ally was the People, and he encouraged them to encourage, or threaten, their Congressional representatives to give the President what he asked.

It largely worked, for it took the Democrats 20 years to undo most of what Reagan accomplished, while it took Trump only two years to undo the bulk of Obama’s handiwork.

In retrospect, Reagan’s was a kinder, gentler time.

I haven’t watched a SOTU live in thirty years, since Reagan, although I have seen many of the snippets of past presidents. I had no intention to watch this one, except my son encouraged me to because he thought something big might happen, you know, like a 5-car pileup at Richmond Raceway. With casualties[…]

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The Circle Shall Not be Broken

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Communism, Conservatism, Constitution, Democrat Party, Elitism and Class, President Donald J. Trump, Progressives, Republican Party, Republican Party establishment, Revolution, sedition, The Left, Treason

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

By God!

I sat up with a start this morning, around 2:04.

It hit me, “Why are we all pretending this is politics…when it’s revolution?”

Their media, our media, their talk-show people, our talk show people, all have to pretend to be matter-of-fact about a situation that is probably the most significant series of events in American history since the southern states seceded in 1860…

…all because a solitary man was elected with a solitary purpose, but which had to be postponed until he could complete the new mission his election forced on him, to win a civil war and restore the Union.

Out of the mouths of babes Beto O’Rourke, three term congressman from Texas, near-miss (by some accounts) senator from Texas, and sure fire presidential candidate for 2020, (assuming there will be a contested one) let it slip this week the dirty little secret that every one but the most self-delusional on his side knows to be true:

“The Constitution of the United States is no longer a fit foundation for a modern government. It is no longer relevant.”

For what it’s worth, I first heard this same concept in the classroom in 1968, as a lecture by a political science professor, his argument being that the structure of our society and economy was too complex for a ham-fisted Congress to manage or, or for the general population to have anything more than a ceremonial say in it.

He was of course echoing the thoughts of Wilsonian Progressivism from around 1910, and slashed me a letter grade for disagreeing with him on the final exam.

In other words, all the elements of disavowing the Rights of Man on the one hand, and keeping academic students in line on the other, were fully in place in the academy 50 years ago. Had I wanted to go on to pursue a masters and PhD, he would have insured I couldn’t. I’d been tagged[…]

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What Donald Trump has not Done, But Can, and Should Do

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Bureaucracy, Constitution, Democratic Party, Elitism and Class, President Donald J. Trump, Religion

Woodrow Wilson’s sheep grazing on White House lawn to reduce grounds keeping costs during World War I, c. 1917. Source: Library of Congress (digital. id. hec.10788)

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

Needed: A Forty-Year Legacy

Donald Trump has broken down major barriers simply by being elected president.

In the greatest sense of the term, his election was “historic” for it represented the first time in many generations that the people of the United States, as was always their power to do, reached up and took charge of their government despite all the urgings, warnings, and finally, direct opposition from the people who had carved out a very comfortable existence inside government as the self-appointed managers for the people.

That took both courage and wisdom by the people.

How Donald Trump even got the opportunity to be allowed to take on this job is a story unto itself. But from the citizens’ perspective instead of the government class’s point of view, it was simply a matter of the people invoking a power that had always belonged exclusively to themselves, to throw down an entire government.

Call it our “nuclear option”, only it had laid dormant for so long the government class had almost forgotten we had it.

A little history: For the first half of America’s existence, to around Reconstruction, nearly a century, the people didn’t need to use this nuclear option simply because everyone in government knew the people had it, and would likely use it, so minded their P’s and Q’s.

I call that our Classic Era, when the federal government was dirt poor and the federal payroll consisted of a few clerks, customs agent and the post office, which didn’t even print its first postage stamp until 1847.

After the Civil War, for a variety of reasons; industrialization, massive immigration of poor European laborers, and the attendant rise of a government class to tend to both, by the end of the 19th century, a growing state class took shape, which began to believe this nuclear option wasn’t safe in the hands of the people. In an evolutionary process natural to all bureaucracies, if allowed to survive that long, the state class began to believe the people no longer possessed this power of the nuclear option[…]

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The Canons of Conservatism, “Those Other Guys”, and the Veterans, A Preamble

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Communist Agenda, Conservatism, Constitution, Democrats, Education, Elitism and Class, military and veterans, Progrerssives, Religion, Veterans, Veterans' Tales

The twelve Apostles receiving inspiration from the Holy Spirit and composing the Creed Illumination by Somme_le_Roy_f.10v – Date: 1295 (Wikipedia)

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

William F Buckley, Jr. was the founding figure of modern conservatism in America. He wrote God and Man at Yale when he was 25, and wrote many books afterward until he died in 2008.

But he had an extra dimension which seems to have been lost on the newer generations of conservatives, which I’ll discuss here.

In 1960, at age 35, in his home, WFB and several other “founders”, penned the Sharon Statement, which became the founding statement of the Young Americans for Freedom, (the YAF) which went on to become the central conservative campus organization for over 50 years.

I never joined, as I was not a conservative in my college days.

It was not until 1964, and the Goldwater campaign, that I became aware of Mr Buckley, who was then still not yet 40, 4 years younger than my dad, who subscribed to National Review that year and sent back- issues to me every few weeks or so.

By the time Ronald Reagan was elected, and I was 35, I had been a conservative for only four years, but never disagreed with National Review in all those earlier years about conservatism, just still holding onto my own brand of “Civil Rights liberalism”.

Like many liberals of my generation, my error was in believing government could do good things, which, later reading and real-life experience proved to me was wrong-headed and that the Founders knew exactly what they were doing when they designed government small, and left the people in charge.

In 1976 I had my Road to Damascus moment while in the Army, during the Ford-Carter campaign. I read a Mary McGrory column in the Arizona Republic where she stated (and I paraphrase) that “Modern Liberalism stands for the proposition that all human conduct should be subject to the political process.”

At that instant I ceased being a liberal, and never looked back.

The Sharon Statement, which I link here, while aimed at defining the YAF, is essentially the Canons of Conservatism. Virtually every conservative, including #NeverTrumpers, would agree with it, if they’d bother to read it.

So I recommend every millennial and Gen X’er to do just that.

But in 1960 it was written for college students who already possessed a core set of principles that inclined them to see threats to democracy, internal and external, and the freedom found in free markets and the uniqueness of America in the first place[…]

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