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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How the Government Shutdown is Playing on Main Street

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Bureaucracy, Elitism and Class, future Democratic voters, government shutdown, Illegal Immigration, Media, National Security, Progressives war on America, Progressives War on Donald Trump, The Wall

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

I’ve been working on a piece about how regular America actually get their news, and what is it that is important to them.

The first thing that comes to mind is border security. After all, that is the main plank that Donald Trump ran on in 2016. Only, what the pundits, politicos and pollsters missed from the beginning: Donald Trump did not sell this idea to the people, the people told Donald Trump this is what they want from their president.

This is why border security transcends “traditional politics” and moves into “existential politics” again a thing the political establishment misses altogether.

It is probably the only national news the vast majority of the American people pay attention to, and despite Media reporting that is largely anti-Wall support for the Wall continues to grow, now over 90% of Americans believe illegal immigration to be a real problem.

If anything, anti-Wall sentiment by the Media has spurred this pro-Wall sentiment even among people who don’t follow news as you who are reading this do. They do read blogs, or go to the internet, Tweet or Facebook (unless it’s a grandbaby or cat), but just driving to work in the morning or home in the evening they can’t avoid that News on the Fives, or top of the Hour Headlines, from the local radio station, and, despite all the evidence to the contrary, local radio newsrooms have been convinced (or ordered) to believe that 1) negative news about Trump, 2) Trump shutting down the government over the Wall and 3) it’s Trump’s fault the government is what listeners need, not want to hear.

The same is true of daytime television, which is supposed to hold viewers until the Nightly network News comes on[…]

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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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“Alleged”, a brief History

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Democrat Party, Elitism and Class, Judge Sullivan, law, Media, Michael Cohen, President Donald J. Trump, Progressives

Unified Patriots by Vassarbushmills

To younger students, one of the reasons it’s nice to keep old people around is we can tell you the origins of things that are common in your world, only how it got here, you may have missed, but which might be relevant in the deeper lessons of life you’re always instructing us in. (Insert Ocasio-Cortez joke here.)

I never thought of this as ancient history, but I was a high school senior, in the school auditorium for a pep rally…state high school championship, and I was the starting left end…when the vice principal walked in and took the podium and quietly said “the President has been shot”.

Just as my parents knew exactly where they were on December 7, 1941 my generation knew exactly where we were when we heard that JFK had been shot, November 22, 1963.

The good news is that 77 years later the whole nation still pauses to remember that awful day in 1941, even better, while no longer blaming any Japanese person living today for it. But November 22nd scarcely gets a second thought, much less a moment of silence, even though most of the young people who were alive then and worshipped JFK most, are still alive today.

This is because the thrill with JFK has long since passed.

A good man nonetheless, today his party gets embarrassed when we remind them that once upon a time their party also had a president who was patriotic, loved America, was a war hero, and a free-market advocate.

But then again, once upon a time, that wasn’t anything special for any American.

So, I’m quite certain that when the last person dies who can remember where he/she was on November 22, 1963, John F Kennedy and the whole Kennedy name will quietly slip below the waves of cultural memory and sink, without any help from historians, media or social commentary. Unlike the last Confederate veteran who died in 1951, there will be no one to plat “Taps” in his memory, or to reflect that even the “woman in black”, who laid flowers at Rudolph Valentino’s grave until she died in 1984, stayed her course longer. Even the eternal flame that a worshipful Nation laid at JFK’s grave in 1967 will eventually go out, then maybe not be relit, since no one will recall why it was lit in the first place[…]

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