A Senate of Benedict Arnolds...

Benedict Arnold was a well-respected and courageous officer in the American Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. He fought in half a dozen battles and was central to winning the critical Battle of Saratoga in 1777, where he suffered a leg injury that sidelined him for the next two years.

They say that idle hands are the devil’s workshop, and that appears to apply to legs as well. Over the next two years, Arnold’s inherent victim complex blossomed. Others were, he suggested, getting credit for his actions or getting promoted when he deserved such.

In 1779, Arnold would take a step that would change his life: He married Peggy Shippen, a member of a powerful loyalist family in Philadelphia. Eventually, his jealousy would get the best of him, and he contracted to betray the Americans. By at least as early as July of that year, he was giving the British information on American troop strengths, movements, and munition locations.

George Washington knew none of this and trusted Arnold and put him in charge of West Point in August 1780. One of the most important posts in the country, it was the spot from which the Americans commanded the Hudson River. Less than two weeks after receiving his command, Arnold agreed to a plan, in exchange for $20,000 ($3,500,000 today), to surrender the post to the British in September.

The surrender never occurred, however, because Arnold’s British contact, Major John André, was captured along with the plans for the betrayal. André was hanged, and Arnold escaped to join the British. The British immediately commissioned him as a brigadier general in their army, but most soldiers considered him dishonorable, and many refused to follow him.

Following the war, Arnold would spend most of the rest of his life in London, where the king liked him, but many British citizens and military men despised him. In America, his name has become synonymous with treachery.

Although Arnold’s ultimate plan never came to fruition, had it done so, it could have changed the outcome of the war. Washington said of the plan that “Such an event must have given the American cause a dangerous, if not a fatal wound.”

And that is the crux of why betrayal is so dangerous. It’s one thing to understand that your enemy seeks your destruction. It’s another thing altogether when one of your own, one upon whom you’re counting on to man the ramparts, turns and lets the enemy in. It might not be fatal to your endeavor, but it could be and most certainly will endanger the mission.

Sylvester Stallone recently called Donald Trump the new George Washington. That’s not quite true, but like Washington, Trump is trying to carve out of an enemy-infested wilderness a great nation seeking freedom and prosperity. Also, like Washington, Trump is faced with numerous people who are theoretically on his side while, in reality, aligning with the enemy.

And who is this enemy? The Swamp. The Borg. Basically, the government that controls virtually every element of American life, from baby formula to school curriculum to college funding to healthcare to retirement, not to mention banking and justice and speech…if you object.

Ostensibly, Trump should have a mandate given that he won the popular vote and the Electoral College, gave the GOP a Senate majority, and kept the majority in the House. The first test of that mandate came recently and it didn’t go particularly well.

In the Senate, with Mitch McConnell leaving his leadership role, there were three competitors to replace him: Rick Scott of Florida, John Thune of South Dakota, and John Cornyn of Texas. Hardcore MAGA firebrand Mike Lee or bomb-thrower Rand Paul weren’t even considered. Of the three considered, two are virtual Democrats, with the Conservative Review giving Cornyn a Liberty Score of 54% and Thune an abysmal 51%, while Scott scored a respectable 86%.

Both Cornyn and Thune are, at their core anti-Trump, while Scott has been a staunch supporter of the president. Thune, who said after January 6, “What former President Trump did to undermine faith in our election system and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power is inexcusable,” is seen as K Street’s favorite and endorsed Tim Scott in the GOP primary. In 2016, the immigration dove and gun control fan Cornyn ridiculed Trump’s border wall, was booed at the Texas GOP convention in 2022, and, in 2023 said Trump couldn’t win as his time had passed.

In a shameful last act, McConnell set a secret vote, and Thune came out on top. The fact that the Senate GOP dispatched an aggressively MAGA leader and instead elected someone who’s basically a Democrat tells you that Senate GOPers don’t care about what the American people are looking for.

What’s more, at the same time, in a closely split Senate, Trump’s pick for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz withdrew after it became clear there would not be 50 Republicans to confirmed. 

The Swamp, of course, is not just the Senate. With Trump’s picks of Pete Hegseth for Defense, RFK Jr. for HHS, Tuli Gabbard for DNI, and Tom Homan as Border Czar, larger Washington is reacting with horror and fear. Employees at HHS are threatening to quit, Justice Department lawyers are lawyering up and “freaking out“ while DoD employees are “alarmed“ and governors are promising not to assist in deportations.

But those fears, which are exactly what are necessary to begin trimming the bloat from government, only exist because of Trump’s picks, and those picks (and Trump) will only succeed if the Senate approves his nominees. And that’s a problem.

During his first term, Trump’s picks were approved at a rate far slower than Obama’s or Bush’s. With a McConnell clone running the Senate, there’s concern of a repeat. While the Senate is by design supposed to be a check on the tyranny of the masses, it’s rare that a president must battle his own party to do his job.

Obama had a similar mandate in 2008, and Democrats gave him everything he wanted and more. But Democrats are a core part of the Swamp while Trump is seeking to battle it.

And there’s the rub…

Democrats are the Swamp, and so too is the bureaucracy. But sadly, much of the GOP is, as well.

Trump has his work cut out for him in this uphill battle he’s taken on. But if there’s anything to be gleaned from his picks so far, it’s that, unlike in 2016, this time he knows what he’s up against and is planning to take the fight to the Swamp with bare fists and brass knuckles if necessary, and it will be.

If Trump continues to assemble a team more interested in solving America’s problems than in being feted by the elites, he just might triumph over the Benedict Arnolds who populate the establishment GOP, those whose primary goal in life seems to be to go along to get along, accumulating ever more power and money along the way.

 

Following a Donald Trump Forged in a Crucible of White Hot Fire

 I first started writing a blog in 2009, after Barack Obama’s election. My first post, America’s Original Sin, addressed the then-nascent movement to disparage and denigrate America because the Founding Fathers didn’t have the foresight in 1787 to write a constitution that would dovetail with the mores of 21st-century snowflakes.

The title of my blog, Imperfect America, is followed by a quote attributed to the French philosopher, Voltaire: “Perfect is the enemy of the good.” Our nation is a billboard-sized testament to that adage. Rarely have we seen perfect, but we frequently see good. And that’s the problem with leftists… They want to sacrifice good for the fiction of perfection.

While today it’s all the rage to dwell on America’s failures, it’s far less celebrated to talk about her triumphs. Although the left has been demonizing America since the sixties, it was after Bush won in 2000 that this tactic started to stick. The cancer of hate really took off once Obama became president. On college campuses, in elementary schools, on nightly newscasts, and in papers across the country, we were incessantly told that America was racist, sexist, homophobic and destroying the environment.

It was into this miasma that Donald Trump marched when he announced he was running for president. He saw the leftist cancer destroying the very foundations of freedom, opportunity, and prosperity while undermining America’s core civilization and setting the country up for a devastating collapse. And he willingly stepped into the breach to stop it.

The problem, however, was that rather than running as a Democrat, where all solutions come from an omnipotent central government, he was running as a Republican who sought to reduce government control and return power to Americans.

That was a bridge too far. From the second he announced, Trump found himself enduring a withering barrage of vitriol and venom unseen in American politics. The abuse came from Democrats, the media, social media and academia as well as the GOP establishment. What Trump endured was relentless. Yet somehow, he won.

(Full disclosure: I initially had concerns about Trump and wrote about them often, with one post titled: Sure, Donald Trump may shiv us... but the country can’t survive Hillary Clinton’s thugs.)

In the wee hours of November 9, 2016, it became clear that Trump would become the next president of the United States. It also became clear the Democrats were not going to take it lying down.

The Russia Collusion hoax started a drumbeat that would bedevil the president for the next four years, even after it was shown to be a Clinton crafted fiction the mainstream media parroted. Indeed, the New York Times and the Washington Post would win Pulitzer Prizes for their “reporting” on the fake story, and no, not because they exposed the lie but, instead, because of their vociferous and eloquent participation in it.

During his presidency Donald Trump endured extraordinary abuse and treachery, driven by the media and the Democrat party. The irony of the media’s hatred for Trump was that channels like CNN and MSNBC virtually owed their rescue from irrelevance to the Trump presidency, while newspapers slowed their decades-long declines with pages of anti-Trump rhetoric.

As bad as the media abuse was, it was nothing compared to the treachery of the apparatchiks in the government. When Trump tried to build his promised wall, he was blocked at every step. His efforts to make Bureau of Land Management employees live closer to the lands they regulated were pilloried for making the agency “less diverse.” Lt. Col Alexander Vindman, the NSC’s Ukraine expert, launched an impeachment when he lied about Trump trying to coerce Ukraine into investigating the Bidens.

And if all that wasn’t bad enough, during the Covid “pandemic,” possibly the most economically destructive self-inflicted wound in human history, the two government-employed doctors Trump looked to for guidance lied to Trump and the country. Finally, in perhaps the greatest treachery of all, we learned that members of America’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies were actively working to undermine Trump in the election.

Worse, this orgy of Trump-directed destruction wasn’t just in Washington. The 2020 riots cost billions of dollars in damage, and brought chaos and bloodshed to cities across the country, all the while being spurred and supported by Democrats single-mindedly focused on defeating Donald Trump.

These attacks were relentless, every single hour of every single day and came from inside and outside of government. Yet somehow Trump managed to run the government well and campaign like the Energizer Bunny. In the end, it took a literal coup d’état to oust him from office.

And now he’s back—and the mainstream media, Democrats, the GOP establishment, bloggers, and erstwhile fans all insist that we’re supposed to abandon him.

Aside from the fact that the Democrats will demonize as a Nazi, racist, homophobe anyone who carries the GOP flag, the reality is that Donald Trump is a fighter for America unlike any president we’ve ever had. No one has ever had to endure the level of vitriol or withstand the relentless phalanx of persecution from every corner as Trump has.

And here’s the thing…he didn’t need to. Trump was a billionaire already. Trump was already feted by politicians and media around the world. He already had a beautiful family, spectacular homes, and his own plane! No politicians in American history had more to lose when they decided to fight for the American people than Trump did. Usually, politicians go to Washington as middle class and leave millionaires. Trump, however, had literally billions of dollars to lose, but he took on the Swamp anyway.

Now, after enduring seven years of abuse for his defense of American freedom, prosperity and farmers and truckers and little guys of all shapes and sizes, he’s once again stepping up to do battle.

You may not like Donald Trump, and there’s much to not like. He’s arrogant, he’s petty, he’s defensive, and he can be cruel. (Those attributes can just as much be applied to Barack Obama.)

Unlike Obama however, Trump doesn’t try and pretend he’s something he’s not. He’s a crude, brash New Yorker who speaks his mind and gets things done. He knows how to fix things and wants to fix America with strong borders, energy independence, limited government, a robust economy, and individual liberty… All of the things the Swamp fought him on and the very things Joe Biden has undermined.

Donald Trump circa 2022 is still imperfect, but he’s been forged in a crucible of white-hot fire and has emerged even more focused than before on making America great. So, yes, while there may be brilliant lights on the horizon, I think I’ll take a pass and stick with the guy who got out of his Bentley and ran through a gauntlet of machine gun fire into the burning mess of Democrat America in order to save the eagle stuck inside.

Trump may tell off-color jokes and may not always be the best judge of character, but he can take the heat, and his North Star has always been prosperity and security for the American people. Given the literal evil the Democrats are seeking to impose on America, I’ll happily follow him into the fire.

Five For Freedom - A Contract With America For The 21st Century

  America’s in a civil war.  Not a cocktail party war like Vietnam or Afghanistan where Americans stand around and talk about it but relatively few are personally impacted.  No, this a WWII level existential threat war where the difference between victory and defeat is literally freedom or tyranny.  One need look no farther than what Adolph Trudeau is doing in Canada right now to understand what the future holds. 

This war has been simmering for decades and most Americans didn’t even notice.  Now it’s obvious. Virtually every element of traditional American culture is being destroyed.  The left has decided that the United States is a plague on humanity and must be eliminated.

In this case the “left” consists of government, media, big tech, big business, and academia, among others.

Here’s a short list of their targets…    

Turning schools into leftist Indoctrination centers

Government control of your neighborhood

Open borders

Money / Driver’s licenses / Voting for illegals

Legalizing crime / No bail  

Encouraging / Empowering homelessness

2^nd Amendment

Censorship

Gender reimagining

Control over your body

Free exercise of religion

Peaceably assemble

Men having babies

Banking

Climate Change

CRT

Government spying on citizens

Girl’s sports

And of course, most problematic of all is their successful coup d'état.

With that and more, do we still live in a free country?  Obviously not.

Which brings us back to war.  Ask yourself, if someone declared war on America, what more might they do in victory? Other than killing you or turning you into slaves, what more is there?

Some argue we’re not in a war, citing polls that show a majority of Americans don’t like those leftist positions.  That’s accurate, but it doesn’t matter. The majority doesn’t count. The people who “count”, the opinion makers, those in academia, media, high tech, etc are the hardcore leftists behind all of this, and as we all know, the squeaky wheel gets the oil.

Americans have traditionally been ambivalent about government. For most politics was something to be endured every four years and after the election life got back to normal.

But no longer.  If you were a Teddy Roosevelt partisan or a fan of Truman or IKE, whether your guy won or lost didn’t matter tremendously to the average American.  Maybe your taxes would go up or down a bit or maybe the price of gasoline or chicken might change a bit, but that was it for most people, because government, particularly the federal government had little impact on their everyday lives.

Today not so much. In America of 2022 the federal government impacts almost every aspect of American lives, daily.  The price of gas, grades of meat, rate of pay at work, MPG for your car, Epi-Pens, not to mention vaccine mandates, gun regulations and shipping illegal immigrants to your neighborhood.  But it’s not just the federal government.  It’s state and local government as well.  From inane licensing requirements for hairdressers, bartenders and Uber drivers to union-centric dysfunctional schools and gun laws that outlaw the 2^nd Amendment in all but name, the fists of the federal fit perfectly into the state and local regulatory gloves, together strangling American freedom. 

But government’s not the only front in this war. There’s culture too.  From social media – the 21^st century’s public square – to mass media to academia and big business, the left dominates.  Not just dominates as in winning, but dominate as in ruling over everyone else.  Live and let live is not an axiom the left recognizes or exercises.  No, the left demands fealty or will crush you.  They’ll destroy your business, get you fired or banned from social media, take your kids away, kick you out of college and anything else they can think of.

Today we’re seeing the government leviathan becoming even more powerful as it assimilates with the leftist borg.  We saw it for four years as the FBI worked side by side with the media to tarnish Donald Trump’s name and destroy his presidency. Now, Joe Biden has encouraged the silencing of “misinformation”. 

At the same time the federal government has essentially established a gulag to house political prisoners who participated in the “insurrection” despite many being invited into the building by the police, some never entering the building at all and most having been involved in no violence whatsoever.  Some of these “terrorists” have been sitting, without charges or bail, in jails for over a year.  That treatment stands in stark contrast to the treatment of those who participated in the violent and deadly BLM / Antifa riots of the summer of 2020, most of whom were bailed out in the unlikely event they ended up in custody in the first place. 

All of this points to a fracture of America. Observations about “majorities” give one hope, but the reality is that unless the “majority” who reject leftism react, it won’t matter because, as we’re seeing in real time in Canada, the wall between freedom and fascism is fragile, and once it’s breached it’s likely game over.       

If the Republic is to survive it will be up to that “majority” to do something to arrest the slide into tyranny.  The GOP needs to take a page from Newt Gingrich and give them something to focus on, to talk about, and most importantly, vote on. The Contract with America was pivotal in nationalizing the election, and that’s exactly what we need now, a message that patriots can rally around.

The fronts upon which the left is attacking are too numerous to defend against simultaneously.  The battle lines need to be streamlined just as the Contract did.  As such, here are Five for Freedom… five common sense items that every GOP candidate or official must agree with if they want to win.  If they refuse on any one of them, they should be primaried or defeated in favor of someone who does support them.

1.  The 2020 election was fraudulent and such fraud cannot be allowed to occur again.

2.  Covid mandates are unconstitutional and must stop.

3.  The #1 job of the federal government will be to seal the southern border.

4.  The United States must be energy independent.

5.  CRT has no place in American schools.

If any candidate running on the GOP ticket can’t support these five positions, they have no place in the GOP. The threats to liberty are too numerous, the threats to the Constitution too grave to elect someone who will waffle on these basic principles.

If there is indeed a majority of Americans who are interested in saving the Republic, they have to have something to rally around.  Thus far the GOP has done an atrocious job of focusing America’s attention.  They need to do that now and Five for Freedom is the tool to do just that.  It’s likely it will have to happen over the objections of establishment Republicans like McConnell, McCarthy and Ronna McDaniel, but so be it.  At the end of the day you’re either on the side of freedom or not.  As the last two years have demonstrated, liberty is fragile and without citizens willing to stand up for it, it vanishes. This is the time, this is the place and Five for Freedom is the weapon with which patriots can vanquish the borg of woke leftism that has been seeking to assimilate America for decades.  The only question is, does the GOP have the courage to wield it? 

(Image courtesy of www.AmericanThinker.com)