Everyone Knows The Truth About Politics

 Everyone Knows The Truth About Politics

by

R.E. Prindle

 

Peggy Noonan
 

Peg Noonan bloviates her way through another weekend article in the 9/14-15/19 issue of the Wall Street Journal.  Don’t get me wrong, believe me I don’t mean bloviate in its negative sense but, since it doesn’t have a positive sense, I mean in a more neutral sense—she’s just talking and I like a good talker.  Peg is the best.

I nearly fell off my chair when in her first paragraph she mentions James Burnham.  That’s going back quite aways to an obscure figure.  Of course her photo is probably touched up but she doesn’t look old enough to know James Burnham except from his books and history.  If you catch my good side, which is a toss up, in a photo I look younger than Peg.

Burnham was your usual Commie who turned whatever post-WWII when the 1917 generation felt that Stalinism failed them, which is to say his crimes could no longer be concealed, so they chose a different boring from within strategy and called themselves born again conservatives.  Burnham, Peg says, was a founder of the magazine National Review.  Good title, it sounds definitely right-wing.  It took me about two issues in the Sixties when I launched into what has passed for an adult life to realize that the Review was a magazine run by born-again Reds.  Christ, Whittaker Chambers said he ‘abandoned’ Communism and immediately became a senior editor of Time Magazine, a so-called conservative rag.  Time and Newsweek both were suspect outfits.  Newsweek marketed a book because it weighed five pounds.  I still have my copy.  Still weighs five pounds.   I have since moved higher and recently bought a twenty pounder.  I’m heavy into self-improvement.

Anyway, Burnham wrote books. Just before 9/11, to leap ahead a moment, it was announced that 2.3 trillion dollars couldn’t be accounted for, just disappeared.  Went away.  Can anyone really wrap their mind around 2.3 trillion.  Incomprehensible.  Without asking yourself how much 2.3 trillion dollars weighs which can be represented in comprehensible numbers, do you how much 2.3 trillion dollars is?  Nobody does.  Incomprehensible.

What this has to do with Burnham?  Along about 1951 an atom bomb disappeared from the stockpile.  Do you know how big an atom bomb was, how much it weighed?  One can’t even consider it in relation to Newsweek’s five pound book.  But that’s not the important part.  Burnham though he knew where it was, in a general sense. It was in the basement of a house in the South Side of Chicago—in the Black Belt, Chicago.  Yowsuh, Negroland.  How do you get a bomb that big into the basement of a house in the Black Belt.  Obviously you disguise it as a five thousand pound book going by at five miles an hour on a flatbed.  What and how else?  It must have easier to build the Great Pyramid.

So, here’s Peg, quoting this guy Burnham who sagely said:  If there’s no alternative there is no problem.  OK, I can dig that.  I used to be a beatnik a few decades back and we could talk like that all day long.  Once you get the swing of it it’s easy.  Viz. ‘the greatest minds of their generation’ Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg and geniuses of that stamp.

So, having made her point Peg goes off on a blizzard of ‘everyone knowses’.    Everyone knows the Democratic candidates are dildoes.  But everyone knows that Pres. Trump is a nutcake so I suppose that means dildoes to the left of me, nutcakes to the right, Sane people in the middle.  There is no alternative so there is no problem to follow Burnham and Peg’s logic.

As much as I like Peg’s stuff, she could develop a more subtle understanding.  Trump is the alternative and Democrats find that a problem.  Everybody knows that, and, she says everyone knows Trump makes a fool of himself with his tweets as though that were an unforgiveable sin.  She doesn’t ask why Trump turned to making tweet storms with winds up to 180 miles per hours.  I can answer that question.  Because from the moment he announced his candidacy the United Media of America made the greatest noise of denunciation America has ever heard.  Even H.L. Mencken who was always prepared for the worst in politics would have been stunned into breathlessness.

How else was Trump to breach this wall of vitriol?  Every reasonable remark he made was turned into something ridiculous by the media.  As President of the United States he was openly mocked by ignorant TV commentators during interviews.   No, Lemon, no, put your hand down, you’ve got your own forum.  Trump’s only way to make a point as everyone knows was to tweet it out.  And then Twitter intimated it was going to ban him for, get this, hate speech.  Nevertheless his tweeting has worked and breached the offensive of the media.

So my point is that until Left and Right acknowledge  how unfairly the President has been treated I have to dismiss every single criticism of the Pres. as mere bigotry.

Peg writes:  By my observation something is going on with Trump supporters.  They now concede much more about him in private than they did in the past.

In other words Peg is insulting Trump’s supporters as total nutcakes who now realize Trump is dropping below even their nuttiness.  Nonsense, we Trump supporters have always served as apologists for his seeming faux pas and gaffes.  Now they’re beginning to make sense.  Everyone knows….

There is no middle Peg and if there were they would have the alternative of voting for delusional Leftists or intelligent Rightists.  In the same issue of the WSJ containing your ruminations Peg the Journal records that China has just blinked in Trump’s ‘crazy’ trade war.  They are removing the ‘punitive’ tariffs on food stuffs- that is principally pork and soybeans. Why?  Not as a concession to encourage Trump but because they can’t feed their people.  They need us more than we need them. 

Trump wins if he knows how to weaponize food and doesn’t get into any Democratic sentimental maunderings.  You see, it is easy to win trade wars when you can starve the other guy out.  Everybody knows that and I believe the Pres. does too.  Just takes a little time but then that is what negotiations do, isn’t it?  You may learn Peg, that the Pres. isn’t nutty, just crazy like a fox.