damning indictment (and hard to keep track of it all)

Instapundit links to a sarcastically titled article: "Behold the Democrats' Closing Argument for the 2022 Midterm Election." It lays out all (or at least most) of the foibles, gaffes, and outright sins of the bumbling, stumbling Biden administration. And there are still millions of idiots out there too stupid and stubborn to recognize what sort of man they thrust into office ("...and in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn't understand."), and the magnitude of the damage that this creature and his fellows are doing to the country. I hope you fuckers are happy. I really do. Here's a good chunk of the litany that appears in the article:

• Americans’ net worth has been reduced by $75,000 since Joe Biden took office, according to the Heritage Foundation.
• Inflation is rampant from overspending and is destroying savings and retirement accounts, which are down by 20% from when Joe Biden took office.
• Inflation has destroyed 25% of the average 401K plan in 2022 alone.
• The U.S. has only a 25-day supply of diesel fuel.
• Gas prices are the highest in American history.
• Heating oil has shot up by 40%-plus in the last few weeks and is in short supply going into winter.
• Joe Biden reduced the U.S. fuel supply, ending American dominance, and begs for oil from despots.
• Democrats turn off reliable sources of energy and pour money into sun and wind power, which depend on the weather.
• There’s still a baby-formula shortage.
• The U.S. military is assessed as “weak” for the first time in the history of the Heritage Foundation index of military strength.
• The Afghanistan bug-out is the biggest and most embarrassing self-inflicted military disaster in U.S. history.
• Forced shots hollowed out the ranks of the military, police, and medical professionals — so-called first responders who went from heroes during 9/11 and COVID to zeros when they disagreed with the regime.
• Wokism has decimated the number of new recruits to the military.

Read the rest. If you can bear it.

My one great hope is that my countrymen will, after the double-whammy of the pandemic and Biden, dig down deep and rediscover within themselves the intestinal fortitude that is supposed to be the hallmark of Americans. Judging by the scaredy-cat reactions to the COVID virus and the number of people who blindly accept leftist oppression, I'm not hopeful. But if no one stands up to resist all this nonsense and make some effort to steer the country in a better direction, I honestly don't know what will become of the former land of the free and the home of the brave. As things stand now, the future doesn't look good.

I saw someone at Instapundit make a comment that Trump needs to come back and have his righteous "cleansing of the Temple" moment. The idea appealed to me for about ten seconds as I thought my vengeful thoughts, but then I realized a few things. 

(1) Trump now has a very clear idea of how deep and vast the Swamp really is. There will be no cavalier "draining" of it. Nothing short of a surprise, simultaneous nuking of Washington and other leprous power structures (Hollywood, Silicon Valley) can burn the rot out at this point, and that sort of fiery purge is never going to happen under Trump, who has amply proved he lacks a bloodthirsty character. But even simply undoing the damage of the incompetent Biden administration is going to take most of a hypothetical second Trump term. This means managed expectations. Trump, with his usual bombast, might talk a big game via hyperbolic MAGA imagery—let's remake America, etc.—but in the end, there's only so much the man can do in four years, and at the cliff's edge of 80, no less.

(2) While Trump can obviously direct and nurture a national economy far better than the current idiot can, it's not obvious to me that Trump is the man to reunite the nation in a spirit of healing and reconciliation. I do, in fact, wonder whether such a thing is even possible at this point. Divisions that used to be mere differences of opinion now run so deep that the country has essentially turned into dueling religious cults. Maybe a better option is for America to figure out a way to break up into several loosely affiliated nation-states, each with its own political stress, thus giving people the option to go where they may. Each new nation-state should try to become as self-sufficient as it can so it can negotiate with the other nation-states from a position of pride and strength, not a position of need. Would Trump have it in him to preside over such a transformation? Would he even see it as desirable, or is he too wedded to the current metanarrative that stubbornly sees the US as "one nation under God"? Trump probably doesn't want to be the guy who presides over the dissolution of the current union. 

(3) How would a cleansing of the Temple even work? Trump would need to clean out powerful institutions like the FBI and the CIA. (I'd also prefer that he utterly eliminate Homeland Security, a Dubya-era mistake.) But the FBI and the CIA have all sorts of mechanisms to defend themselves; in a real sense, they don't control the levers of power: they are the levers of power. Should a reelected Trump spend time creating his own military to take these institutions down? Doesn't that seem a bit Stasi-like? So as much as I might fantasize about burning all these power structures to the ground and starting over, I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen, and even if it did, the purification project would take far longer than a single Trump term—years, maybe decades, and there'd be no guarantee of purity by the end of it.*

The upshot to all of this is that I don't know what a second Trump term might bring. I assume Trump will reason that he's got to start somewhere, so maybe, as with Rudy Giuliani's broken-windows policy,** he'll start small, then build up to bigger projects. Or maybe Trump will pull a Biden and sign a slew of executive orders in an attempt to undo Biden's misguided policies. Ideally, we'd get one more term of Trump and two terms of DeSantis to give our economy a chance to pull its head out of its own ass, but a lot also depends on how we deal with Democrat election-rigging and other problems. There's also America's reduced global status to contend with (having an old, senile leader means a steep loss of respect, as when the Saudi prince apparently mocks Biden routinely—denial of mockery here), not to mention all the problems mentioned in the above litany.

Meanwhile, the US is in a nosedive, and as the above-quoted article says at the very end, if you like the policies and consequences discussed above, then vote Democrat.

__________

*There's also no guarantee that a purge would eventually end. More likely, it would spiral out of control and lose any sense of its original purpose, and by that point, everyone and everything would become a target.

**The broken-windows policy is not to be confused with the broken-window fallacy. The policy, a brainchild of Giuliani during his time as mayor of New York City, involved dealing with small, superficial things first as a psychological measure to create a sense of safety and optimism: remove assaultive homeless people from the streets, clean up graffiti, repair broken windows (hence the policy's name), etc. Then, little by little, work on the bigger, deeper issues. The broken-window fallacy, by contrast, is a response to the idea that a broken window is a good thing because it gives people work to do: the glassmaker makes panes; the woodworker creates a new window frame, etc. This thinking is considered fallacious because of the opportunity cost incurred by the window's having been broken in the first place. While the shop waits for its window to be repaired, it has no choice but to chug along at reduced capacity. And time is money. So other people might gain from the shop's damage, but the shop itself can't contribute fully to the larger economy until its window has been repaired.

ADDENDUM: Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, who suffered a stroke months ago, just came through a disastrous debate with Republican hopeful Dr. Mehmet Oz (a.k.a., the TV personality "Dr. Oz"). Fetterman, who is aphasic and may have some serious cognitive issues, was an absolute mess on stage, revealing his unfitness to serve as lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania and his unfitness to serve as a US senator in Congress (the position he's running for now against Dr. Oz). Meanwhile, by contrast, we have Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson (I wrote about him back in 2018), who gives an inspiring speech at the Dallas CPAC event. Watch what a lieutenant governor is supposed to look and sound like: