Dec
3
2023

Sadly, It May Not Be a Good Year for "Patient and Practical"

Seen on Twitter: [crickets are delicious]

Where can I buy?

It's Sunday, so let's look at what the oddsmakers are saying:

Candidate EBO Win
Probability		 Change
Since
11/26
Donald Trump 38.4% -0.1%
Joe Biden 32.3% +4.2%
Nikki Haley 8.6% +1.2%
Gavin Newsom 6.0% -3.9%
Robert Kennedy Jr 3.2% -0.5%
Michelle Obama 2.6% -0.6%
Other 8.9% +2.0%

Whoa. Notice who's missing? Ron DeSantis! He's dropped below our 2% criterion for inclusion. Below Gavin Newsom and Michelle Obama, who aren't even running.

Not yet, anyway.

George Will plugs our girl, who's now in third place in the bettor's hearts and pocketbooks: Nikki Haley, patient and practical, awaits her moment.

Delicacy is rare in the mass-mobilization politics of democracy, where candidates prefer bold brushstrokes of primary colors rather than pastels. But while the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination is a fountain of colorful rhetoric, Nikki Haley’s ascending candidacy is using tactical reticence to reach the right moment for becoming the last challenger standing against Donald Trump.

Critics in, as it were, the bleachers, fault Haley for not focusing her campaign against the former president. What these critics have in common is that they do not have what she has: responsibility. She is competing in the game. They do not have the challenge of prudence — of applying personal preferences and principles to untidy realities. This task falls to the few who are in the arena where great power is at stake.

Critics of Haley’s judiciously modulated nomination campaign can haughtily disdain compromises and maneuverings. These critics can concentrate on curating their pretty political profiles. They have the luxury of ignoring stubborn facts while proclaiming the importance of stopping Trump. Haley, however, must attend to the practical politics of doing that, which begins by accommodating this fact:

Americans gave Trump 62,984,828 votes in 2016 and, after watching him govern for four years, 74,223,975 of them asked for four more years. Many voted for him not as a complaint about the nation’s distribution of material rewards but to protest a more searing deprivation: of dignity. The large and widening “diploma divide” between the roughly one-third of Americans who acquire the (often foolish) prestige that comes with a four-year college degree, and the nearly two-thirds who do not.

Interesting points about campaign strategery. How to criticize Trump without insulting the people who like him?

Also of note:

  • Worst Poltergeist sequel idea. Robert Graboyes says The Jew-Movers Are Back.

    Sages of social media and swarms in the streets tell us, “It’s time to move those Jews again.” “From the river to the sea,” they inform us, “Palestine will be free.” Free of Jews, that is. Or, some Germans once put it, “Judenrein.”

    Following Hamas’s livestreamed orgy of murder, torture, rape, beheading, kidnapping, and necrophilia, and before Israel had reacted in any way, celebrants took to Western streets and campuses to condemn Israel, not Hamas, and to chant their ambiguous little rhyme, which has three plausible interpretations: (1) extermination, (2) coexistence in a binational state, and (3) expulsion and exile. Hamas has always made crystal-clear that their ambition is option (1)—the murder of every Jew on earth. Rep. Rashida Tlaib chose option (2), saying the phrase “is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate;” but she proffered that definition while dodging censure and repeatedly spreading Hamas’s murderous lie that Israel had killed 500 by bombing a hospital.

    So, let’s explore interpretation (3)—expulsion and exile. We’ll examine a whole array of questions: How long have Jew-Movers been forcibly relocating Jews? How did European and Arab governments force Jews to move to what is now Israel? What would happen if Israel’s Jews suddenly left Israel en masse? Where do Jew-Movers insist they go?

    Graboyes looks at the long history, often gory, of Jewish persecutions and forced exile from various countries. A useful, if painful, history.


Last Modified 2024-01-16 5:24 AM EDT