Breaking News from Maine:
Presidential hopeful banned from running in election
Oh, no, wait, sorry, my mistake - that's Russia. In Maine, presidential hopeful Donald J Trump has also been banned from running in the election, but that's no reason to confuse a great "constitutional republic" such as the former Soviet Union with the United States. For one thing, both countries are rife with "Sudden Adult Death Syndrome", but in America its first symptom is not, as in Russia, that you find yourself accidentally falling out of an upper-floor window.
Still, would you really be surprised to see it come to that?
Trump Plunges from Mezzanine-Level Bathroom Window at Mar-a-Lago
He carelessly slipped on a classified document an FBI agent had accidentally dropped during the last raid.
We should note the differences between the Colorado and the Maine rulings. In the Centennial State, the decision was made by four judges doing (please, no tittering) "impartial justice". In the Pine Tree State, the decision was made by a (do try to keep a straight face) "constitutional officer". That's to say, although the Secretary of State is a Democrat working in a Democrat Administration, under the "constitution" (look, knock it off with all the giggling) she has one foot in the executive branch and the other in the judicial branch. So yes, it may look like it's the ruling party directly banning the opposition leader ...but relax, that's just a coincidence, as any constitutional scholar can tell you.
Be that as it may, the key difference is that in 2016 and 2020 the GOP candidate failed to win Colorado, so it's all a bit hypothetical, leading some of America's "conservative" commentators to suggest that Trump might decide "for strategic reasons that he doesn't want to challenge the ruling". But, under Maine's split apportioning of its electoral-college votes, he won the Second Congressional District (basically the northern seven-eighths of the state) - both times. So Secretary of State Shenna Bellows has just deprived Trump of an actual electoral-college vote.
Have Jimmy Carter's election monitors weighed in on Maine yet? Um, no. They're a little preoccupied right now:
Carter Center Calls for Calm and Transparency as Counting Continues in the Democratic Republic of the Congo Following Prolonged Election
Not as "prolonged", obviously, as New York's 22nd Congressional District, but prolonged by the standards of the functioning parts of the planet, such as Sudan and Chad.
If you're wondering whether Maine and the Congo are connected in any way ...well, Maine wants to phase out gasoline-powered motor cars within a decade, and the Congo is the biggest source on the planet for the indispensable ingredient of electric-vehicle batteries: cobalt, which is extracted by miners who are minors, some as young as six. Say what you like about child slave-labor, but, at least when the middle-school girl is down the cobalt mine, she can't be getting her breasts sliced off at the recommendation of the transgender guidance counsellor.
So where, other than the Mar-a-Lago upper-floor windows, does the Trump campaign go from here? According to the latest poll, the candidate commands the support of 67 per cent of Republican primary voters. Nine months ago, he was at just 47. Then they started indicting him: 53... 54... 57... 62... 64... We have been assured all year by all the sophisticates that the criminal charges are a massive head-fake to lure the rubes into nominating Mister Mugshot because he's the guy the Dems really want to run against.
Because Trump's only up over Biden by single digits whereas the candidate they really fear, DeSantis, is clobbering Joe by, er, nought-point-two per cent.
Okay. But in that case why is the party that's so eager to run against Trump now removing him from the ballot in multiple states?
Ah, say the sophisticates, that's an even wilier head-fake ...to force the risk-averse Chief Justice to take up the appeals and kill this Fourteenth Amendment rubbish once and for all, thus ensuring the Dems get their way and Trump's on the ballot in all fifty states.
Maybe we're all over-thinking this. Maybe what's happening is happening because America's "constitutional republic" has simply degenerated into a corrupt dump. Just a thought.
The lone hyperpower is not quite a one-party state, but it is a one-party Deep State. In 2016, while everyone was shrieking about foreign interference in US elections, there was sustained domestic interference in US elections - courtesy of the FBI, Crossfire Hurricane and all the rest. But, in those bygone days, it was still necessary to do it sotto voce - offshoring most of the dodgier bits to friendly Five Eyes guys, such as the Australian High Commissioner in London.
Unfortunately for Peter Strzok et al, they underestimated the scale of the challenge. So they were obliged to spend the next four years subverting the so-called head of the executive branch - again, mostly on the sly.
But they're doing it openly now. They're using anything to hand - civil suits, criminal prosecution, executive authority, whatever it takes. It's ever more brazen. In the preferred cliché of the age, last time round it was the quiet part, now it's out loud.
We are a little over ten months to what's still quaintly called "Election Day". Does this seem like the behavior of people who, come Tuesday night in November, will be willing to lose a democratic vote?
As I said a while back, whatever this is, it is not politics. When the lazy talentless hacks of the American press drone condescendingly that such-and-such is just "politics as usual", boy, don't you find yourself missing the days when there was such a thing as "politics as usual"? There is nothing recognizable as politics in the United States right now, and pretending there is is not a useful service to the people. I see the media are currently exercised over Nikki Haley's "twenty-four hours in New Hampshire she'd rather forget" - she muffed a question on the Civil War (the one from a century-and-a-half ago, not the one just getting started), and some nine-year-old kid channelled John Kerry and called her a flip-flopper. Talk about lèse-majesté! In a sane society, that nine-year-old would be down the mine digging up cobalt for Nikki's EV.
Mrs Haley is a rubbish candidate hot for war on at least three continents, and therefore too busy to fine-tune her message on wars from the day before yesterday. But her having a lousy twenty-four hours in New Hampshire is not a story; American self-government having a lousy rest of the century is the story. To coin a phrase, democracy is on the ballot. Oh, no, wait, that's Biden's line.
They're trying to teach you a lesson: The permitted bounds of electoral choice in 2016 were supposed to be Hillary vs Jeb, the wife of the previous president vs the brother and son of the previous presidents. That's ridiculous in a republic of 300 million people. So eight years later they've broadened it out: the dead husk of the previous vice-president vs a robotic clunker with primitive animatronic arm movements you wouldn't accept from a CGI extra in X-Men 43. In America, the land with the famously unique "peaceful transfer of power", that's all the choice anybody needs.
But even that isn't a real choice. 1984 is Today thinks I'm falling for the head-fake. Actually, I'm way beyond that: The Democrats are telling us that, even if they lose, they'll win - whether they're up against the Orange Fascist, the "Don't Say Gay" boy, the Hindu Confederate, or whoever else comes along. Two-party politics can safely resume when it's Victoria Nuland vs Robert Kagan.
In my bestseller After America, I quoted the late Pat Caddell's observation that it is not a good thing to tell the people that there are no peaceful means of effecting meaningful course correction - not in a land where half the people are disinclined to go along with open borders, Chinese domination, grade-school transitioning and all the rest. If voting doesn't change anything, you are setting up pre-revolutionary conditions - assuming for the purposes of argument that, in the panopticon state of 24/7 high-tech surveillance, our rulers haven't already priced that in, and figured it's no longer possible.
Nevertheless: In Colorado and Maine, in Georgia and New York, the permanent state is telling you that, in the interests of "saving democracy", there isn't going to be any "peaceful transfer of power". The talk-radio guys with the butch bumper music and the easy-listening opinions could at least stop trying to pass this off as "politics".
~On this sixth day of Christmas, I thank you for all your comments on our Yuletide content, from our annual Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols to our farewell to those we lost in 2023. (The second part of that show will air on New Year's Day.) I am very grateful to all the members of The Mark Steyn Club from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati who have stuck with us these last six-and-a-half years. We hope to welcome many more of you in the decades ahead.
