Programming note: Please join me later today for a brand new episode of our current Tale for Our Time - Bulldog Drummond by Sapper - and tomorrow for another edition of my still newish weekend music show Mark Steyn on the Town. Bit of a sporty theme this week - it airs Saturday at 5pm UK/6pm Western Europe/12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~The so-called New Hampshire Seacoast, which is actually a New Hampshire Oceancoast, is about as far as you can go from my corner of the state and still be in NH. So I don't get there terribly often. But maybe I'm missing out...
Two people were thrown into the ocean after a whale landed on their fishing boat off the New Hampshire coast on Tuesday morning, and the entire incident was caught on video by two brothers on a nearby boat https://t.co/tZ4tildSTx pic.twitter.com/WzPemowDTZ
— WCVB-TV Boston (@WCVB) July 23, 2024
Is it a metaphor? Is the whale Trump? And the fishermen the Deep State?
Or is the whale the Deep State? And the fishermen Joe and Jill?
Or is it just another of Fauci's gain-of-function projects?
~I dissent somewhat from the notion that what befell Joe Biden just five days ago was a "coup". The toppling of Liz Truss by "the markets" in October 2021 was a coup - and the new PM and new Chancellor promptly steered the Government in a different direction (ie, back in the old direction). Even in the more limited sense of a "palace coup", in which one faction of the ruling junta moves against another, what happened in Washington last Sunday was no such thing.
Whoever was in charge of America's government a week ago remains in charge today. Because that was the purpose of the manoeuvre - to ensure that nothing changes. For it to be a coup, one would have to believe that the decrepit Biden has wielded executive power these last three-and-a-half years. That is self-evident codswallop. He has been a squinting, croaking, stumbling, bumbling frontman for whoever's actually running the executive branch. Whose identity would be interesting to know, don't you think?
In the Westminster system, one stands for Parliament; in America, one runs for President. But Biden can't run and can barely stand, and even the most apathetic and uncurious voters had begun to notice that. So he had outlived his usefulness, and it was necessary to replace him with another front-man - or front-woman, front-BIPOC, front-Montreal-schoolgirl, whatever. The operation was the inversion of a coup: it was to prevent the possibility of any change. You may get excited about all the glass-ceiling-shattering - the first female president! the first South Asian president! the first Jamaican president! the first British subject since Barack Obama! the first Canadian president since Chester Arthur! - but all the shattered glass piled up to your chest is there to distract you from the fact that, aside from the glazier's bill, everything stays exactly as it was.
In 2017 Trump wanted to change things, so the FBI, the Joint Chiefs and other elements of the executive branch undermined the supposed head of that branch. In 2022 Liz Truss attempted a more modest shift of direction, so she was removed, very briskly. As I said the morning after this month's UK election:
The goal of the Permanent State remains the same: nothing will be permitted to change.
And this month's French election:
Our rulers have decided that no changes to anything that matters can be permitted.
Okay, how about last year's Dutch election? Geert Wilders won that one. Yet, after months of negotiation, some bloke who didn't even participate in the "democratic exercise" mysteriously wound up as PM. He is not a politician but, tellingly, a "civil servant" and Deep State spook. Here's his first major intervention on the world stage:
How about we talk about your "mandate" to speak on behalf of the Dutch people?
We didn't vote for you. Most of us hadn't even heard of you before you were installed as "our" Prime Minister.
And now your first public move is to attack @PM_ViktorOrban for trying to establish... https://t.co/dGXCeZCYJy
— Eva Vlaardingerbroek (@EvaVlaar) July 5, 2024
So no change there.
In healthy polities, telling the citizenry there is no possibility of peaceful change of course through voting would risk setting up revolutionary conditions. But we all have "smartphones" with "earbuds" now, so they're betting they can get away with it...
~Over at The New Criterion, James Piereson, whom I always read with great interest, is more optimistic and very precise:
Notwithstanding the euphoria today, Trump will win the election by six points—forty-nine to forty-three percent—winning 339 electoral votes, including all of the so-called swing states, plus the Democratic-leaning states of Virginia, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. Republicans will pick up three or four seats in the Senate and perhaps twenty seats in the House, giving them safe majorities in both chambers. This will give Trump the margins he needs to implement a good piece of his agenda in 2025 and 2026.
This scenario takes as a given a clean election. Which we have, save for the college towns, in New Hampshire. But, if they're willing to nullify something as quintessentially American as the presidential primary, I think we can take it as read these guys are already thinking outside the (ballot) box...
~The Internet appears to have concluded that Joe Biden's "live address" was not in the least bit live. Who knows? From Ann Althouse:
I'm thinking this was the only take, and they decided that it was good enough because it was impossible to believe it would get better. It was very poorly articulated and I (and others I talked to) found what we did hear hard to understand because it seemed to have been said by a person who did not understand the words.
That rather assumes the people running the show wanted it to "get better" - as opposed to wanting merely to plant the seed for the next plot development.
Meanwhile, this chap suggests that Biden may be the ultimate victim of the old jabba-jabba:
Joe Biden is dying. I wonder why? pic.twitter.com/oT5w0EhIuX
— Truth Justice ™ (@SpartaJustice) July 25, 2024
Whatever he is, he's not "boosted".
We are aswirl in a blizzard of lies.
~I thank you for all your supportive comments these last grisly months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead, and I look forward to your company on Tales for Our Time tonight, and Mark Steyn on the Town tomorrow.
