Same As It Ever Was

A Quasi-biblical Revelation

William TimbermanLeave a comment

I’ve never been in any doubt about the depth of Donald Trump’s depravity, but I’m familiar enough with German history to understand why half the country voted for him, and why our titans of industry rushed to provide him with the means to fulfill his vile ambitions. I am surprised, though, at some of the people I’m belatedly finding in the miles-long line of fools waiting to kiss his ass.

It’s not just the hypocritical gasbags who’ve been lecturing us for decades about ethics, morality, courage, manliness, and the sanctity of free enterprise. Everyone knows that commoditized list of virtues by heart, and all of us know at least one person who’s made a career out of preaching from it. It’s not as shocking to me as it should be to see them now suddenly burning their own books, scrubbing their own mottoes off the walls, and looking down at their shoes when I ask them why.

No, the people who’ve surprised me are those I’d come to know as decent, compassionate, human beings, who now refuse to defend the defenseless, who turn away now from those in the greatest need with a shrug, with platitudes, with lectures about choosing one’s fights, with supposedly sage advice that one must be patient, that this too shall pass. This won’t do, this won’t do at all. If we want to keep calling the United States the Land Of the Free and the Home Of the Brave without being consumed by shame, this temporizing, compromising, agreeing that black is white, that President Zelenskyy should wear a suit when invited to lick the tyrant’s boots—all this nonsense will have to go. We need to do better. A whole lot better.

How It Happened

William TimbermanLeave a comment

The DNC wants to know how it happened, by which they mean how it happened to them. Someone—I no longer remember who—once said that after 1968, the Democratic Party finally succeeded in locking its entire left wing in a windowless room, then spent the next 40 years booby trapping all the exits. Ironically, it was a Democrat who once told us that those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. He was another kind of Democrat, though, and anyway he was talking about somebody else.

Nancy Pelosi thinks it happened because men in her party aren’t cunning enough. She may be on to something.

Joe Biden thinks it happened because the Democratic Party wasn’t Joe Biden enough. Enough said about that.

AOC tried everything she could think of to keep it from happening, including reluctantly acting the part of a loyal apparatchik in party conferences. To no avail, as is now clear even to her.

David Frum says he knows how it happened, but rather unconvincingly ignores the fact that he was in the room when it was being planned.

Donald Trump thinks it happened because he’s the bonfire of all the vanities. Not quite all the vanities, though, as will soon become abundantly clear.

Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks it happened because stupid is not only stronger than smart, it’s also more patient. She’s wrong, yet on the scale of a single human lifetime, it’s gonna be impossible to prove to her or to anyone else exactly how wrong she is.

How do I think it happened? You don’t want to know.

The Democratic Party I Know and Don’t Love

William Timberman2 Comments

Lyndon Johnson, our second great emancipator, did his utmost to ship me to Vietnam. Richard J. Daley and his uniformed thugs had my friends beaten up in the streets of Chicago. Hubert Humphrey, the great defender of organized labor, spent the last years of his political career solemnly licking Lyndon Johnson’s boots.

Still, I went to work for the McGovern campaign in 1972. On election day I walked a precinct in Southern California until the polls closed at 7:00 p.m. Pacific time. I didn’t have the cell phone that would certainly be in my pocket today—I didn’t even have a transistor radio—and so it was that people who opened the last few doors I knocked on in the near darkness of that California evening actually burst out laughing at me before closing the door in my face. I may have been the last person on earth to hear that the election was already over, that McGovern had won only one state and the District of Columbia.

Thirty-four years later, at a fundraiser in Arizona a liberal friend had dragged me to, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, a property developer in Phoenix and ex-chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party, let me know in no uncertain terms that it was those anti-war crazies who got Nixon elected, and that we (meaning the Democratic Party) were never going to go there again if he had anything to say about it. He wasn’t the only senior Democrat of consequence who’s served me up that deeply cherished nonsense over the years.

And so it’s gone since—the Clintons and their “New Democrats,” Obama’s “more than a collection of red states and blue states,” et cetera, et cetera. The members of the DNC, who, like Godechot’s Bourbons, have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, now reverently present us with the ghost of Joe Biden—take him or leave him—and warn us earnestly that if Trump gets elected in November it’s all going to be our fault again, just as Nixon was in 1968 and 1972, and Trump was in 2016.

To which I say, “I’m done with this. No matter how it goes this time, we’re done. Peddle your paralysis elsewhere.”

Res Ipsa Loquitur

William Timberman2 Comments
Three men holding fish on a boat in the water.
“I stayed for three nights in a modest one-room unit at the King Salmon Lodge, which was a comfortable but rustic facility. As I recall, the meals were homestyle fare. I cannot recall whether the group at the lodge, about 20 people, was served wine, but if there was wine it was certainly not wine that costs $1,000.”

Why Did This Man Have a Chicken On His Hat?

William Timberman
A man in gold and white uniform with a bird on his head.
Führers are a dime a dozen these days. Real leaders are born, not made.

Ask Ron DeSantis. Also ask him why he wants to turn America into a place where he can wear one just like it.

Ask Newt Gingrich, the world-renowned historian. I’m sure he can explain precisely how and why we’ve all lost our way since the time when men could wear hats like this without getting laughed at.

Ask Sarah Palin or Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Taylor Greene. I’m sure they’d give up their present gigs in a heartbeat to be the consort of a man with a hat like this.

Biden’s Victory Speech

William Timberman

Now is the Summer of our discontent
Made glorious Winter by this dearth of Trump

If all goes as well for the Democrats on November 3rd as reality is likely to permit, there may be a few minutes, a few hours, even a few days of self-congratulatory euphoria granted to the Ancien Régime of the DNC and its legions of fellow travelers. At the end of it, though, the butcher‘s bill will be presented to someone else, preferably someone to the left of them, and their descent into irrelevance will pick up again exactly where it left off on November 2nd.