Posts Tagged → fall
Interesting PA 15th district state senate race
Now that the Super Tuesday primary election is over, which Our Lord and Savior President Donald Trump completely dominated in a historic crushing nationwide landslide, Pennsylvania has only another six weeks of national irrelevance to go until our primary election on April 23rd. Which makes Pennsylvania less than unimportant in the grand scheme of national politics, but allows us to focus on some interesting local races.
The election race that grabs my interest the most is for the 15th state senate district here in central PA, centered on Harrisburg City. This is a senate district I ran in one-and-a-half times. First in 2012, which entailed a real head-butting with the GOPe, and in which I did well but did not win. The second time I ran was 2015-2016, and I was the first candidate out of the gate. Color me surprised when another candidate announced (John DiSanto), quite establishment with the charisma of an old shoe, and who was backed by the same acidly anti-establishment state senator I had worked hard to elect in York County (Scott Wagner).
Political races are often weird, and in Spring 2015 I was just getting with the weirdness of facing off against people whom I had worked hard to elect, and who had no explanation for why they were opposing me, when the race got more complicated.
Enter out of the clear blue yonder a very young and very ambitious guy (Andrew Lewis), just moved back to Pennsylvania and fresh from military intelligence work in Washington, DC (now that MAGA knows how corrupt and evil our own American intelligence establishment is, one must wonder if this connection will hurt Andrew Lewis in his future political ambitions). With no local work or volunteer history, other than his family lived in both Juniata and Perry counties, Andrew Lewis became the alternative conservative candidate to me. Good looking and bright, Andrew made a fine candidate. His presence in the race bit into my rural support, and the fact that he, too, was financially supported by Scott Wagner bit deeper into my feelings about Scott Wagner and the people working for and with him.
What the heck did Scott Wagner have against little old me?
My participation in the race came to an abrupt end in late November, 2015, as I stepped up onto a boulder high on a mountain while bear hunting, and awkwardly fell off. My left knee was the knee that had not been previously operated on, and I had babied it for thirty years. The two back-to-back surgeries required to fix its resulting bad tears in the cartilage and frayed ligaments meant I could barely walk. And if there was one advantage I had it was my good door-to-door effort that had paid off before.
Not being able to walk door to door, I had no way of really running a competitive three-way race, and so I bowed out in December. And never a sore loser, I endorsed the same monkey-wrenching Andrew Lewis as the superior of the two candidates.
John DiSanto won that springtime primary election and went on to defeat the incumbent Democrat in the Fall of 2016. After eight years of voting reliably Republican present, but with no distinguishing leadership on issues like election integrity or the state system of education, DiSanto is now giving way to the heavily gerrymandered new senate district.
Our new 15th district map was created by the PA Dems to favor forever incumbent PA House member Patty Kim, a terribly undistinguished, sleep-walking, cookie cutter Marxist Democrat who is tired of not having to run for re-election every two years and now desires to not have to run for re-election every four years.
So we know who the Democrat candidate will be: Patty Kim.
On the GOP side we have two candidates, and this is what I find so interesting about this race. One candidate is an outsider, a nice man named Ken Stambaugh.
Local politicos will recognize the Stambaugh name because so many people from this large and engaged family are involved in politics across three counties here. Having appreciated the opportunity to speak at length with Ken Stambaugh, and having read his near-daily campaign trail updates, I come away with the impression of a good guy with good intentions, and no policy experience or even a desire for good policy, and not a lot of charisma. That he was recruited by incumbent state senator John DiSanto for the Fall suicide run against Marxist Patty Kim seems doubly lost on Ken.
That Ken was endorsed by the Dauphin County GOP is not lost on me or other conservative grass roots activists who abhor party meddling in primary races. Candidates today who tout their party endorsement in a primary race have a tin ear, or just don’t care about the voters.
Sometimes not being “political” can work well to a person’s advantage, and in this case, I think Ken Stambaugh probably sleeps well each night not knowing what politicos know. Let’s keep this a secret, because Ken’s earnestness is refreshing. He means well, which is to his credit.
Out of the blue, longtime politico, former Dauphin County commissioner, and newly elected Dauphin County treasurer, Nick DiFrancesco, has also decided to run for this same state senate seat.
Two weeks ago, the Lower Paxton Township Republicans issued a statement, calling on Nick to drop out of the race.
“I told everyone Nick would not take the treasurer position seriously,” said one frustrated politico.
“You crazy man,” I wrote to Nick. After all, having worked so hard to re-ingratiate himself with the Dauphin County GOP and barely win the county treasurer seat last November, to now run against the party takes real Italian-style chutzpah. Or too much ambition. Or balls. Or leadership….
However Nick’s thumb-in-the-eye and kick-in-the-shins entry into this race is characterized, Nick is at the opposite end of the politico spectrum from nice guy candidate Ken Stambaugh.
Nick DiFrancesco is very experienced with running for office and all of the “retail politics” this includes, such as money grubbing and networking. He also has Dauphin County name recognition, which always goes a long way in a primary race. Nick may be as establishment as a Republican can get, but to run against the party establishment is about as anti-establishment as it gets. Intriguing!
Which raises the question of whether Nick DiFrancesco has a political suicide urge, is addicted to running for office, or does he think he can really win against Patty Kim? I think Nick believes he can win against Patty Kim in the Fall. He says so, and I believe him.
The entire 15th senate district R vs D race in the Fall comes down to the R candidate reaching deeply into the Harrisburg City black community, and getting their votes. Which with the right candidate can be done. After all, decades of Democrat Party rule has left Harrisburg City and its majority black citizens bankrupted and left behind. Like pretty much every other Democrat-run city in America, it should be noted.
American blacks are not stupid, they are incredibly loyal (why blacks identify with the party of Slavery, the Democrats, and not the party of Abolition, the Republicans is a case of effective marketing vs. no marketing at all). They are smart enough to begin asking what the hell have they been loyal to and loyal for. The American black community is beginning to wake up to the fact that white liberal Democrats like Patty Kim are the most racist people on Planet Earth, and that repeatedly voting for them and their guaranteed failure and intergenerational poverty is stupid. And no, I don’t think candidate Alvin Q. Taylor has what it takes to lead, sorry, buddy.
Nick DiFrancesco should play Malcolm X’s “Political Chump” speech all over Allison Hill and Uptown Harrisburg, and lead Dauphin County in a political revolution that all of America needs. If there is one candidate who can do this, who has the balls to try it, to show all the scared Whiteys huddled up in their country clubs that Black people are very engaging and very interested in what candidates have to say, it is Nick.
In this primary race, and in the Fall race, I think Nick DiFrancesco has all of the advantages.
Sweet Fall is in the Air
Fall may be my favorite time of year, for umpteen reasons, only a few of which come to mind at any given moment. Until I walk outside and then recall another dozen reasons.
Clean air, freshly scented with a hearty, earthy smell fills the streets and woods alike.
Sunlight strong enough to throw objects into clear relief, but not strong enough to make you uncomfortably hot.
Cool nights, asking in the back of your head “Did you split and stack enough firewood for the long cold winter that is coming?”
Leaves turning from verdant to golden and scarlet.
Apples ripen, begging to be eaten, baked, distilled. Hard cider is popular everywhere around here, and applejack is even more popular.
Wild game begins to prick up its ears, sensing the change to leaner times is on that new wind, bringing with it hungry predators.
As a predator, my own senses begin to naturally sharpen. Tree stands are checked, shooting lanes trimmed. Hunts are planned with friends near and far.
Successful or not in taking something home, a hunt is time afield, with nature. Cannot beat that.
Enjoy Fall, friends, as it is also a metaphor for change, the end of growing things, harvesting of crops, aging, and sometimes the death that naturally follows the aging process. It is a pleasing reminder that our time here on Earth is simply fleeting.
Fall is a reminder to make every moment count, and make every moment positive to make it count the best and the most.
Current American Parallels with the Fall of Ancient Rome
In the recent past I have been in touch with some old high school friends.
We were quite close way back then. All remain good people, and we have maintained irregular but meaningful contact for the past 35 years. So any communication between us now is like picking right up where we last left off way back then.
“When are you and your militia friends going to storm DC?” semi-teasingly asks one, a professional resident of Washington, DC.
Immediately I’m thinking “Trump winning pretty much was the storming of DC, in a way.”
But I don’t say it, as the cascade of shallow whining about the election results sure to follow has become regular and boorish among Trump detractors.
“Josh, I was no Hill-Dog lover [Hillary Clinton], and I liked Kasich [presidential candidate], but do you really like Trump?” asks another, this one a successful self-made businessman, his face unhappily wrinkling over Trump Anything.
Given the constant opposition to the Trump presidency from both establishment parties (Republicans and Democrats, or the ‘UniParty’ as some call both parties together), as well as from taxpayer-funded entitlement recipients, some small and many big business folk alike, and especially the media-academia Big Government complex, now seems a good time to remind everyone who has something to lose of the history that brought America up here and could drag us back down.
First, like America, ancient superpower Rome was also “too big to fail,” both in the minds of Romans and their many enemies. They had too much money, too much military power, and the Roman people were living too fantastically a high standard of life to envision it actually dissolving.
In that way, America is no different than Rome, or any other major civilization that has come and gone before us: We perceive we are too wealthy and powerful to fall, and our personal lives are so fantastically comfortable and convenient that we cannot imagine all of it coming undone. It’s just too good. How could it possibly go away?
But fail and fall, Rome did. First sacked in 410 CE by its own mercenaries, and then for good in 454 CE by its mercenaries allied with their ethnic tribes. Inside jobs, both.
Second, like Rome, America is an island anomaly in a sea of big, all-powerful governments, dictatorships, really, domineering little citizens. While by today’s standards ancient Rome may not have been a free society, by the measure of its time it provided a lot of liberty and opportunity to individual citizens, much more than anywhere else.
Rome also had a semblance of the rule of law. Most nation-states back then were simply feudal aggregations of people with swords at the top and field-cropping, over-taxed serfs at the bottom. No rule of law.
Today, Planet Earth still has mostly tyrants and dictators, with a cruel grip on their respective populace. So, like America now, Rome then had some extra work to do to hold itself together. Government power had to be diffused among senators, army officers, and business people. Standards and expectations were higher among a wider group of people. Government power, societal stability, quality of life did not depend upon the one monarch alone.
Predicting the end of America is almost as silly as predicting “climate change” -caused sea levels catastrophically rising, and super-powerful storms catastrophically leveling human civilization.
Though there is evidence of climate and weather affects on past human civilizations, it is a historical fact that human civilizations come and go of their own accord, usually due to simple power lust and ego. Sometimes environmental destruction rendered the land unfit for habitation. So on that alone we know that some day America will change. And it will not be a change good for the majority of its citizens.
America is nowhere near where Rome was when it fell, in terms of military preparedness. But in other ways we are past where Rome was, in terms of our unsustainable debt, ironically held by some of our worst enemies. The Chinese have become a kind of mercenary banker force, also supplying us with the electronics we use to run our daily lives as well as much of our military. That they are spying on us through their electronics is already proven.
Plenty of people inside and out would like to run America themselves, without the annoying, dirty citizenry in the way.
And yet so many Americans continue to party on, oblivious, as if we are invincible, invulnerable.
Go ahead and tease me, friends. Your ribbing is funny. But you should also be reflecting on the implications of ANTIFA, BLM, OWS etc mobs-cum-militia already rampaging across American streets, including DC and the US Capitol. Those stormings are already under way, under cover of national media and academia. They are real, and neither I nor any militia I know of have anything to do with them.
Go ahead and casually write off people like me, ‘kooks’ who love America in a simple way, a traditional way. We love all Americans, in all their ingenuity and passion for liberty and opportunity, and we have therefore come to despise the power-grab being waged against the citizenry by Big Government latté sippers. In both parties.
Go ahead and smugly dismiss us, mock us, cheerily toast our foolishness.
Just remember in the back of your mind, it is you we are trying to save. God knows, you can’t get it done.
Life’s natural rhythms
Hunting and gathering have provided 95% of the sustenance for humans on Planet Earth, for most of our time as modern humans. These activities are a natural, seasonal rhythm outside of the equatorial region.
Usually more gathering is done during the summer months in temperate climates, when fruits, vegetables, and nuts would be ripening. Hunting typically occurs all year ’round, but picks up in the Fall and Winter.
Our garden produced a constant supply of non-sprayed, healthy, fresh, naturally ripened food this summer. As usual, some plants did really well, while others eventually failed long before their time. Nevertheless, the garden produced more than we could keep up with, and is now coming to a close. It was a pleasurable way to eat – walk into the back yard, pick some fresh vegetables, make a salad or sandwich inside, and then taste the sunlight.
Now, hunting and trapping seasons are upon us, and it’s as if a hidden switch was flicked ON in my body. I suppose a hundred thousand years of hunting and gathering cannot be easily scrubbed from our DNA and body’s natural inclinations, although some people pretend they can (and should).
In a country awash in cheap, easily accessible food, growing a successful garden and harvesting wild meat for the table may seem silly, but the truth is these are skills being honed. Anyone who thinks the food, electricity, water, and heat which define American life will always be easily available is fooling themselves. Anything could happen to disrupt those supplies. Could be something small, or something big, or something cataclysmic. Either way, oscillating with nature’s natural rhythms is both, well, natural, and also healthy. Ignoring those natural rhythms is like double-dog-daring something bad to happen to you, and it will, because in human history, change is the constant.
Enjoy the colorful Central Pennsylvania Fall, and Go Lions!
Hunting season preparations – Xmas in July
Though hunting seasons may be many months away, the truth is that hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania hunters are quietly sorting out their plans far ahead of time. Doe tags, DMAP tags, licenses and berths in a Quebec hunting camp for black bear and caribou, a camping permit for an ADK wilderness…it is all lining up now across the state.
Summertime preparations for Fall and wintertime hunting activities are a sign that yet another round of sustainable, renewable economic development is upon us here. After all, hunting is a $2.8 billion industry (or business sector, or economic sector) in Pennsylvania. Hunters are a renewable, and sustainable source of income and economic activity, so long as they have places to hunt.
Longingly fondling old, trusted firearms and bows, sighting them in on the sitting room wall or at the range, hunters can already smell that clean air, feel that cool breeze upon the cheek, and hear dead leaves rustle under foot, if they but close their eyes and imagine it.
It is Christmas in July now, as hunters across the Commonwealth gear up, trim up, and make sure everything is in order for that best time of the year: Hunting season.
Warmer weather can’t come too soon
What began as a happy trip to the wood shed for a load of seasoned oak in the Fall is now a crabby trudge through deep snow and ice, a drudgery opposite the cheerfulness felt with the first flames to beat back Winter’s early chill.
Spring warmth cannot come too soon. Naturally, it will arrive, melt the Arctic snow cap occupying my lawn, and probably result in some Biblical flood carrying my home down river to the Chesapeake Bay.
Speaking of floods, and flood insurance, I am hopeful that the insane congresswoman Maxcine Waters will have her bizarre legislation permanently overturned, so that people can either afford to own their homes (something she is not familiar with or supportive of) or the Federal government will buy out the landowners so the societal costs and benefits are not concentrated on just the private property owners. Government cannot change the social contract in one week. Well, under liberals it can, of course. Let’s rephrase that: Government should not restructure the social contract in such a short time that private property owners see their investments destroyed overnight. That would be good government, something unknown to Maxcine Waters and her fellow liberals.
“Decline & Fall of the American Empire”: Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself
For those of us who have struggled to make sense of last week’s historic vote, this writer sums up most of the most important take-aways. I urge you to read his article:
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
By Rabbi Pruzansky
Posted on November 7, 2012 | 60 Comments
The most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo – for the incumbent President and for a divided Congress. They must enjoy gridlock, partisanship, incompetence, economic stagnation and avoidance of responsibility. And fewer people voted. As I write, with almost all the votes counted, President Obama has won fewer votes than John McCain won in 2008, and more than ten million off his own 2008 total.
But as we awake from the nightmare, it is important to eschew the facile explanations for the Romney defeat that will prevail among the chattering classes. Romney did not lose because of the effects of Hurricane Sandy that devastated this area, nor did he lose because he ran a poor campaign, nor did he lose because the Republicans could have chosen better candidates, nor did he lose because Obama benefited from a slight uptick in the economy due to the business cycle.
Romney lost because he didn’t get enough votes to win.
That might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons. Romney lost because the conservative virtues – the traditional American virtues – of liberty, hard work, free enterprise, private initiative and aspirations to moral greatness – no longer inspire or animate a majority of the electorate. The notion of the “Reagan Democrat” is one cliché that should be permanently retired.
Ronald Reagan himself could not win an election in today’s America.
The simplest reason why Romney lost was because it is impossible to compete against free stuff. Every businessman knows this; that is why the “loss leader” or the giveaway is such a powerful marketing tool. Obama’s America is one in which free stuff is given away: the adults among the 47,000,000 on food stamps clearly recognized for whom they should vote, and so they did, by the tens of millions; those who – courtesy of Obama – receive two full years of unemployment benefits (which, of course, both disincentivizes looking for work and also motivates people to work off the books while collecting their windfall) surely know for whom to vote; so too those who anticipate “free” health care, who expect the government to pay their mortgages, who look for the government to give them jobs. The lure of free stuff is irresistible.
Imagine two restaurants side by side. One sells its customers fine cuisine at a reasonable price, and the other offers a free buffet, all-you-can-eat as long as supplies last. Few – including me – could resist the attraction of the free food. Now imagine that the second restaurant stays in business because the first restaurant is forced to provide it with the food for the free buffet, and we have the current economy, until, at least, the first restaurant decides to go out of business. (Then, the government takes over the provision of free food to its patrons.)
The defining moment of the whole campaign was the revelation (by the amoral Obama team) of the secretly-recorded video in which Romney acknowledged the difficulty of winning an election in which “47% of the people” start off against him because they pay no taxes and just receive money – “free stuff” – from the government. Almost half of the population has no skin in the game – they don’t care about high taxes, promoting business, or creating jobs, nor do they care that the money for their free stuff is being borrowed from their children and from the Chinese. They just want the free stuff that comes their way at someone else’s expense. In the end, that 47% leaves very little margin for error for any Republican, and does not bode well for the future.
It is impossible to imagine a conservative candidate winning against such overwhelming odds. People do vote their pocketbooks. In essence, the people vote for a Congress who will not raise their taxes, and for a President who will give them free stuff, never mind who has to pay for it.
That suggests the second reason why Romney lost: the inescapable conclusion that, as Winston Churchill stated so tartly, “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Voters – a clear majority – are easily swayed by emotion and raw populism. Said another way, too many people vote with their hearts and not their heads. That is why Obama did not have to produce a second term agenda, or even defend his first-term record. He needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a rapacious capitalist who throws elderly women over a cliff, when he is not just snatching away their cancer medication, while starving the poor and cutting taxes for the rich. Obama could get away with saying that “Romney wants the rich to play by a different set of rules” – without ever defining what those different rules were; with saying that the “rich should pay their fair share” – without ever defining what a “fair share” is; with saying that Romney wants the poor, elderly and sick to “fend for themselves” – without even acknowledging that all these government programs are going bankrupt, their current insolvency only papered over by deficit spending. How could Obama get away with such rants to squealing sign-wavers? See Churchill, above.
During his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to Adlai Stevenson: “Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!” Stevenson called back: “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!” Truer words were never spoken.
Similarly, Obama (or his surrogates) could hint to blacks that a Romney victory would lead them back into chains and proclaim to women that their abortions and birth control would be taken away. He could appeal to Hispanics that Romney would have them all arrested and shipped to Mexico (even if they came from Cuba or Honduras), and unabashedly state that he will not enforce the current immigration laws. He could espouse the furtherance of the incestuous relationship between governments and unions – in which politicians ply the unions with public money, in exchange for which the unions provide the politicians with votes, in exchange for which the politicians provide more money and the unions provide more votes, etc., even though the money is gone. How could he do and say all these things ? See Churchill, above.
One might reasonably object that not every Obama supporter could be unintelligent. But they must then rationally explain how the Obama agenda can be paid for, aside from racking up multi-trillion dollar deficits. “Taxing the rich” does not yield even 10% of what is required and does not solve any discernible problem – so what is the answer, i.e., an intelligent answer?
Obama also knows that the electorate has changed – that whites will soon be a minority in America (they’re already a minority in California) and that the new immigrants to the US are primarily from the Third World and do not share the traditional American values that attracted immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a different world, and a different America. Obama is part of that different America, knows it, and knows how to tap into it. That is why he won.
Obama also proved again that negative advertising works, invective sells, and harsh personal attacks succeed. That Romney never engaged in such diatribes points to his essential goodness as a person; his “negative ads” were simple facts, never personal abuse – facts about high unemployment, lower take-home pay, a loss of American power and prestige abroad, a lack of leadership, etc. As a politician, though, Romney failed because he did not embrace the devil’s bargain of making unsustainable promises, and by talking as the adult and not the adolescent. Obama has spent the last six years campaigning; even his governance has been focused on payoffs to his favored interest groups. The permanent campaign also won again, to the detriment of American life.
It turned out that it was not possible for Romney and Ryan – people of substance, depth and ideas – to compete with the shallow populism and platitudes of their opponents. Obama mastered the politics of envy – of class warfare – never reaching out to Americans as such but to individual groups, and cobbling together a winning majority from these minority groups. Conservative ideas failed to take root and states that seemed winnable, and amenable to traditional American values, have simply disappeared from the map. If an Obama could not be defeated – with his record and his vision of America, in which free stuff seduces voters – it is hard to envision any change in the future. The road to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to a European-socialist economy – those very economies that are collapsing today in Europe – is paved.
A second cliché that should be retired is that America is a center-right country. It clearly is not. It is a divided country with peculiar voting patterns, and an appetite for free stuff. Studies will invariably show that Republicans in Congress received more total votes than Democrats in Congress, but that means little. The House of Representatives is not truly representative of the country. That people would vote for a Republican Congressmen or Senator and then Obama for President would tend to reinforce point two above: the empty-headedness of the electorate. Americans revile Congress but love their individual Congressmen. Go figure.
The mass media’s complicity in Obama’s re-election cannot be denied. One example suffices. In 2004, CBS News forged a letter in order to imply that President Bush did not fulfill his Air National Guard service during the Vietnam War, all to impugn Bush and impair his re-election prospects. In 2012, President Obama insisted – famously – during the second debate that he had stated all along that the Arab attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi was “terror” (a lie that Romney fumbled and failed to exploit). Yet, CBS News sat on a tape of an interview with Obama in which Obama specifically avoided and rejected the claim of terrorism – on the day after the attack – clinging to the canard about the video. (This snippet of a “60 Minutes” interview was not revealed – until two days ago!) In effect, CBS News fabricated evidence in order to harm a Republican president, and suppressed evidence in order to help a Democratic president. Simply shameful, as was the media’s disregard of any scandal or story that could have jeopardized the Obama re-election.
One of the more irritating aspects of this campaign was its limited focus, odd in light of the billions of dollars spent. Only a few states were contested, a strategy that Romney adopted, and that clearly failed. The Democrat begins any race with a substantial advantage. The liberal states – like the bankrupt California and Illinois – and other states with large concentrations of minority voters as well as an extensive welfare apparatus, like New York, New Jersey and others – give any Democratic candidate an almost insurmountable edge in electoral votes. In New Jersey, for example, it literally does not pay for a conservative to vote. It is not worth the fuel expended driving to the polls. As some economists have pointed generally, and it resonates here even more, the odds are greater that a voter will be killed in a traffic accident on his way to the polls than that his vote will make a difference in the election. It is an irrational act. That most states are uncompetitive means that people are not amenable to new ideas, or new thinking, or even having an open mind. If that does not change, and it is hard to see how it can change, then the die is cast. America is not what it was, and will never be again.
For Jews, mostly assimilated anyway and staunch Democrats, the results demonstrate again that liberalism is their Torah. Almost 70% voted for a president widely perceived by Israelis and most committed Jews as hostile to Israel. They voted to secure Obama’s future at America’s expense and at Israel’s expense – in effect, preferring Obama to Netanyahu by a wide margin. A dangerous time is ahead. Under present circumstances, it is inconceivable that the US will take any aggressive action against Iran and will more likely thwart any Israeli initiative. That Obama’s top aide Valerie Jarrett (i.e., Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett) spent last week in Teheran is not a good sign. The US will preach the importance of negotiations up until the production of the first Iranian nuclear weapon – and then state that the world must learn to live with this new reality. As Obama has committed himself to abolishing America’s nuclear arsenal, it is more likely that that unfortunate circumstance will occur than that he will succeed in obstructing Iran’s plans.
Obama’s victory could weaken Netanyahu’s re-election prospects, because Israelis live with an unreasonable – and somewhat pathetic – fear of American opinion and realize that Obama despises Netanyahu. A Likud defeat – or a diminution of its margin of victory – is more probable now than yesterday. That would not be the worst thing. Netanyahu, in fact, has never distinguished himself by having a strong political or moral backbone, and would be the first to cave to the American pressure to surrender more territory to the enemy and acquiesce to a second (or third, if you count Jordan) Palestinian state. A new US Secretary of State named John Kerry, for example (he of the Jewish father) would not augur well. Netanyahu remains the best of markedly poor alternatives. Thus, the likeliest outcome of the upcoming Israeli elections is a center-left government that will force itself to make more concessions and weaken Israel – an Oslo III.
But this election should be a wake-up call to Jews. There is no permanent empire, nor is there is an enduring haven for Jews anywhere in the exile. The most powerful empires in history all crumbled – from the Greeks and the Romans to the British and the Soviets. None of the collapses were easily foreseen, and yet they were predictable in retrospect.
The American empire began to decline in 2007, and the deterioration has been exacerbated in the last five years. This election only hastens that decline. Society is permeated with sloth, greed, envy and materialistic excess. It has lost its moorings and its moral foundations. The takers outnumber the givers, and that will only increase in years to come. Across the world, America under Bush was feared but not respected. Under Obama, America is neither feared nor respected. Radical Islam has had a banner four years under Obama, and its prospects for future growth look excellent. The “Occupy” riots across this country in the last two years were mere dress rehearsals for what lies ahead – years of unrest sparked by the increasing discontent of the unsuccessful who want to seize the fruits and the bounty of the successful, and do not appreciate the slow pace of redistribution.
Two bright sides: Notwithstanding the election results, I arose this morning, went to shul, davened and learned Torah afterwards. That is our reality, and that trumps all other events. Our relationship with G-d matters more than our relationship with any politician, R or D. And, notwithstanding the problems in Israel, it is time for Jews to go home, to Israel. We have about a decade, perhaps 15 years, to leave with dignity and without stress. Thinking that it will always be because it always was has been a repetitive and deadly Jewish mistake. America was always the land from which “positive” aliya came – Jews leaving on their own, and not fleeing a dire situation. But that can also change. The increased aliya in the last few years is partly attributable to young people fleeing the high cost of Jewish living in America. Those costs will only increase in the coming years. We should draw the appropriate conclusions.
If this election proves one thing, it is that the Old America is gone. And, sad for the world, it is not coming back.
http://rabbipruzansky.com/2012/11/07/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-american-empire/
What a Fall Day for Middle America
What a Fall day to remember.
Flag football with Son and his team, including a Kids vs. Parents game that the parents lost, to the kids’ supreme pleasure.
Bought and then replaced the battery in my daughter’s car.
Split the last of the oak and stacked most of it.
Gathered the loose oak bark and piled it around the magnolia tree, where Viv wants good bark mulch.
Viv clipped long grass around the stone wall out front and put away lots of lawn stuff that’s been around for a few weeks, with Nina’s help, including piles and piles of brown oak leaves.
This is the typical, pleasant life of Middle Americans all over the country on a beautiful Fall day. It’s a way of life that most Americans take for granted. It’s a way of life fully in Obama’s cross hairs, as he seeks an America where “everyone gets their fair share.” That forced redistribution of wealth is now and will continue to end the Middle American lifestyle.
How pleasing it is to see both Gallup and Rasmussen polls showing Romney pulling ahead of Obama nationally and in the swing states. Obama is claiming just seven states now, and that’s not many. This election is looking like it might be a blow-out, as Middle Americans realize just how much everything they take for granted is under assault and at risk with the Obama administration.