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Thursday, October 07, 2021

Read Mark Steyn's "The Shadow of Your Stall"

 

At this point, conservative complaceniks tend to trot out Adam Smith: "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation." But not this much - not Covid lockdowns and open borders, Afghan "translators" and Haitian "refugees", Big Tech and Big Trans, BLM and CRT, ID for the IHOP but not for the voting booth, China as America's manufacturer and America's loan shark...

Do you know Aladdin? No, not the ancient folk tale about the penniless Chinese boy who gets given a golden lamp by the US Chamber of Commerce that grants his every wish and makes him rich beyond his wildest dreams. No, I mean the Broadway musical thereof: It came back for one night, and then closed down again because of a bad case of the Covid. One step forward, seventeen back, and so it goes. If you seek alternative entertainment, there's always the leaden dinner theatre in Washington where they're arguing about whether to pass an unread bill authorizing the spending of $6 trillion or an unread bill authorizing the spending of $47 trillion, neither of which number has any meaning over in the real world, where the Government of the United States has to pay $30 trillion just to get back to having nothing at all. Nonetheless, Republicans are yet again going through the motions of pretending to be possibly considering mulling over the option of musing on not raising the debt ceiling and thereby putting America at risk of default - in the same way that you not raising your overdraft limit with the First National Bank of Dead Horse Junction from 700 bucks to four mil could put your family at risk of default...

Is the United States Constitution going to save you from the above? No, the Constitution enabled it - or, to put it at its mildest, failed to prevent it. James Kirkpatrick:

'Constitutionalism' is flawed because legalism can't restrain power. Power shapes law. If 'constitutionalism' worked, we wouldn't be here, especially when it comes to immigration. If the 'rule of law' meant anything, we wouldn't have millions of illegals. Adherence to largely symbolic ornaments doesn't prevent a country from being utterly remade.

Once you abolish the principle of equality before the law, any law - from the Constitution down - is irrelevant. Almost all the examples above are about the replacement of a land of laws with a land of men: antifa are privileged above "insurrectionists" for the purposes of mostly peaceful protests; the vaccinated are privileged above the naturally immune for the purposes of dining in a New York restaurant; illegal aliens are privileged above US citizens for the purposes of the paperwork necessary to enter the country; subscribers to the official narrative are privileged above contrarians for the purposes of access to the monopoly social-media platforms...

Read the whole thing. 

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