Welcome to 2021! On New Year's Eve Mark returned to the Golden EIB Microphone for a final three hours of 2020 substitute-host-level Excellence in Broadcasting on The Rush Limbaugh Show. A look back at an awful year and a look ahead to what awaits dominated the proceedings - as well as the uncertain resolution of the Georgia runoff, and a final sentimental reprise of Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, with a tip of the hat to Walter Williams. Click below to listen:
As to that Mark Steyn Cruise Mr Snerdley and Mark were talking about, you can find more details about that here. And, if you're interested in giving the gift of Mark Steyn Club membership for 2021, you can find more details here.
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A new justification for the Electoral College that I have never heard before is as a firewall against voter fraud. What if Georgia had a system like Maine where electors were assigned by congressional district? The district(s) around Atlanta where all the cheating takes place would go to Democrats but they would not be able to drag the rest of the state with them. This would also reduce the motivation to cheat. Systems like Dominion would, of course, still be a problem. A similar situation exists with Michigan and Detroit and Pennsylvania and Philadelphia. I think this would get Republicans 12 out of 16 electors in Georgia, 14 out 16 in Michigan, 17 or 18 out of 20 in Pennsylvania and 8 out of 9 in Wisconsin.
Doing this as a means of isolating these high-density metro areas and thus minimizing their damage to the republic may indeed be an excellent idea.
The last part of the show shed a really insightful sidelight on the challenge which the Republican party faces. There is no future in denying that, right now, it is fighting rearguard actions, and those include trying to save what it can in the supreme court judiciary. Equally, there is no denying that, in common with most defeated armies, it is not winning every rearguard action. That is frustrating, especially when it seems that actions are in some cases not being prosecuted with sufficient determination.
So what to do? The option not available is the one resorted to by soldiers, my military metaphor notwithstanding. The nazis famously garlanded Berlin's lamp-posts with hanged deserters, and one knows that must have deterred desertion. The NKVD famously placed stopper groups behind advances to shoot at any retreating troops, and one knows that must have both deterred retreat and minimised congestion at hospitals. (Heaven help us if the likes of Dr Fauci and Mr Cuomo ever hear of that technique!) I know that I needn't explain that this approach isn't popular among politicians, not least because it is they who face the charges of faint-heartedness.
Nevertheless, we need to find ways to incentivise politicians to higher levels of performance. There's certainly room for that. I don't imagine that anybody on these boards is likely to forget that, not so very long ago, Republicans had control, not only of both legislative houses, but also of the presidency, with all of the immense execututive powers that entails, and achieved, as far as I'm concerned, pitifully little, apart from a huge, reeking pile of excuses and blame-shifting.
I can tell you where any manager of any worth would begin to rectify a performance problem of that order. One sets performance expectations expressed as concrete objectives or outputs, one ensures that the minimum resources needed to achieve those outputs are in place, one checks on progress as the principal component of any managerial encounter, one checks that the allocated resources are not being exceeded, and one turns a deaf ear to excuses. An election manifesto comprising three straplines won't do it, especially when those straplines can be swept under the carpet whenever they prove embarrassing in light of actual accomplishment. And accountability is lodged at the highest decision-making level. There is little future in shooting foot-soldiers.
Actually, the same principles apply to the management of rearguard actions.
Sobering thought that in many ways sums up everything: There are probably a few alleged GOP senators waiting for results of the Georgia runoffs hoping the party gets one of the seats so they can "heroically" switch parties and toss control to the Dems and earn the standard hagiography in the New York Times
Mark, my favourite comment of yours in this show was probably "if you surrender the language, you disarm yourself". That is bloody true and I refuse to surrender.
Happy New Year - and thank you - to Mark and the whole team at SteynOnline. And congratulations on the chart-topping week of guest-hosting on TV and radio.
PS. For anyone who missed it, MSC member Richard Caskey wins Best Comment (in terms of the big picture) under the recent thread on "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?" - and the wonderful performance by Mark & Co.
Very classy wrapup by Mark Steyn, the guest indispensable man.
Yes, a beautiful and touching farewell for a wonderful man. We're missing him already.
Just to be clear, I was referring to Mark's parting farewell to Walter Williams. I just listened to the entire show through again and noticed the very last part Mark mentioned about Rush's plan to join us back again in '21! I was a little worried there as I thought Rush's last broadcast show might have been last week's. I like to be wrong about things like this.
Somebody, it may have been one of Rush's guest hosts, pointed out the symbolism of 2020 regarding our ability to see things clearly. I believe God provides us with all sorts of such metaphors and symbols that are explanatory if we are willing to take notice. Truly 2020 was a year of seeing. I think President Trump's greatest accomplishment in office is that he has been instrumental in enabling us to see almost everyone for who they really are. To borrow from Rush, Trump has been the great Truth Detector. We now know without a doubt who are the uber-malignant frauds, the bush league frauds, and the people who are reasonably aligned with the truth. The mills of history grind slowly but they eventually separate the grain from the chaff. This also is God's relentless purpose. No one remains concealed for long. People have been able to witness leftism in it's shameful nakedness all year long, and leftism is, first to last, a lie. If people do not know, at this point, what leftism really is and how consistent it is they may be beyond instruction. They are enemies of the truth. There is no longer any excuse. If you have chosen to believe a lie and prefer it to the truth you have crossed a line from which it may be difficult, if not impossible, to return. You will have nothing good to expect from the future. You will have no grounds to expect clemency from the Court of Heaven. We are headed for some sort of adjudication and vindication. What that might look like is anyboy's guess but it doubtless will not be pretty. In 2020 we could see clearly that the road is wide that leads to destruction and it is filled with countless fellow travelers. We can hope, nevertheless, that in 2021 we will also be able to see clearly a glimmer of redemptive grace.
Well said Todd!
This is great, Todd. Yes, I vaguely remember this being said on Rush, by Todd Herman perhaps. I'm glad you put this up. I listen to Rush daily and while I forget details I do remember that Rush, Mark, Todd and Ken Matthews say meaningful things that help clarify the insanity going on around us. This helps refresh the clarity.
It should be read aloud in the style of Dame Maggie Smith in 'the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' (I'm thinking of the scene between Miss Brodie and Miss McKay).
On the flip side, what we also see more clearly - as noted by Mark, Rush Limbaugh, Ned Ryun, Jesse Watters et al - is our own acquiescence and passivity as conservatives, and (even worse) the rationalisation of our inaction. The Left has been exposed, and so has the Right. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil..."
Mark's observation - that "culture trump politics" - ties in with his direct experience: "What you mostly hear [...] is the silent majority's silence".
We are reaping the consequences of decades of being too "civil" (unlike Steyn) to engage in the culture wars, while the Left - credit where it's due - worked relentlessly to destroy everything. And now (in the Land of Liberty) even the ability of conservatives to hold the line in secrecy on the political front - in the voting booth every few years - has been ripped away, with the connivance of their traitorous representatives. Stop-the-Steal has been cunningly inverted. "Unity" beckons. Any push back against those in power - ie. Big Gov + Big Media - is going to be even harder without the democratic means to do so.
Andrew Breitbart's declaration of war - a decade ago - is doing the internet rounds (see 30 second video edit). Who knows whether such material will be erased from existence in another month. Let's hope the ship can be turned around before it sinks.
This all is true. Wisdom comes from God, not us. If we want it we have to be humble enough to ask for it. We need to pray for America, but we also need to keep praying for our enemies to convert. When ruth bader ginsberg died I reflexively started to pray for her soul. The horror of where it was headed drove me to pray.
In the decades I've spent working as a nurse I've cared for a lot of dying people. People have souls. They have some sort of spirit keeping them alive. When they die that spirit leaves them. Sometimes it lingers. I've had some pretty eerie experiences with some of my patients. All I know is people of good faith who have served God seem to have a 'good death.' People who have lead selfish and destructive lives are terrified when they die. We need to pray and not give up hope, even when we're praying for demented leftists. Hell is horrifying and eternal. Heaven should be the only goal.
Always enjoy your responses and I agree with this one 100%. I know not everyone is a fighter. I can admit that I'm not but wish I could. The frustrating thing is where are the fighters for our side? Is Trump and a few brave politicians all we have? We can't just be content with rallies and conventions because the only ones hearing our message is us. The rest have ignored us and dismissed us. I loved Mark saying we should move the line and not just hold it. It's like playing for a tie in football, American or otherwise, by simply defending and not even trying to score. The closer it goes, the less optimistic I am. America was first born from a shot heard around the world. How will it end?
Of course I understand what you are saying here but there are problems with this outlook that need a fuller discussion. Maybe what I am saying will be seen as yet more rationalization but we have to get real about this. Those on the right get plenty of browbeating but little understanding. Much of what they do is not noticed by anyone, even their own media. For simplicity I will generalize that those on the right and those on the left are quite literally from different planets. People on each side are motivated differently, have different objectives, see people differently, and have a different assessment of what's important in life. There are a host of points to make about this and there isn't enough space here to get into it fully. Maybe it can be discussed in smaller bits as the occasions arise. Possibly the most basic point though is that politics is absolutely everything for the leftward oriented. It may mean little or nothing to those who are not leftist in outlook. I think politics has a definition that we have lost sight of. Things that are genuinely political are very few. This is an intuitive reality for most of a conservative bent. The Left, as they do with everything, has totally corrupted our understanding of politics. If we are to put everything in life into a political framework we have already ceded the game to the Left. Politics to the Left is how you make everything happen, but most importantly it is what fills the vacuum when the truth matters nothing to you. Politics quite naturally fills the arts, the sciences, education, the media, and everything else for the Left. Not so the right. A purely political society is a truthless society. If we think we have to function in terms of the premises, rules, and narratives of the Left we can't win. It is their playing field and it is tilted 45 degrees in their favor. President Trump has tried to make government function in terms of what is true and right and all hell has broken loose. He is on the right track though and I think it's probable most people know it. He is still winning.
Another biblical allusion may help. The story of the two women who claimed an infant child to be their own may be useful. Neither could seem to make their case beyond a reasonable doubt so Solomon decided to take a sword and cut the child in half and give each woman a part. That was the "political" part, but politics wasn't the point. The truth was the point and it immediately became clear. There is a principle here.
"A purely political society is a truthless society. If we think we have to function in terms of the premises, rules, and narratives of the Left we can't win. It is their playing field and it is tilted 45 degrees in their favor. President Trump has tried to make government function in terms of what is true and right and all hell has broken loose. He is on the right track though and I think it's probable most people know it. He is still winning."
Todd,
Absolutely brilliant. You've described what I sometimes call the "Harry Potter Fallacy"; the false notion that evil must be defeated by a more cunning counter-evil or "good evil".
President Trump's greatest achievement was that he exposed the Left, and more importantly the impotent Right for what it was. A tiny bit of truth came out and "all hell has broken loose". Evil indeed triumphs when good men do (or say) nothing, but more importantly, evil falls when good men withdraw their support for it. The Left and impotent Right need our support to complete their victory; don't let them have it.
I can hear what you mean, Damien.
A Steyn quote elsewhere reminded me to reply. "Politics is downstream from culture".
I agree with everything you've said, Todd. My point is that the Left politicised and weaponised every aspect of the culture - to their advantage - and we did nothing about it.
"If we think we have to function in terms of the premises, rules, and narratives of the Left we can't win." But we will lose.
PS. Assuming the discussion resumes on a future thread, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about Rod Dreher's book.
On the subject of sacrifice, or the absence of it, by the ruling caste, here is David Lloyd George, to Neville Chamberlain, in the "Norway Debate" (which took place over three days in Westminster, in May, 1940):
"He has appealed for sacrifice. The nation is prepared for every sacrifice so long as it has leadership, so long as the Government show clearly what they are aiming at, and so long as the nation is confident that those who are leading it are doing their best.
"I say solemnly that the Prime Minister should give an example of sacrifice, because there is nothing which can contribute more to victory in this war than that he should sacrifice the seals of office."
Lloyd George shamed himself in the inter-war years, by being taken in by Hitler, but his intervention in the debate was devastating. More famous, but possibly less effective, was a speech by Leo Amery, MP, which he ended with a quotation, possibly not entirely accurate, from Oliver Cromwell:
"You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"
2020 is hindsight.
Good one! Durn, I wish I'd thought of it...
Yeah, one of my co-worker came up with that one early last January. How did he know?
I have a question regarding the so called COVID "relief" bill. Why aren't radical leftists upset they didn't get more out of it? I thought that they wanted reparations? Was their shopping sprees in the summer satisfying enough for them? Do they view their "pain and suffering" to be only worth $600? How can they be content with getting a measly $600 when the Smithsonian gets a billion and the rest of the world gets over $700 billion? I hope that they look very seriously at how this bill treated them and they should view it as a sign of things to come.
It's ironic that they have so many billions to throw to the Smithsonian and the rest of the world when four years ago they were complaining that there wasn't 5 billion to build a wall on the southern border. What a bunch of lying hypocrites we have in Washington, D.C.
What's the Swedish for "Stockholm syndrome," when Stockholm is the only place not exhibiting the symptoms?
My New Year was busy. Working at a casino at "full capacity" along their COVID guidelines for what good that does, I can assure you more people were inside than anywhere else in Minnesota since everything else was shut down. Just waiting for the announcement of sick employees after last night but the response will be "Clearly they celebrated at home and there is no way they got sick here."
When this nation was founded, we wanted a government for the people and by the people so they created the foundation of our nation through the constitution and the bill of rights. The people wanted something that gave them the knowledge that the people were in charge, not the bureaucracy. Our history was filled with people who either fought for those rights or against them. The constitution and the bill of rights is how we define freedom. When they go after our history, they want to erase the concept that America was a free nation under god. Their Marxist ideology wants to replace that history with one that says that the state gives freedom and is perfect. When Mark says "A nation that has no past has no future" I think of the hyper present tense state of an Orwellian novel. Your past, present, and future are all the same. To say you have a future means that things will get better for you but in a totalitarian system, what you have now is as good as it's gonna get for you and the same thing for your children and generations to come. How many people leave their home nations just to go to a country where the state determines their destiny? The only reason why people don't like freedom is because freedom isn't free and no one wants to pay the price to be free. Antietam, was the ground for the bloodiest battle America has ever had. If the left has their way, that battle will be forgotten and the memory of the Americans on both sides of that conflict will be lost as well.
HNY - and maintain the rage, Brian.
PS. Looking at comments by Senator Ben Sasse (R), the wickedness of the GOP side of the Uniparty knows no bounds. See: "Adults don't point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government" – Ben Sasse attacks Republicans who plan to object on Jan 6th - (The Right Scoop).
Staying strong and keeping the hope. All we have left now I guess. Thanks Kate.
I stand in defense of the year 2020; I can do no other. What is a year but the period of the earth's orbit of the sun? How can a year, much less a season or a day, be guilty of a crime? A date may "live in infamy" owing only to the wicked acts performed on its watch. December 7, 1941 didn't bomb Pearl Harbor, the Japanese did; 2020 didn't commit the unspeakable acts of which it is unjustly charged. Here's who did.
Xi Jinping: No. 1 with a bullet, or so we can hope. We may call him "Xi Who Must Be Obeyed" or "Chairman Eleven", but "The Man From Carbuncle" is no cuddly Pooh Bear—and there's a cot in a concentration camp in Xinjiang if you disagree. More than two million people will have died by the time The Chinese Year of the Rat yields to the Ox. Xi saw to that by grounding domestic flights while permitting hundreds to thousands of infected people to scatter across the globe. He knew what he was doing, else why quarantine Wuhan city and Hubei Province? Who can say why Xi deliberately poisoned the people of the earth, but I would note that China's was the only economy in the world to grow in 2020, and is now on pace to surpass the US as the largest economy by 2028, five years earlier than thought.
Andrew Cuomo: Figurehead for all governors who sent old people suffering from a disease fatal almost entirely to old people to live among old people, nobody did it better. Nobody boasted about it more, wrote a book about it, accepted more accolades and awards. Nobody was a greater asshat than the 10-gallon Stetson of asshattery.
Bill de Blasio: Few if any corpses lie at his feet, but it takes a special kind of evil to weaponize the ChiCom virus (Xi-ngles) against the Jews, as he did and continues to do. Maybe an interloper here, but I just hate the guy.
"Dr." Tedros: He's more of a doctor than "Dr." Jill Biden, in that he studied biology and infectious diseases, but still not a MD. When Xi needed cover as his genocide revealed itself, who was he going to call but Dr. Tedros? Who can say why Tedros lied to the world, leaving it vulnerable to pandemic, but I note from his own Wikipedia entry that his political affiliations have long been to the Left of the Left, and that Ethiopia's alliance with China dates back 50 years.
You can submit your own rogues, scoundrels, and jackanapes, but my word count runs short. Just remember that we toasted 2020 when it was but a pup, and do ourselves no credit by kicking it to the curb in old age. These villains still rule.
The chinese economy will surpass the U.S. sooner if biden is sworn in. A harris/biden administration will ensure the collapse of the dollar. Then all bets are off. With economic collapse will come social turmoil. The left have been stoking this kind of destruction for America for a long time. God defend us!
Mark, I may be able to ease your mind concerning the Covid shutdowns. In fact, I have a commercial here where I live that answers the question. Done by a local hospital, this is one of those commercials that features numerous people looking into the camera and repeating the same phrase. Nothing more persuasive than that, right?
So, in this commercial, various healthcare workers wearing masks look into the cameras and say: "It's not forever... it's not forever... it's not forever... it's not forever... it's not forever...... it's for each other... it's for each other... it's for each other... it's for each other... it's for each other."
Happy New Year! Although I realize now that sharing that will have everybody thinking you drank too much for New Year's Eve when you vomit profusely, like I want to do every time I see this commercial.
It's too bad masks are not as effective as wishes.
Brilliant, W.