The stapler
In my continuing and frustrating efforts to renew my passport, I finally resorted to trying to do it by mail. I had to get still another photo taken; will this one pass muster? The instructions were to staple it with four staples (placed in a certain required configuration) to the application.
That made me wonder whether I even possess a stapler anymore. The last time I used it might have been twenty years ago. It might have been longer ago. I have no idea, but it seemed a quaint thing, like paper money.
But there it was, in a desk drawer exactly where it should be. A box of staples was there, too, but it turns out the stapler was already loaded – which was a good thing because I’ve probably forgotten how to load one, too.
And it worked just fine. Nice.
Vance: the election was about the war and Israel
J. D. Vance is intent on putting daylight between himself and the policies that led to Tuesday’s results. He’s been hinting for a long time at being Tucker lite, and his comments were in line with that: he blames the Iran war for the loss.
As discussed at Legal Insurrection, he conveniently leaves his own role out:
I would argue that Vance’s overriding faith in diplomacy left him naive about the terrorists who run Iran. The administration pursued negotiations with people who either had no intention of honoring their commitments or lacked the authority to speak for the IRGC leaders calling the shots.
I believe that had the U.S. and Israel stayed the course militarily, the war would have ended by now. Instead, the diplomatic approach Vance championed has, in my judgment, prolonged the conflict.
I would agree with that analysis.
Plus, from what I’ve seen regarding exit polls, the economy was a far more important factor than the Iran war in driving the dismal results of the election. Now, it’s true that gas prices – which affect other prices – rose as a result of the war (although not solely the war). But that’s not really upset about the war itself, although that exists too especially in those who consider that Trump promised that even a military action such as the one against Iran would not be happening.
Vance also said we need to “change our relationship to Israel.” He certainly doesn’t mean to get closer to Israel. I see this as a winning proposition with the Buchanan-esque Tucker-esque part of the right as well as the left, but Vance certainly isn’t going to win elections by appealing to leftists. He seems to think this is his best approach, however.
I can only imagine that the mullahs and the IRGC are as happy as clams over this election and over Vance’s remarks. Some people think Trump has some sort of mop-up operation in mind before the new Congress is installed. I tend to doubt it, but it’s certainly possible.
It seems to me that another message Vance gives is that the US isn’t going to fight any wars. The Iran war isn’t like any other US war of which I’m aware: virtually no troops and almost no casualties. If we can’t tolerate a “war” like that, we have become a fangless nation.
I suppose if there were to be an actual literal invasion of the US, or if a nuclear weapon destroyed a US city, we’d fight. But I don’t think that sort of “invasion” or war is likely. No, I think we’re seeing the invasion already and we will continue to see it. The border will become permeable again. And we will have more elected officials like El-Sayed and the leftists who are united with him.
First up on the Democrats’ agenda: revenge
I said “first up,” but it’s perhaps second and third and fourth up, too. It’s what a great many voters want, and the Democrats will do their best to deliver it.
Something similar was true with the Biden victory in 2020, and J6 was used to justify it. Don’t forget that it was reasonable to think that, instead of being elected president in 2024, Trump would be wearing an orange jumpsuit by that time.
But I think the potential for damage is worse now and probably far worse. Back then – even though the Democrats also had the presidency – their Senate margin was small enough that moderates such as Sinema and Manchin were still able to stop the drive for permanent power. I think some people forget that back then Congress tried (and narrowly failed) to pass the same things people on the right are worried about now: packing the Court, nationalizing relaxed rules for voting, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico.
But now, nothing stands in their way except Trump, and the idea is that he’ll be gone in two years at most and a Democrat president will be giving the green light to those measures.
At this point, much of the electorate has become even more vicious and filled with hatred – witness the reaction to Charlie Kirk’s murder as well as that of Brian Thompson and several others who had aroused the ire of the leftist social media crew and therefore deserved to die. Their deaths were openly celebrated by the left and even by many “ordinary” Democrats.
I’ve written before (can’t find it at the moment) that the Trump near-assassination and the Kirk assassination were bookends of a sort. Trump’s close call seemed to start a good cycle for him and the right that culminated in his 2024 election. But Kirk’s death started a different and much darker cycle that persists to this day, a time in which violence and hatred on the left flourish and are flaunted and celebrated and rewarded electorally, and the right is riven by discord and to a certain extent even by Jew-hatred (that latter sentiment is legion on the left).
All of that has led to these election results, and the Democrats’ plan is to fully vent their spleen and gain permanent power rather than lose it in 2028 or ever again. The “burn it down” folks on the right don’t seem to mind.
There’s also – as I wrote in this recent post – the phenomenon of Trump fatigue, which I feel is widespread and even affects many of his previous supporters:
As for the right, why does it appear that a great many people are turning on Trump? After all, much of what he’s done in his second term has been effective, and the Democrats seem so very very much worse.
Some of it is objection to certain policies like the Iran war (in which very very few Americans have been killed or hurt), and of course the problem with “affordability.” But I believe a fair amount of it is from what I’ll call Trump fatigue. What was once fresh and new is neither anymore.
Think about it – Trump first was elected ten years ago, and if all goes well there are two more years to go. That’s twelve years. Yes, Biden was president for four years in between. But Trump was nevertheless a huge presence and even an obsession during those four years. The pause has actually lengthened the amount of time Trump has dominated the scene. People are fickle.
Apparently much of the vote was driven not just by general anger but by anger and frustration at something very specific which the Democrats recognized early on and relentlessly hammered home their message on it: lack of “affordability.” For now let’s leave aside the question of just how much people are truly suffering economically and assume that they are suffering and that it hits younger people harder. I can understand that, if that’s your perception and your experience, you might be angry at the GOP for not fixing things. But why would you think that Democrats would? Or is rhetoric enough?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this election reminds me of the 2024 election in Britain in which the populace threw the ineffectual Tories out and installed the left. How’s that working out?
Open thread 11/5/2026
A post-election comment sampler
Here are a bunch of blog comments I found at Ace’s that I think are interesting although I don’t necessarily agree with them and certainly not totally.
In no particular order:
It has little to do with never Trump. It has to do with human nature history.
The border is sealed. The economy is booming. China is out of Venezuela and Cuba. Iran is a no longer a threat and is now a failed state.
We wanted all of these things. And we got them. So why vote Cause they can’t possibly be reversed.
The Party in power always loses in midterms. Not hard to look up. Cause why vote when you are winning? Human nature never changes.
This makes no sense to me. Dems took the evil side of every 80-20 issue, R registrations far outpaced D, people have been abandoning woke, Dems have been threatening their fellow Americans, Trump has reversed the Biden administration’s abuses against Americans, Dems have lost funding for their riots and other nefarious doings, crime is down, inflation is down, employment is up …
What is going on?
People are upset over everything being expensive, so they are putting the people who caused it back in power?
Make it make sense!
I’m not going to analyze the results in detail today. Maybe some other time, when we learn more about what blocs of voters voted for what.
My initial impressions are that Hispanic voters – who voted for Trump and the GOP in 2024 – veered to the left in this election. I’m not sure exactly what the motive was. Also, the Democrats’ emphasis on “affordability” was brilliant and they hammered it home. They didn’t have to explain what they would do to fix it; it was enough to talk about it and hope that people’s short memories would mean they had forgotten the Biden years (and the gas prices and sky-high inflation during some of those years, as well).
Calling Iran a “forever war” about a month after it started was another factor, and the Tuckeresque right was very instrumental in disseminating that message as well, despite the fact that it’s been a war in which there have been very very few American casualties and pretty much no boots on the ground, against an implacable enemy that’s done much damage all around the world for almost fifty years. No matter. A lot of people on the right feel that Trump broke one of the promises on which they had relied, and that it’s the fault of his listening to the nefarious Jews.
Now what? A personal note
Even before yesterday’s election, I was feeling down. As regular readers know, I’ve been reeling from the death of my ex-husband, and in connection with that I’ve also been very occupied with sad legal tasks and practical and sometimes overwhelming chores like going through his things and clearing out his home. My son and my grandchildren live far far away. And several of my friends are very ill, and I mean very.
My ex probably would have been able to joke me out of my funk at yesterday’s election results, at least for a moment. He’d been making me laugh for almost sixty years. But now he’s gone, and it’s been very hard.
I have no intention of stopping the blog. However, I had already been thinking about writing somewhat less about politics and more about other things. I’m not really sure that I’ll be writing less about politics. I’ll just go with how I feel, day by day.
The day after
As I wrote last night, the results are even worse than expected. And what was expected was already bad.
The whole debacle reminds me somewhat of the 2024 British election, the one that put Keir Starmer in the driver’s seat because the voters were mad at the conservatives who’d been in power. Afterwards voters had some buyer’s remorse but they couldn’t do very much about it except substitute another PM of the same party.
For years the left has been foaming with rage at everything Trump does, but a large number of voters on the right are also angry at Trump and the GOP for this or that or the other thing, whether it be the war in Iran (despite the very low number of US casualties), the high price of gas and real estate, or the failure to pass the SAVE Act.
And when in doubt, blame the Jews. As Tom Lehrer sang long ago:
Trump is still president, though, since we don’t have a parliamentary system. If we did, he’d be out. He also will have veto power for the next two years. However, the Democrats will do what they can to stymie and undermine everything he attempts: his war efforts in Iran, his support of Israel, his judicial appointments, you name it.
Will they try impeaching him once again? Of course. But as with previous impeachments, I don’t think there’s much chance there will be the requisite 67 Senate votes for removal. That would require a lot of Republican cooperation.
It’s not just that Democrats won yesterday. It’s the large margin of victory by which they won, even in some red states. Talarico, for example, in Texas, seems to have won by twelve points. Paxton was a weakened candidate, to be sure. But twelve points? In Texas? Democrats have been saying for years that they will turn Texas blue; have they finally done it? Was it an influx of Californians?
And even Susan Collins, who usually manages to defy the polls, could not win against Troy Jackson, who was far from a stellar candidate. The quality of the Democrats didn’t matter, for the most part. All that mattered was having a “D” after their names.
Some people are saying it will be good for voters to experience the awful things Congressional Democrats will do. However, it occurs to me that, because Trump is still president and will veto the leftist bills Congress passes, the Democrats will not have to take responsibility for much of anything they try. They can say they would have accomplished wonderful things but evil Trump thwarted them, and so if voters elect a Democrat for president in 2028 all will be well.
And then – watch out if they get both houses of Congress and the presidency in 2028. Maybe it won’t work out that way because life is unpredictable. But right now I’m not seeing anything that’s cause for optimism.
I think the most basic problem is that the Gramscian march through the institutions has been successful, and the internet and especially social media have helped it along tremendously. Younger voters in particular are affected by this.
This feels like the worst election of my lifetime, by far. Maybe I just don’t quite remember the others. But this feels irreversible, I think in part because the Democrats of today are different than the Democrats of the past. They intend to make it impossible for the right to ever win elections again. They’ve done it in states like California, and they intend to do it on a national level now.
I certainly hope they don’t succeed. But so far we have failed to heed this admonition:
Open thread 11/4/2026
Election night results
I’m probably going to stay away from listening to or reading news for at least a little while. I want to try to relax. But yes, I’ll be planning to come back and update later tonight.
Here’s a thread for you hardy ones to discuss it all.
UPDATE 11:15 PM:
It seems at least as bad as expected. Perhaps worse.
I’m not going to get into the details tonight. Too depressing, although expected.
The pollsters must be feeling vindicated, though.
One thing I’ve noticed over the years I’ve been blogging – something that you can very much count on – is that when there’s a bad night for conservatives the trolls come out to celebrate and mock. This has already happened here, but the new comment system has made it more difficult for them.
Oh, and at least the political spam phone calls I’ve been getting will stop.
On ending aid to Israel
I started to notice serious talk about the US cutting aid to Israel not long after 10/7 – and this was on the Israeli side. They realized that depending on the US for Israel’s arms was dangerous, although it might have been an okay idea back when US support for Israel was bipartisan.
Now US support for Israel no longer is bipartisan, and that became obvious during the Biden administration – or actually it started to be obvious with Obama. Now it’s even more true, because there is significant anti-Israel sentiment on the right as well, although nowhere near as much as on the left.
So it’s in Israel’s interest to become even more militarily self-sufficient.
No more aid to Israel would seem to rob the Israel-haters and Jew-haters of a talking point, but not really. First of all, they will lie, and second of all, they have plenty of other anti-Israel talking points to lie about. There’s an almost insatiable appetite for such things.
But anyway, Trump made this announcement today:
“We give them more than anybody else, and they no longer need it. We’ve been doing it for years. I’ve been doing it, but Israel is a very thriving country. They don’t need it. If they did need it, I would say keep it going.”
The president said the idea came from Netanyahu himself, suggesting that the agreement was also made to stop Democrats from using US funding to Israel as ammunition to criticize Republicans. …
“Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like El-Sayed?” he asked, referring to Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed. who has made Israel aid a flagship issue of his campaign.
“You take that off the table,” Trump said. …
Netanyahu has been publicly pushing to end the aid since at least January, when he told The Economist he hoped Israel could stop relying on American military funding entirely within a decade. By May, he was telling CBS’ “60 Minutes” that he didn’t “want to wait for the next Congress.”
Days before Israel’s Oct. 27 election, he went further, telling Israel’s Channel 10 that the aid “won’t keep coming because America has changed, not because Israel has. It’s over and it will be over; it’s just a question of time.”
That conforms to what I recall in the post-10/7 world. But of course, as I said, it won’t stop the haters.
NOTE: The bulk of that four billion comes back to the US anyway because it has been used to buy our arms (the haters conveniently leave that out). There’s a long post at Ace’s today on the entire subject that I recommend reading.
Election Day thoughts on stupid voters
[NOTE: I plan to put up a new post after the polls in the east close, one for Election Night.]
Here’s food for thought – “Stupid Voters Are the Biggest Threat to America”:
What worries me are voters. Sadly, many of them are stupid. And angry. …
We have millions of Americans heading to the polls who believe socialism will make their lives more affordable. That price controls and government takeover of private industry will ease inflation and cure what ails capitalism, so abhorrent to their central planning sensibilities. …
“If a majority of Americans think that socialism is the right path, well the American experiment is over in a sense. It would be very, very difficult to recover from that. That’s a multi-generational recovery kind of thing,” Charles Steele, director of the Center for Commerce and Freedom at Hillsdale College, told me on a recent episode of The Federalist Radio Hour.
Yes, of course there are plenty of stupid voters on the left. And there are also many stupid voters on the right – for example, a significant number of those who follow and admire Tucker Carlson and are bona fide isolationist Buchananite “conservatives.”
As I said, plenty of stupid voters – but there are also plenty of misguided voters (who tend to land on the left) who’ve been fed a steady diet of leftist propaganda all or much of their lives. They are not necessarily stupid at all. Some are actually very smart, and I know plenty of Democrats in the latter category.
The author of that piece I linked goes on to acknowledge this:
How did we get here? Ignorance. Willful ignorance.
From pre-K through grad school, America’s education system has failed America and the American Dream in many ways. None more so than in sweetening socialism and poisoning capitalism in the minds of the last few generations of voters. Marxist critical theory — oppressors vs. the oppressed — dogma has indoctrinated millions to believe that socialism can work if only done right, failure after failure notwithstanding.
The media and social media are right up there as agents in this, with some foreign players in the mix (for example those behind TikTok).
But are the stupid more susceptible to this sort of indoctrination? That’s not what I’m seeing out there. Orwell’s famous remark in his essay “Notes on Nationalism” was this:
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
It’s often been misquoted/paraphrased as something like “Some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual would believe them,” which captures more or less the same idea.
But remember something. Orwell was a brilliant man, and an insightful one. But to his dying day he was a socialist. I wrote about that phenomenon in this 2014 post. An excerpt:
Orwell was a brilliant man, and he struggled to reconcile his wish for a certain type of world with his knowledge that such a world could probably never come to be as he wished it. Much of his writing was devoted to the horrors of failed attempts to achieve that world. …
It is my opinion that Orwell came very close to understanding that his vision of a planned economy plus freedom could not come to pass, that the contradiction was basic, and that socialism would always sow the seeds of its own destruction. I just think he couldn’t fully face and embrace that knowledge because to do so would have meant renouncing a lifelong dream. So he clung to some notion of a kinder gentler socialism without the totalitarianism, while at the same time he wrote tirelessly about the evils of Communism.
Also, in this 2008 post of mine I quote Orwell in 1937’s The Road to Wigan Pier:
One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker. nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.
Was Orwell a time-traveler?
But yes, he remained a socialist anyway because the dream dies hard.