Slaps In The Face

     The first is an open-handed one. Quoth Baron Bodissey:

     Anyone who is forced to accept the farcical results from Pennsylvania is being grievously humiliated. Some people may really believe that the vote in the Keystone State was truly free and aboveboard, and that John Fetterman won fair and square (the gents at Power Line may fall into that category; I’m not sure). But most know they have been had.
     Anyone who has any significant political profile, however, will be disinclined to express his opinion in public; otherwise he might draw the attention of Homeland Security, and be summoned to sweat through an interview with a couple of FBI agents in a claustrophobic little room.
     For all dissidents in the political class, this is total humiliation. They will feel compelled to affirm that the Lie is true.

     I’m forced to agree. But the next slap is with a baseball bat:

     MSNBC host Katy Tur speculated on Wednesday that Pennsylvania Senator-Elect John Fetterman could run for the presidency someday.
     Fetterman’s victory against Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz provided Democrats a flipped Senate seat on Tuesday, in which several MSNBC panelists praised him for bringing new leadership tactics to the Democratic Party.
     Tur floated the viability of, “Fetterman, as a nominee at some point for president,” before later going on to say that his record for surpassing President Biden and former President Trump’s vote share in the state….
     Tur went one step above praising his performance as a candidate for Senate, suggesting he could aim for the presidency but acknowledged there are “some variables.”
     “I know there’s some variables, obviously, but I just, you know, what he did in the super-red, deep-red parts of Pennsylvania and the way that he ran ahead of Biden, ran ahead of Trump, and it makes you wonder about his future,” she said.

     I was calm and collected before I read that.

     If you’re not yet homicidally enraged, check your pulse: you may have died and not noticed.

     We already have a dementia sufferer who can’t climb stairs reliably, remember other people’s names, or read the words on a teleprompter as president of the United States. Now we have a man with brain damage so severe that he can’t understand spoken English – or reply in coherent sentences – who after January 3 will sit in the United States Senate. These are not separate infamies; they’re threads of the same cloth. Above and apart from all else, they carry a message:

     Theodore Dalrymple has told us that the core tactic of the tyrant who seeks absolute submission from his subjects is humiliation:

     In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

     While no tyrant has stepped forward to confirm or contest Dalrymple’s analysis, it seems correct nevertheless. The elevation of Joe Biden and John Fetterman to their positions is as brutal a humiliation as a free people has ever suffered. It’s the greatest insult our political class could possibly have dealt us.

     Where’s the fury? We absorb slap after slap with nothing but a few pixels of protest. The Figurehead-in-Chief commits violation upon violation of his Constitutional duties and constraints, and no one does a thing to rein him in. Now we have a U.S. Senator-elect who’s so mentally impaired that he’ll need a stenographer to understand Senatorial floor exchanges. (Will he dare to speak to that august body himself?) The Democrats are slavering at the prospect of absolute and unending power; the Republicans are ball-less wonders, desperate merely to retain their positions at the feed-trough.

     And we continue to sit idle.

     The foundations of our free republic were:

• Faith: the guide to right action that trumps Man’s laws.
• Family: the binding element that makes stability possible.
• Community: the mutual support that gets us through tough times.

     Our faith has been eroded by the secularization of our educational systems and our entertainment media. Our families have been undermined by youth culture, sexual libertinism, and no-fault divorce. Our communities have been atomized by materialism, the loss of employer-employee loyalty, and the inculcation of pervasive fear and distrust. How could we imagine that freedom and justice are still possible, now that those things are gone?

     They who rule over us know that we have degraded. They feel safe dealing out the most blatant insults to us. They’re confident that we’ll take whatever slaps they deliver with no more than a feeble cry of protest.

     I could go on. On other occasions I might. But not today. Today is for mourning the loss of what we had: our just pride in ourselves as a free and self-respecting people. It wasn’t taken from us; we let it fall from our hands. Whether we can regain it, I cannot say.