2014 midterms were a beginning, I hope


It is premature to say that the American electorate has awoken. They still don't seem fully to understand that they are being bribed with their own money. They still switch on the TV news. They send their kids off to socialist indoctrination at school, or something that is too near it for comfort.

Still, anti-Obama sentiment carried Republicans to substantial victories yesterday. An interesting snippet from the Internet news sphere notes that all of the successful GOP Senate candidates campaigned against Obamacare.

Obama is offering defiance to the Republicans, post election, threatening vetoes and executive orders. He is so completely the blind ideologue that he cannot imagine that he is not in the right: he deeply believes that his ideas naturally reflect the right way forward. What the Democrats need to live down, and they may never manage to do it, is that they went lockstep with this guy's every whim, every dream, every half baked idea for six whole years. Then they pretended that they were not Team Obama when the election came around, and ran away from their President. O-who? Never heard of him! America's voters more readily forgive liars than fools, which is why the Democrats got as far as they did, over the decades, and why they lost big this time.

Upset victories in midterm elections are not uncommon, and it remains to be seen whether Republicans are smart enough to make this victory stick in 2016 and beyond. To keep their momentum they need to deliver on what they said: turn back the tide of rising Obamunism. Everybody knows how Obama created a disaster with health care 'reforms,' entitlements and debt, crony deals, government intrusions and overreach and general sneakiness. But are the Republicans gutsy enough to substantially undo those things before the next election? At the very least they need to make trying to do so a battle royal, if they are to sustain their credibility.

------------------
Update: From the retrospective perspective  (retroperspective?) of 2015 things look rather different.

Image

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A moldy oldie review: The Singlepoint sight

Image
"I don't know just what it is, but I'll let you have it cheap." So said the fellow at the gun show, and that is how I came to have this thing in my collection. The Singlepoint is an ancestor of today's red dot sights. It created a stir back in the seventies. It was discussed in the English  Parliament . Its moment of fame came on the Son Tay  raid in the Vietnam war. It even got writeups in  Popular Mechanics  and  Popular Science , honors reserved for things that were maximally cool. By modern standards, though, it's a pathetic gunsight. It was a good try for its time, no doubt. It is an occluded eye gunsight (OEG), meaning you can't see through it. When you look in the end you see a black field with a red dot floating in it. You look at the target with your other eye and your brain merges the two images into one. Thus, you see the red dot superimposed upon the target. Well, sort of. It doesn't work perfectly. The effects of  pho...
Read more

Classic gun review: First generation Thompson Center Contender

Image
Including a pictorial on how to change barrels The Contender is a break action single shot. You can set up the gun as a pistol or carbine, depending on your tastes. Barrels are interchangeable and available in many calibers. The gun reviewed is an older model, made in the seventies. There is a more recent "G2" second generation model with numerous changes to the mechanism. In between the early model shown and the present G2, there were several variations in parts and design, most significantly a redesign of the barrel latch to make the gun easier to open. The review gun lacks the easy-open feature. More about that later. The Contender figured in a  Supreme Court case , which established that having a pistol and parts to convert it to a rifle did not amount to possession of an illegal short barreled rifle. Thus in a small way the Contender has a place in gun rights history. Of course, it is still illegal to assemble the pistol barrel to a receiver which ...
Read more

The Williams Foolproof sight -- it really is!

Image
I have these classic micrometer peep sights on two rifles, at present, and they are good gear! This type of sight has been around approximately forever. The company makes numerous versions to fit a great many firearms. On some guns you will need a taller front sight when you install a peep sight but this is by no means true of all. It used to be old graybeards would look at my peep sighted rifle, nod approvingly and say to me, "See ya got a Foolproof. Good, good..." Now I am the graybeard saying that to younger folks. There is a great deal to approve of. The windage and elevation settings are finely adjustable. They ride on screw shafts and the setting have countable clicks and a visible index. Adjustments are supposed to be in minutes of angle and fractions, but of course that will vary with the length of the barrel, as a matter of simple geometry. Since I have this sight on a rifle that is longer than normal, and on another one shorter than normal, nothing works out to ev...
Read more