WHAT WOULD MACHIAVELLI SAY ABOUT GEORGIA AND DONALD TRUMP?

 

10/29/21

The GOP loss of the Senate in Georgia back in January through the sheer ineptitude and self-obsession of Donald Trump has been roundly and nearly unanimously regarded as a huge political blow to the Republican Party.  As the monumental Democratic overreach of a spending bill currently called “Build Back Better” wends its way through the legislative sausage making process, yours truly has concluded that, at least from the GOP’s political perspective, losing the Senate may have been an admittedly heavily disguised blessing.

If Donald Trump had not suppressed the GOP vote in Georgia through his self-centered pouting about his “stolen” re-election bid and the GOP won at least one of those two seats, the Republicans would now have been in control of the Senate.   President Biden and his fellow travelers in Congress would not have even considered such a monumental reshaping of the American economy and society as that contemplated in the “Build Back Better” program; such a program would have been, to use a vastly overused expression of the last, oh, thirty years or so, dead on arrival in the Senate.   The President’s, and his Party’s, aspirations would thus have to be throttled back a notch or seven to a program that would have been far more modest in its aspirations and thus far more acceptable to the American voting public, or at least that portion of the American voting public that constitutes the “middle” and decides elections.   Democratic prospects in 2022 and in 2024 would thus be far rosier than they appear to be at the moment, with a public that just wanted to get rid of Donald Trump facing the prospect of a vast, expensive, and unprecedented remaking of American society by a party with the barest of majorities.   So, from a political perspective, which is the only perspective that seems to matter to those who hold virtual lifelong sinecures in Washington and insist on calling themselves public servants, the Republicans should be delighted that they were able to provide only a modest check on the lascivious ambitions of the Democrats, and that only with the help of a couple of apparently sober Democrats.

From a policy perspective, of course, Donald Trump’s undermining his own Party by means of his customary childish fit of pique has been a disaster.   Without his suppression of the Republican vote, the GOP would have held the Senate and President Biden thus would have been forced to deal with the Republicans when crafting legislation, which thus would have been far more modest in its ambitions and therefore more cognizant of seemingly bygone considerations like market economics and political consensus that have done so much to make this country great.   Further, one does not have to have libertarian instincts to realize that the country historically has done better when the government is divided; think, in recent memory, of the Reagan/O’Neill collaboration of the ‘80s and the Clinton/Gingrich collaboration of the ‘90s.   Things are better when neither Party is in complete charge, which says a lot about human nature and the character of those who rule, er, sorry, govern us.

What also says a lot about the character of the people who govern us is that a lot of Republicans, once they figure this out, will probably be agreeing with me that losing the Senate was probably a good thing because, after all, it gives their Party a chance to avoid self-immolation and pick up at least one of the houses of Congress in 2022 and, maybe, the White House in 2024.  And what could possibly be more important to our public servants than their own career prospects?

QUINN ON LORI LIGHTFOOT, RETROACTIVE TAX INCREASES, THE OUTFIT, AND PEDRO MARTINEZ

 

10/29/21

 

Now that I have started writing for this blog again (See today’s other post.) after a five-month absence, I thought I’d amalgamate some letters I have written to various newspapers over the last few months for my readers’ convenience and, of course, reading pleasure:

 

 

 

 

I wrote this letter to the Chicago Sun-Times back in September after Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago School Board selected Pedro Martinez, a man with no teaching background, to run the Chicago Public Schools.  The letter was published on 9/19/21:

 

 

9/14/21

 

In the wake of the selection of Pedro Martinez to head the Chicago Public Schools, politicians and others who opine for a living go immediately to Mr. Martinez’s ethnicity, pondering whether it is a good thing for CPS, and/or for the Mayor’s political fortunes, for a Latino to be in charge of the city’s schools.   What serious people think would be a more relevant question, i.e., whether it is a good thing for a man who does not have an education degree and has never held a teaching position to head the CPS, pales to the point of insignificance when compared to the only trait that seems to matter about anybody nowadays, i.e., his or her race or ethnicity.

 

The debate regarding Mr. Martinez’s qualifications is yet another instance of the ironic failure of those who most piously profess to oppose racism to see anything beyond race.

 

 

 

 

I wrote the following letter, on one of my favorite subjects, to the Wall Street Journal back in July as the growing crime wave in Chicago achieved even greater prominence as a national story.  It was published on August 5:

 

 

7/31/21

 

Congratulations to Joseph Epstein (“Crime is No Longer a Family Business in Chicago,” Opinion, 7/31/21) for committing the dual effronteries of calling for vigorous law enforcement as a remedy for the crime that plagues our hometown and for pointing out that the disabling of the Outfit was not an unmitigated positive for our city.

 

Federal prosecutors crippled the Outfit with a series of high-profile trials over the last thirty or so years, the most salient of which was the Family Secrets trial in 2007, which resulted in nearly the entire upper echelon of the Outfit, including Joey “The Clown” Lombardo, Frank Calabrese, Sr., and James Marcello going away for effective or actual life sentences.    Perhaps the prosecutors were overcome with naïve notions of the perfectibility of man that have become so popular of late.  More likely they were just doing their jobs and doing them well.  However, if they and those who cheered them on thought the result of their efforts would be an abatement of crime in Chicago, they were sorely mistaken or at least obviously disappointed.   The disabling of the Outfit in Chicago, and of the broader Mob throughout the country, has resulted not in less crime but, instead, in the replacement of organized crime with disorganized crime.  

 

 

 

 

I wrote this letter to the Wall Street Journal back in June when, in one of the early iterations of its schemes to grab more money from workers, investors and other productive types, the Biden Administration proposed a retroactive income tax increase.  The missive was published on June 7:

 

6/1/21

 

Not only is the Biden Administration’s plan to make its income tax increases retroactive (“A Retroactive Tax Increase, 5/29/21) bad fiscal and financial policy, it makes no sense if the objective of the tax increase is, as the Biden Administration claims, to raise revenue rather than to punish the successful, as many suspect.

 

A prospective tax increase would, if history, common sense, and human nature are to serve as guides, result in a flurry of stock sales before the imposition of the tax increase as investors sell to avoid pending confiscatory rates.   Those sales, of course, would result in a windfall of capital gains tax revenue for the federal government at, ironically only to the naïve, the pre-increase rates.  A retroactive tax increase provides no such opportunities for tax avoidance selling and hence no resultant windfall for the federal government.

 

 

 

 

 

I wrote this letter to the Wall Street Journal in May after Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that she would do one-on-one interviews only with journalists of color.  It wasn’t published, but it should have been:

 

5/21/21

 

There is a profound irony that the Wall Street Journal missed in its Review & Outlook piece on Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s recent declaration that “I will be exclusively providing one-on-one interviews with journalists of color.”   (“Racism at Chicago’s City Hall,” 5/21/21)   This declaration came from a mayor who did not carry a single black ward in the February, 2019 first round of Chicago’s mayoral election.   While Mayor Lightfoot trounced the hapless Toni Preckwinkle in the run-off with decent, though not overwhelming, Black support, she got into the run-off on the strength of her vote in the trendy, “progressive” wards on the near north side.   Not only are these wards overwhelmingly White and at least relatively wealthy, but they are also the types of places in which the White reporters she has now excluded from one-on-one interviews live. 

 

Maybe the Mayor is bent on political suicide, and who would blame her for wanting to at least figuratively get out of town, given the hopelessness of the job she now holds?   A better bet, though, is that Mayor Lightfoot feels that the “progressive” voters who put her in office are sufficiently cowed by actual or potential charges of “racism” that she can count on their support in 2023.