THE DEMOCRATS RHETORICAL LOOPS

Ken Grossberger, PhD

In order to make excuses for their failed policies, the Democrats, and their Not-So-Mainstream- Media allies, have, either in coordination or due to some neurotic impulse to repeat their word or phrase for the day, routinely blurted out responses in reaction to criticism of their positions. Once that word or phrase is spoken by a leader, by the White House, or by some other lefty forum, the talking heads all start saying the same thing.

Remember the increases in energy costs due to Biden’s policy decisions? It was called the “Putin Price Hike.” And Biden’s deflection from the Democrats’ failures in Congress blaming the GOP? He said, “this is not your father’s Republican party.” And Biden’s flip on soaring inflation? He whispered, “Bidenomics is working.” And the multiple catchphrases repeated by his Homeland Security Secretary and others, “the immigration system is broken” and “the border is secure”, and not to forget “the border is closed.”

This constant repetition, with the presumptive force of rhetoric, perhaps satisfies the base, but further antagonizes the political right, and frankly puzzles the political center. Each of these lines is severely challenged by facts and believability. To whom are they speaking? They can only win their base once; the right and the center just aren’t buying into these. This not-so-subtle attempt at deflection is mawkishly transparent at best and ludicrous at worst.

Repeating nonsense doesn’t make it less nonsensical. Perhaps it satisfies having said it, perhaps it reassures when it is repeated, but it surely insults when measured against reality. The White House and the Democrats get stuck in these rhetorical loops because quite often they have no other answers.

The Challenge of Catholic Education in Challenged Times

Ken Grossberger, PhD

Generation Z comprises a group of Americans born around 1997 and after, meaning they are about 27 years old or younger (Dimock, 2019). They are going in a direction much different than their parents and grandparents, as one study reports that almost half of that generation supports socialism (Acton.org, 2020). This requires more analysis and definition, but this may be due, in part, to the automated tech world they are growing up in, the instant news cycles, and the dependence on cell phone and technology. But somehow the values of prior generations have been, to some extent, filtered or ignored. A concerning observation as we have learned that values and customs typically are socialized from one generation to the next.

Concurrent with this development, Catholic school enrollment has been dropping. A plurality of private school student enrollment in the United States (elementary and secondary) is within the Catholic church (about 38% in 2015 according to the National Center for Education Statistics (n.d.). Yet the number of Catholic school students has been decreasing over the years, from 2,647,301 total enrollment in 2001 to 1,878,824 total enrollment in 2017, a 41% drop over that time period (National Center for Education Statistics, 2, n.d.).

The correlational denominator between these two phenomena is American social values. As Boland (2009) states, the purpose of Catholic school education is to “to build community, not just as a concept to be taught but as a reality to be lived; and to serve all mankind, which emanate(s) from a sense of Christian community” (from Carper & Hunt, 1984. p. 15). She infers that the observations of educator Michael O’Neill explain the experience of Catholic education: “when people in a school share a certain intentionality, a certain pattern or complex of values, understandings, sentiments, hopes, and dreams, it deeply conditions everything else that goes on….”. Boland (2009) further states that the recent downward attendance trend in Catholic schools suggests that “in the 21st century the greatest challenge for Catholic schools will be to maintain faith as their focal point and service as their manner of speaking as society around them continues to adjust to a revolutionary age of human achievement and self-focus.”

Yet much of American youth seems to have carved out a different path, with divergent, and apparently, competing values, based on a rather confused approach to power: “how can young Americans distrust the government to look after their interests yet endorse socialism, which entrusts the government with the power to redistribute wealth, direct all economic activity, and control their access to such necessities as healthcare?” (Acton.org, 2022). Young people’s apparent superficial view of socialism notwithstanding, these considerations are based on different values than those they might have encountered in a Catholic school. Is this an educational failure? Are technology and isolation predominant enough that we have a large proportion of young American adults rejecting ideals that nurture families and futures in favor of government control of the means of production (and perhaps even distribution)? Or is this a philosophical argument between perceived good and perceived bad, however flimsy the factual support?

Socialism does not leave much room for God or faith, as that system of government replaces the need to believe in a power any higher than the ruling central committee. As those of us who went to Catholic institutions learned and absorbed, faith and education are not mutually exclusive. We make choices as to what we will and will not accept, whether faith in God or trust in a certain form of government, but our foundation comes, in large measure, from the schools we attended and the families we lived in. Those are the defining environments of our early lives, but we now observe, with bated breath, the rollout of the transition of the early adult generation into post-graduate responsibilities, with, in large measure, a different view of engaging the world. One can only hope that their steps forward are in a direction that serves their souls, as well as the world they are inheriting.

Acton.org (10/23/20). Half of gen Z supports Marxism/Socialism. Here’s Why.Half of Gen Z supports Marxism/socialism. Here’s why. – Religion & Liberty Online (acton.org)

Boland, P. (2000). Catholic Education in the 21^st Century. Catholic Education, A Journal of Inquiry and Practice. “Catholic Education in the 21st Century” by Patricia Boland (lmu.edu)

Dimock, M. (2019). Defining generations: Where Millennials End and Generation Z begins. Pew Research Center. www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/01/17/where-millennials-end-and-generation-z-begins/

National Center for Education Statistics. (n.d.). Private Schools and Enrollment. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/schoolchoice/ind_03.asp#:~:text=Of%20the%205.8%20million%20students,religious%20schools%2C%20and%2024%20percent

National Center for Education Statistics, 2. (n.d.). Enrollment and instructional staff in Catholic elementary and secondary schools. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_205.70.asp

The Discomfort of Undue Process

Ken Grossberger, PhD

What if George Santos is found not guilty? What if Donald Trump is? What if Hunter Biden is? What if Joe Biden gets indicted? The rush to judgment may satisfy emotionally, but due process gets trampled along the way.

Congress may have acted prematurely in the George Santos case. The press, and the people, may have prejudged Trump and anyone named Biden (depending on one’s predilections), in advance of any jury verdict. This is fine for a discussion at the bar at midnight, terrible for any appreciation of due process. The lesson here is that preemption may be prematurity. Expelling Santos from Congress and removing Trump from the ballot may be politically palatable to some but is also legally foundationless. The political strategies of ballot denial and power maintenance are also ethically dubious at best. The US Constitution requires due process to protect each individual’s rights, and even though in some venues due process does not apply in fact, it should apply in principle.

The most egregious example is in Maine, where Secretary of State Shenna Bellows unilaterally removed former President Trump from the primary ballot. Her argument was that Trump was guilty of inciting an insurrection on January 6, thus she was compelled under section 3 of the 14^th Amendment to the constitution to rule that Trump could not run for political office. Access to the ballot, therefore, is left to the constitutional interpretations of hundreds of unelected state administrative officials, a precedent under which democracy, as we know it, would disintegrate.

In Colorado the state supreme court also removed Trump from the ballot under the same logic. Here we have at least some semblance of jurisprudence, with a court of law involved. However, we also have the legal conundrum as to the intent of section 3 as Congress intended it in 1868. After the Civil War, Congress was left with the problem of over 5 million people who were still slaves in the south. Thus the legislature passed the 13^th amendment to free them, the 14^th amendment to provide them citizenship and the 15^th amendment to give former slaves the vote. The insurrection in question was half the country seceding and fighting a major war of separation from the federal government. Almost a million Americans lost their lives as hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides fought a desperate war in this rebellion. The superannuated but highly embarrassing January 6 frat party was incredibly wrong and damaging to the American psyche, but hardly an insurrection.

So, those who graduated from the Google School of Law, and some misguided courts, would have us believe that cherry-picking one’s way through the constitution to find a word or phrase that seemed to justify one’s preconceived conclusion is justified, due process notwithstanding. Removing Trump from the ballot, ipso fact, is supported by the 14^th amendment.

Thus we would be left whims of the perpetually upset never-Trump neurotics, or their counter-parts on the Right, to determine whom they would allow to run for office. Elections would become free-for-alls with competing jurisdictions summarily removing from the ballot candidates of the opposing parties only to suffer retaliation in turn, and then perhaps no one is left on any ballot. Court cases would pile up and the entire electoral system would be permanently constipated.

“Democracy is on the ballot,” as we hear so often, and maybe this year it actually is.

VIVEK’S PLOY

Ken Grossberger, PhD

Vivek Ramaswamy is running for the Republican nomination for President. Or is he? He started off as the new kid on the block: young, bright, rich. But over time he devolved into an old school attack-and-trash pol and even resorted to scribbled messaging at a debate calling Nikki Haley corrupt. Looks like he couldn’t resist.

But what is he really after? He has refrained from direct attacks on Donald Trump, and his pitch is that he represents the new generation of leadership. He reserves his caustic comments for Nikki and Ron DeSantis hard, so he has a fierce side, but he engages in rhetorical pattycake with the ex-President. If he really intends to be the Trump alternative, why does he only target the other candidates? He even said he would pardon Trump if he gets elected president, and Trump has said nice things about him.

Is Vivek just a MAGA version of Pete Buttigieg? It seems that he’s a stalking horse in the primaries, splitting the vote of the other candidates, and making it harder for a realistic challenge by the others (most notably Haley and DeSantis). This looks like a denial strategy.

So maybe Vivek is purchasing a cabinet position. We can be sure he isn’t serious about winning the Republican primary, but he does get attention.

Shenna Bellows – What is She Running For?

Ken Grossberger, PhD

In this era of Trump ballot denial Maine Secretary of State Shena Bellows’ decision to eliminate Donald Trump from her state’s election is the latest example of trashing democracy in the name of democracy. She tortured the dots from the 14^th amendment to Trump in a self-aggrandizing attempt to convince the political world that she actually has a point. But in the end, she mangles the meaning of the US constitution and denies the voters any say in an election designed by law to provide such voting privileges.

This is that latest attempt by the left to reinterpret the 14^th amendment into something other than what was intended. At issue here is Section 3 which reads, in part, that no one who holds an office having sworn an oath to the “support the constitution……shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same” constitution. The 14^th amendment was ratified in 1868 and was clearly designed by Congress to prevent former Confederate army veterans from holding office. Also at issue is the definition of insurrection and rebellion, which has nothing to do with Donald Trump on the infamous day of January 6, 2021. Even more ludicrous is that Trump was actually in office at the time, so the logic of the left is that Trump was conducting an insurrection against himself. The superannuated frat party of misfits that invaded the capitol that day deserve to be punished for breaking the law. They also severely embarrassed the country. Trump certainly could have done much more to stop the mob, and he did not. But this was not an armed rebellion, even though here are those on the left who are quick to point out that some of the capital transgressors had weapons. How does this one-day mess, as bad as it was, rise to the level of an insurrection on the level of the US Civil War where hundreds of thousands fought against the government and almost a million Americans died? Only in this age of extreme polarization can anyone this side of sanity suggest that January 6 was an attempt to overthrow the government that Donald Trump himself was the chief executive of.

But that was not Ms. Bellows primary motivation. She is currently the Secretary of State of Maine. She previously was a state senator. She also ran for the US Senate against Susan Collins and lost. So, stealing a play from Trump’s playbook, she makes a screwy decision to remove Trump from the ballot in Maine, not as the result of a deep-thinking process as to the legal issues at hand, but to deal herself into the big game, to grab the spotlight, to set herself up for the next office she may target.

Her political claim to fame is that she is a Biden sycophant, and now a lefty seeking higher ground. The two for one play is that she might actually believe she could keep Trump off the ballot at the same time, yet another paranoid Democrat seeking Trump inoculation. But if she actually succeeds, she would open something much worse than anything Pandora had in her bag of tricks. Consider the environment where administrative officers across the country decided who could, and who could not, have ballot access based on their perception of a criminal act. Also consider that usually most states have Republican governments. Game-set-match, the end of the Democratic party on most local levels in the US. Does future candidate Bellows really suggest we have a country where we replace legal guilt (determined by a jury) with some notion of administrative guilt determined by bureaucrats? Even though the left quickly points out that their now favorite clause of their now favorite amendment does not specifically state that a legal conviction is necessary, are they actually promulgating a government where the right to run for office hinges on the constitutional interpretations of unelected administrators?

Not quite what she may argue, but apparently, what she wants is controversy, and above all, attention. In a Trumpian way she seeks to command the notice of the media and make herself the center of the circus. But she is guilty of what Yuval Levin calls a “dereliction of responsibility” and the attempted “corruption of political culture.” By no means does this excuse the behavior of Donald Trump. He engages in what Mr. Levin labels “thuggish narcissism.” But this does not disqualify him from any ballot, and the US Supreme Court will undoubtedly make quick work of Ms. Bellows’ stunt, as well as the misguided attempt by other states to bury democracy in the darkness of gerrymandered jurisprudence.

The Big Dance

The art of lying is such a staple of politics that we accept it as a natural act, like the rising of the sun. Thus most national elected officials have dismal ratings in the polls: the President, Vice President, the leaders in the Senate (both parties) and the leaders in the House (both parties). Trust is a thing of the past and many of those who vote strain to choose the least damaging of the worst.

The Biden team is an example of such deceit, on steroids (as the President likes to phrase things). So he clearly thinks he conjured up the big rhetorical flip taking the Republican-manufactured sarcastic term “Bidenomics” and now uses it as a symbol for this miraculous economy he keeps touting. As his team cherry picks through the data for good stuff (“it’s working” Biden whispers) and ignores the bad stuff (e.g., huge spikes in the cost of just about everything and the dramatic increase in the national debt), he is performing the rhetorical choreography of the “the big dance” designed only to make his administration look good. So Bidenomics is better termed Bidenoptics. Every time he whips out his Bidenomics double talk, he is dancing. The border is closed, he knew nothing of Hunter’s business deals, etc. He continues to dance through the political tulips.

Even more embarrassing is White House Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s recent statement that the record setting sea of illegal immigration at the southern border in December is typical for the end of the year. Or “we need Congress to pass comprehensive immigration” as an excuse for the dramatic increases in border crossings under the Biden administration. These deflections are in line with today’s political word games, based on the dance, and not the truth. The American public is being waltzed down the proverbial road because the Biden team, like too many politicians, will continue to blame the person who put the cookie jar on the kitchen counter, not the person who put his hand in it. The same goes for the economic scene where Bidenomics has hit the middle class and working poor pretty hard. The White House excuse machine is not going to talk people out of their pain with some not-so-clever reverse sloganeering. Politicians have a political blind spot: all they have to do is get the right frame, the right explanation, the palatable clarification or the rhetorical justification, and no one will notice that what they say just isn’t true. They’re dancing, and we the people get a continuous show.

Is there a day of reckoning coming? Will the voting public finally reject the old school politics of deception and vote the rascals out? Are voters finally exhausted from the dance and looking to demand substance only? Lincoln might not fare well in today’s political environment, Franklin Roosevelt might. Reagan did. Carter didn’t. But those leaders were from different eras where there was at least a modicum of civility and restraint. Not that they didn’t have their own brand of shenanigans, or rhetorical sleight of hand. But nothing like the psychotic rearranging of reality of the Biden-Trump era.

Will this be the election cycle where voters dump the fibbers and elect the truth tellers? Perhaps the adults in the room will manifest themselves in such a way that this election will be more about self-interest and the needs of the county, and not power and cosmetics. But in the meantime time the big dance continues.

WHAT’S LEFT AFTER THE LEFT TAKES OVER? BIDENOMICS IS BIDENOPTICS

Joe Biden has bought into the lefty-woke political culture. Whether he actually believes this stuff or assumes it’s a means to power, we cannot tell. But he talks the talk even if the walk is a bit of a challenge. Whatever, he has positioned himself far to the left.

The right labeled the president’s failed economic policies “Bidenomics” a derogative term symbolic of high inflation and high prices. Using the Biden campaign’s spin to win technique they now use the term as a message that the president’s economic policies “are working” as Biden whispers not so authoritatively. Spinning is an age-old device in politics, a rhetorical sleight of hand intended to deceive the audience that reality can be rearranged to a more favorable appearance. So in his case Bidenomics is more properly Bidenoptics because the president seems more concerned with appearance than effective policy. But he still leans left as he presumes that the winning political winds come for that direction. Therein lies his problem.

The American political left continues to distance itself from traditional American values and what we used to consider the mainstream of American thought. This movement is now associated with Bidenomics, a slur converted into slogan in the president’s Bidenoptical way. Script flipping aside, Biden’s economic policies are pushing the country towards a progressive left reality that ranges from unworkable to downright ugly, where the rich get poorer, the poor get forgotten and the middle class gets trashed.

Biden’s government is spending $6 trillion more than previously appropriated, on top of an already dangerously bloated budget. This is money borrowed from the future as well as the present, and dramatically increases the debt curve to unsustainable levels where no American government has gone before. There are drunken teenagers with Dad’s credit card who have been more responsible. The interest on that debt grows unmanageably fast. It’s a runaway, and Biden does not even mention it. This leads us to the negative effects of the left, Biden’s current political home turf.

The left has no use for the individual, they are a collective seeking global collectivization. To them the world is a series of groups, but some groups deserve more equity than others (i.e. equity means privilege). The left is woke and woke is a problem. Woke thinking doesn’t work as a governmental construct, not even close. It’s philosophically corrupt and presumes that a theologically lefty oligarchy will tell us all what we can and can’t do, and how to think. If we dare to disagree, they call us names. There is no democracy in Woke-land as it’s a cruel Orwellian twist in yet another attempt by an ideological movement to gain power. “Racism” is the predictable reflexive, default rhetorical response to anything they don’t like. In their (possessive of “them”) homogenized society everybody gets put into a sociological blender so all might have “equity” (except for all the people “they” don’t like). The woke left fails to understand that they are not righting the wrongs of the past, they’re just creating new wrongs, in their reconstructed world of the newly privileged and the permanently condemned. Their version of our national anthem would end with “one nation under them with liberty and justice for some.” A lefty is someone who thinks the United States constitution is the product of white supremacy, and according to the left, individual rights are thus conditioned by circumstance. The result is mass injustice and the end of America as a major power and force for democracy. In the world of Lefty Wokies, who makes the decisions? Clearly not the people. What kind of society results from this thinking?

So Biden’s policies have damaged the economy, but he is somehow on an endless victory lap as viewed through the lens of Bidenoptics. This is not a question of glass half empty or half full, but emptying the glass as Biden doubles down on policies that got us here in the first place. He purports a perverse logic that a decrease in the rate of inflation is somehow a decrease in inflation, intentional duplicity at its worst. The results are and will be disastrous. If Biden is re-elected the US may well be a client state of Communist China within 5 years. And if the left is allowed to tax corporate America into oblivion who will produce anything? The Biden political brand is still on the market long after the expiration date.

What’s left after the left takes over?

POLITICS DU JOUR – PART II

Trump Biden II – Old School Politics and Political Narcissism on Steroids

Our current political environment is a mess. We have retrogressed from name calling to back-stabbing to criminalizing and finally to demonizing. The other side is always an existential threat to democracy. Formerly taboo subjects are normalized: politicians going after each other’s spouses and children, public officials being confronted in public, threatened and even attacked. Some have been shot at and hit.

The two ends of the political spectrum are separated by a vast ideological chasm. The term polarization doesn’t begin to describe how far apart Liberals and Conservatives are. Most polarization models use party line votes in Congress to graphically depicts the centroids (concentrations) and the crossovers, but the nowadays separation is total. Moderates in both parties may approach, but do not cross, the center line. And the language is far worse. The word civility seems to exist in another rhetorical galaxy as we are barraged daily day with a non-stop, can-you-top-this exercise in psychotic superlatives. It’s a fight to the death with no margin for leniency, let alone forgiveness. Does it ever end?

Exacerbating all this is the corrupt leadership of current President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. President Biden is that rare leader that has created more problems than he has solved. His catch-phrase theme should be the Build Back Breakdown where policy does more harm than good and puts The Big Squeeze on the middle class and working poor. Democrats claim that President Biden and Vice President Harris ae doing such a great job but frankly Andrew Johnson and nobody was a better leadership team.

So the struggle continues, even as President Trump announces a bid for another term, to the chagrin of most. Problems will not get solved, perhaps not in this era, not until some dramatic event brings what’s left of us back to our senses. That is unfortunate but may be the moment we have to endure.

Politics Du Jour, Part I

The Great Biden Bomb Out

The current national debt is about $31 trillion. The COVID relief bills cost about $3.4 trillion, which is included in that figure. The Biden legislation will spend event more: the CARES will cost about $2.2 trillion; the infrastructure bill will spend about $1.2 trillion and the American Rescue Plan will cost about $1.9 trillion. That’s a lot of trillions. Sen. Everett Dirksen famously said, “a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” He was wrong.

The abject irresponsibility of the Biden Administration and its blatant disregard for fiscal restraint will bury the United States for generations to come. It has been one bad decision after another. The new money can only be borrowed, as the interest portion of the budget becomes an increasing percentage of the outlays. This squeezes out finding for other items, and the trajectory of this interest is on a stark upward arc: projected to be about a 45% increase in the current fiscal year. Madness.

Biden has also practiced his ignorance technique on the border crisis, crime and inflation. Americans spend more on food, gas and transportation, and worries about criminal behavior have risen dramatically. All this in the face of the midterms, where his party probably loses the house and maybe the senate. But the president continues to deliver speeches based on facts from another world, with magic rhetoric where problems disappear in an exercise of Hocus POTUS. His Darth Biden speech, for example, with the blood-red backdrop and armed soldiers on his flanks, was another egregious example of his severe disconnect from reality.

So the president and his lefty congress have just about wrecked the economy but somehow are on an endless victory lap. This short circuit dissonance comes to a crashing halt after Tuesday when the real reality confronts them as the House and probably the Senate begin the slide across the aisle, and January 3 becomes their due date with a harsh political reckoning.

VAX POPULI

The pressure to vaccinate against COVID 19 by the federal government, big business, major universities and big Pharma has been intense and persistent, despite the ebb of the crisis. The vaccines (mRNA shots), we have been constantly told, are safe and effective. But that message has changed over the course of the pandemic. The earlier warnings and advice have been pushed aside in favor of new warnings and advice (e.g. from the vaccines will prevent the spread to the vaccines will prevent severe illness), to the merely advisory (e.g. the CDC’s recent pronouncements relaxing the restrictions).

So, what are we to believe? Much of what we hear, many think, is politically motivated and the debate rages between warring liberal and conservative factions as to what is true and what we need to do (or not do). The centerpiece of all this has been the mandates to get vaccinated. Here is where we separate fact from politically self-serving fiction, and suppression from democracy. For many, the vaccine is a must in order to keep us all safe, and those who resist are criminally negligent.

Thus, we are confronted with the current problem of using propogandized “science” for political purposes. To paraphrase the good Dr. Krauthammer this is a case of Covid derangement syndrome. First it was one shot, then two. Then a booster. Then annual boosters. Vaccines forever. Now new vaccines for new “variants.” Pretty soon a “cocktail” for all of the above. Endless. But why? To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, everything is about COVID except COVID, COVID is about power. This is politics, not science, the left will not yield.

We need to be pro-choice on the vaccines, keep democracy in the forefront of the debate, and not be panicked into another round of mandates by authoritarians in sheep’s clothing if and when the next surge of COVID strikes.