Angina Monologue 31

His Majesty got back from a long campaign tour last night.

I sensed it had not gone well before he even stepped through the door. First there was a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in irritation and as suddenly descended into sourness. Moments later, the cats scattered.

Then the door flew open. And, since we’re talking about His Majesty, you should understand that I mean that it really flew.

https://youtu.be/yHfLyMAHrQE?start=214&rel=0&end=219

I’m going to have to call the handyman to fix the door frame and hinges and replace the door. That’s another few hundred dollars my retirement is set back. Sigh.

I prudently said nothing, but quietly set out a bowl of light chocolate mint ice cream with sugar-free chocolate syrup and sunflower seeds, added a sugar-free peanut butter cup (Russell Stover makes a very fine line of sugar-free candies), fluffed the Imperial pillow and turned down the Imperial sheets, ran a tub full of hot water with bath salts, and then quietly withdrew to my meditation chamber. I half expected His Majesty to go all pon farr on me at any moment.

Fortunately, His Majesty hates to mix genres, and the bowl of ice cream was grumpily consumed rather than hurled across the room. His Majesty is more a silent treatment kind of guy than a tantrum thrower; while the explosions can be spectacular, they’re pretty rare.

His Majesty had calmed down a little by breakfast this morning, by which I mean he was ready to work off his acid mood by working an acid tongue.

Did you know that our state does not permit write-in votes for the office of President of the United States?

Well, shucks. There goes my plan to write in Mitt Romney.

Six states ban write-in votes for the Presidency. Most of the others make it difficult. This is going to be a significant hindrance to my independent run.

As if the fact you’re not a natural-born citizen of the United States wasn’t already a significant hindrance.

As I’ve said many times before, I can make it legal.

Well, it was a quixotic effort to begin with, and more for my entertainment than anything else. Given who the major parties are preparing to nominate, I can’t even go with the tag line “Why vote for the lesser evil?” That sucks a lot of the fun out of it, right there.

And that’s a shame, because gallows humor is the only thing that’s going to get a lot of thoughtful people through the next few months.

Palpatine to the rescue!

 And no one is more to blame for this lamentable state of affairs than the Republicans. It was entirely predictable that Hillary would be the Democratic nominee. The fix was in all along, as the Wikileaks releases now remind us. But you Republicans had numerous plausible candidates, articulating a variety of mostly conservative positions, most of whom had at least a passably acceptable character, experience, and temperament for the job. And you picked the one candidate with no conservative position, no character, no experience in office, and the temperament of a radical street brawler.

What is this “you Republicans” you speak of? I voted for Cruz in the primary, mostly because Rubio had already been dropped from the ballot by then. And aren’t you a registered Republican yourself?

That was never more than an expediency, to permit me to vote in a primary. I may have been a Republican, but I have certainly never been a republican. But one doesn’t ‘t have to search your feelings very deeply to sense that you felt genuine affection, albeit tempered, for the Grand Old Party.

I admit it was a wrench to re-register as an independent voter last week.

His Majesty is getting old enough that it’s hard to tell whether he has gone slack-jawed because I actually have succeeded in astonishing him, or because old people sometimes go slack-jawed merely because they’re old. Lately I’ve seen him going slack-jawed more and more often, but then lately there have been more and more astonishing events taking place.

Why not go Libertarian, then? You’ve always had a streak of weak-mindedness for libertarianism.

For one thing: “Once burned, twice cautious.” I actually voted for Ron Paul in 1988. I’m pretty embarrassed about that now.

But, in addition, the overlap between libertarianism and conservatism is largely a historical accident, and libertarianism is fundamentally a movement of the Left.

Ah, yes, Russell Kirk’s “chirping sectaries.” Although I think he was thinking mostly of Ayn Rand, who actually has fairly narrow support even among libertarians.

But I see your point. In the first place, your friend Ralph Hancock has pointed out that American conservatism is in crisis because, in this country, it has been about conserving our traditional civil liberties, and there are precious few traditional civil liberties left to conserve. From that perspective, the problem with libertarianism for conservatives is that it pushes an exaggerated and distorted vision of classic liberalism that was never there to conserve in the first place. It is one with this reality that libertarians always seem to win their lasting victories on the ground they share with modern liberals, and never on the ground they share with modern conservatives.

In the second place, Kirk pointed out that conservatism, properly understood, is the rejection of ideology in favor of prudence rooted in traditional customs and institutions. Libertarianism is nothing if not ideological; it is this feature, more than anything else, that betrays its roots in the Left. And I believe a good part of the present weakness of conservatism is the increasing tendency for self-identified conservatives to attempt to construct a conservative ideology: Oxymorons make splendid political slogans but dismal governing principles. That this ideology is built around a faulty and dogmatic understanding of the free market simply points to which part of the Left is being surrendered to: The libertarian part.

And, while it makes little difference to me, this ought to give you pause.

But you, yourself, said that conservatism in American means conservatism of traditional civil liberties.

The key word here is “traditional.” The best parts of the American experiment in self-government grew out of the best parts of the British experience in self-government, which has roots going back centuries. While conservatism has always made a place for measured reforms and cautious innovation (since these are obviously necessary, and their rejection is mere reaction), conservatism has rightly eschewed revolution. It is the latter that naturally drew me to the Republican Party when we naturalized ourselves in this wonderful, terrible mess of a nation. I have never been fond of revolutions.

Didn’t you lead a revolution once?

Rule by Sith actually has traditional roots going back millennia. In any case, the change from Chancellor to Emperor was remarkably seamless, was democratically achieved, was widely acclaimed, and took place after a real attempt at a coup d’etat by a small clique of elitists.

But the point remains: There is no more hope in the Libertarian Party than in the Republican Party.

What about the Conservative Party?

They are an insignificant little band. And consider their platform: On immigration, what’s sensible is also obvious, and plenty is not sensible. They want to build a wall like Trump’s. They want to repeal the presumptive political refugee status of Cubans. They want to require all employers to check through a Federal database before hiring — something that falls under the Federal government’s constitutional powers only if you twist “necessary and proper” into a pretzel. I acknowledge there are workable amnesty and guest worker provisions, but the other stuff must go.

Their positions on free trade are nonsense. They are also evidently drinking the “Audit the Fed” Kool-Aid and the conspiracy theories regarding insurance companies.

And this: “Important legislation can be written in comprehensive language, as the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights clearly demonstrate.”

Assuming they actually meant “comprehensible”, I think they overestimate how comprehensible these fine documents actually are to most Americans. The language was the language of the common law of the late 18th century, for Sith’s sake, and even some of our modern judges seem to have some difficulty comprehending it. The concept of “term of art” as applied to legal language is lost on these people.

I do like the idea of seceding from the United Nations, but only on a Trumpian gut level. The idea does not bear serious examination, at least until the sticky details are fleshed out.

The Constitution Party doesn’t merit a more comprehensive debunking, considering its numbers and inexperience. Perhaps by the time it  merits more attention, it will have tightened up the platform to something I could get behind. The party remind me of a very young and promising Padawan who still has a great deal to learn before he can become a Jedi and then be turned to the dark side.

At which point he tries to kill you.

Just so. (Gives me the hairy eyeball.)

But at least this election will continue to amuse. If nothing else, there is the spectacle of so many people trying so very hard to kid themselves.

Take Paul Ryan, for example. I confess that I like the man. He seems to be one of the smarter members of Congress. Romney picked him for VP and the Trumpistas loathe him, so he has the right friends and enemies. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that his endorsement of Trump at the convention had all the sincerity and conviction of a six-year-old dressed in an onion suit delivering his lines at the school play. It was obvious he was embarrassed to be there — as well he should have been.

Then there’s the liberal blogger for the Washington Post, trying rather unconvincingly to convince us that the Clinton Foundation and the Uranium One deal were all completely above board and the many astonishing coincidences were … just coincidences.

And just this morning, I tuned in to NPR in time to hear them interview their reporter — or it might have been a Democratic Party spokesman; I tuned in late and it’s so hard to tell the difference any more — talk about how Hilary Clinton didn’t really focus on Trump in her speech and he would not be the focus of her campaigning; that she would be focusing on her vision for America, a claim that surprised even the NPR interviewer. It is simply not possible that this person is stupid enough to not believe that Clinton’s best campaign line is that she is not Trump. But the spokesman did reluctantly admit that speeches are not Clinton’s strong point.

Obama’s speech was much better, but it has been noted that he referred to himself about twice as often as he mentioned Hillary. With Mr. Obama, it’s always about Mr. Obama. Of course, given that Hillary is essentially running for Obama’s third term, that may be reasonable. The change of empty suit atop the administration will not matter much.

Amusements abound. This is the first campaign I can think of where every nasty thing the Republicans are saying about the Democratic nominee are actually true. And where every nasty thing the Democrats are saying about the Republican nominee are also actually true. Both sides have made splendid, airtight cases that the other side’s nominee is completely unfit to be President. It’s also the first campaign in which the more honest people on both sides are using essentially the same campaign pitch: With Clinton you know exactly what you’ll get (and they even agree on what that is.) With Trump you have no idea what you’ll get. The Democrats regard this as a powerful argument for Clinton. The smarter Republicans regard this as a powerful argument for Trump. (The dumber Republicans believe Trump actually has a platform.)

Whatever else Trump has or has not accomplished, he’s at least gotten bipartisan agreement on a burning issue in the middle of an election year.

His Majesty slurped the last spoonful of his porridge (it’s amazing how he can talk that much and eat at the same time) and headed into the television room. Moments later I heard the shattering Dies Irae from Verdi’s requiem, accompanied by His Majesty’s cackling. He’s always loved that number.

But, given the likely flow of events in the next few months, I’m actually begun looking forward to his breakfast monologues.