Thoughts on Mike Lindell at the White House

Look, I get that of the four corporate CEOs who came to the podium to talk about what their companies were doing to address the coronavirus crisis, he was the only one who did what he did: strongly suggest that Trump's 2016 election was a sign of God's grace. That was indeed a cringe-worthy moment. But the guy has made no secret of being a die-hard Trumpist for a long time. Yes, it bothers me. It diminishes what is otherwise a remarkable success story on a number of levels. I think he is a serious Christian. He attributes his recovery from crack cocaine addiction to God's grace. He then embarked on a classic American entrepreneurial undertaking. He'd been thinking about why so many people don't get a good night's sleep, researched the matter, and then developed his line of My Pillow products. He then hired hundreds of his fellow Minnesotans to make them. He also has an appealing, infectious personality.

And now, he, like the other three CEOs, is engaged in the not-small project of changing his manufacturing processes so as to dedicate them to make products that can help people with this horrible disease.

Along with the people unwilling to cut him some slack for being a Trumpist, I have seen, on Twitter, some objection to him speaking about the grace of God in the most publicly owned place of all: the White House. These atheists, or secular humanists or whatever they are, want to use precious moments in this time of national urgency to get into some nonsense about separation of church and state.

Drop it. He, like the others, deserves our admiration.

And speaking of yesterday's briefing, I am aware that CNN's Jim Acosta has a history of being obnoxious at White House pressers, and he did not need to be provocative yesterday. That said, all he did was read past statements by Trump about coronavirus back to him, so the argument could be made that it was fair from a journalistic standpoint. And, true to form, the Very Stable Genius blew a chance to be the bigger person, and instead went for the venomous insult.

That little episode sullied the vibe of national unity that had been established immediately beforehand. Both of you boys need to go to your corners for a time out.

Corporate America is rising to the task

Today's briefing has a different tone to it. I don't mean what Trump has had to say, although he stuck to facts more than usual. What I'm referring to is the group of corporate CEOs stepping to the podium in succession - heads of My Pillow, Jockey International, Procter & Gamble, United Technologies - to speak of what their firms are doing to reconfigure their manufacturing processes in order to make products needed to address this crisis.

This is America at its best. The Left loves to bash "corporate America," but as those who have thought it through a bit more understand, corporations are merely organizations comprised of various elements - investors, managers, engineers and shop-floor personnel - that come together to advance the human condition. They're human beings.

These people are doing things that are actually needed. They don't have time to own the libs or own the Trumpists or otherwise preen.

The record book will show that they did every last thing they could to stave off a fate for our nation no one wants to contemplate.

God is pleased with what they are doing.

Hello, all you LITD-ers out there

I'm not huge on subjective, personal-life-account LITD posts. This is basically a blog of observation on cultural, economic political and world-stage developments, and what's going on inside my household and my head are not generally too germaine to any given topic of those natures.

But I've also rarely gone so long between posts and it probably merits a bit of explanation. Plus, in this time of social distancing, fostering a sense of community is something we ought to do whenever we get the opportunity, and you may find yourself resonating with some aspect of my experience.

I'm pretty much okay now. Yesterday was quite productive, really. As usual, I got up with the chickens and went to the radio station and recorded the weekend newscast. I wrote a piece at Precipice, my Substack newsletter site. Clyde and I recorded season two, episode six of the Barney & Clyde podcast, practicing, of course, responsible social distancing and each ensconcing ourselves at remote locations rather than convening for bracing beverages at the Libation Station. I made sautéed cabbage and smoked sausage for supper last night. It received kudos from the missus.

This afternoon I reached out to all the students in the course for which I'm the adjunct instructor at our local community college. Spring break had been extended to two weeks and the rest of the semester is going to be completely online, and I let them know how I envision it going down. 

It has not always been thus. The first week of sheltering in place involved some bouts of nuttiness, one of which probably qualified as a meltdown. My wife handled it graciously, moving past these with a remarkable degree of cheer. 

I'm actually rather surprised at the way I've regained composure, given that, numbers-wise, this thing is closing in on us here in central Indiana. The US Surgeon General, Dr. Jerome Adams, has deemed Indianapolis an "emerging hotspot." 

I think a serious effort to stay in constant touch with my Creator has been a major factor. The pastor of the church I attend has been mailing out weekly packets of prayers and readings, which I receive on Saturdays and eagerly delve into on Sunday mornings. God is sovereign in his Heaven and he loves us infinitely. 

It would help if our supposed leaders at the national level were not choosing to be infantile in their manner of engaging this moment. This was the subject of my latest Precipice piece. I wrote: 

The only players in the entire situation that merit veneration are first responders, the sleep-deprived nurses, physicians and therapists in the nation’s increasingly strained hospitals, and the experts on the task force, who unflinchingly give the public the straight, bracing truth every evening. 

Even these people lack adequate data to provide a comprehensive picture. They are beginning to drill down into what is happening on a county-by-county basis, but no one still has any idea how many asymptomatic carriers are among those we’re keeping a six-foot distance from when we go to the supermarket, or how many people become infected the day after being tested. 

The record book will not be able to note a figure bringing the requisite leadership at the overarching level in this catastrophe. History will merely say that our civilization - indeed, our world - muddled along in states of panic, despair and intermittent, fleeting hope, with bedraggled care-givers and researchers on the ground doing what they could, armed with what knowledge was available.

Congressional Democrats wasted precious days trying to cram a seeming infinitude of progressive wish-list items - demographic diversity requirements for corporate boards, fuel standards for airlines, funding for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, to name a few - into what was supposed to be a clean and simple bill that would put cash money into the hands of businesses and individuals whose lives had been upended by the societally imposed (and entirely necessary) collapse of the economy.

Meanwhile, the pathetic nine-year-old with a Twitter account just today let loose with a string of tweets bragging on the ratings numbers of his nightly press briefings. What a small man. What a pathological narcissist.

He also has invoked the 1950 Defense Production Act to make General Motors convert one of its plants to ventilator production. If there was any doubt that he's harbored authoritarian ambitions all along, this dispels those.

Well, that's the lay of the land in these parts. I'll try to get back to something like the pace of posting to which you're accustomed.

But, as you know, maintaining some semblance of normalcy in this surreal time is tough. Damn tough .

The Left's absence of a soul on full display

I'm striving mightily to extend grace wherever possible and avoid placing blame with any person, party, nation-state or other entity for any aspect of our present juncture. This is important for societal health and my own mental and spiritual health. I'm trying to refrain from pointing out how Trump's solipsism and momentarily heightened ridiculousness are rendering him superfluous to what is going on.   I'm trying not to comment on China's sinister role in this global menace.

But there's something that needs to be done immediately, and only Congress can do it. Given the unprecedented nature of what's happening - a deliberate economic shutdown in order to arrest the spread of a pandemic - Congress needs to pass a very simple, clean bill that puts cash money in the hands of individuals and businesses that will face ruin otherwise.

So what do the freedom-, advancement- and decency-hating leftists in our federal legislature do with this obligation to the nation and to history?

Guy Benson

@guypbenson

Via senior GOP aide, Schumer/Pelosi now pushing these demands amid pandemic-fueled economic collapse: 

1) Unprecedented collective bargaining powers for unions

2) Increased fuel emissions standards for airlines

3) Expansion of wind and solar tax credits

Guy Benson

@guypbenson

Source writes, “not only are these completely unrelated to the coronavirus epidemic, they could prevent companies from participating in the loan programs altogether—directly causing unnecessary layoffs.”

10:22 AM · Mar 23, 2020·Twitter for iPhone

This is obscene. This is wicked.

I just have to believe that sufficient pressure will be brought to bear on these monsters from their own districts and states that they'll have to knock off the grandstanding and do what is right.

But we must consider ourselves warned in the most explicit terms. This is the kind of bringing America to its knees that the Left intents to impose if it ever achieves the completeness of power it salivates for, regardless of economic conditions.

Bottom line? "Grave" is probably a pretty apt term for where we are

First, there's Aaron Ginn's Medium piece entitled "Evidence Over Hysteria." Medium has since taken it down.

Madeleine Fabic has done a peer review of it which explains why that was a sound decision:

The author, Aaron Ginn, a Silicon Valley self-described “technologist” who has written for Breitbart, re-posted to a website called ZeroHedge. In short, this post was exceptionally problematic and I’m glad that Medium has taken it down because it is such a flawed reading of data that gives readers incorrect information and the wrong take-aways.

Read her entire piece.

We have to be responsible here. We have not reached peak menace.

I understand that we have brought our entire society to a halt and the economic fallout is devastating. Don't I know.

And I understand that the status quo cannot go on in perpetuity, that it will lead to a depression and civil unrest.

But serious minds insist that it has had to be. Doctors Brix and Fauci are not blowing smoke.

Thank God such minds are on the case here. We need a voice of authority to refute the Very Stable Genius's claim that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin taken together are a sure-thing way out of this crisis ("gamechangers.)" We know no such thing.

We're going to see millions of Americans die soon.

To not stay in our homes at this time is nothing short of reckless. That's the key to keeping the particular number of millions to a minimum.

No one likes this. But let us realize that, being Americans who have grown up during a time of historically unprecedented convenience, comfort and safety, we're all easily tempted to think a quick solution is coming and that we'll soon be back to maneuvering through an American life that looks just like it did prior to this.

That's not what's going on here, folks.

The present moment as a gauge of the strength of my faith

Let's see, now.

The S&P 500 halted trading minutes after opening due to a 8.14 percent drop. It's recovered somewhat, but not to a healthy degree.

My local hospital is reporting its first confirmed COVID-19 case.

Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb announced that all bars and restaurants in the state must close. They can still deliver orders. The state joins its neighbors, Illinois and Ohio, and several other states that had implemented this measure in the past few days.  The economic hit to thousands of servers, cooks,  bartenders, hosts and managers will be immediate, as such folk don't typically have a financial cushion.

Yesterday afternoon, the White House coronavirus task force gave a press briefing. It's been a while since I saw such an exhausted-looking group of people. Mike Pence, Dr. Deborah Birx, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Seema Verma et al were clearly in dire need of a decent stretch of sleep. As has been characteristic at these gatherings, the Very Stable Genius had to do his relax-we're-doing-great schtick before the bedraggled grownups gave us the straight skinny.

The Democrat debate last night pretty much cemented the nomination of Joe Biden as the party's presidential candidate.

A word about that: regular LITD readers know that I fall into that zone along the ideological spectrum that Trumpists, as well as some of us when it's expedient to employ shorthand, refer to as Never Trump. I don't like the term for two principle reasons. One, there are gradations within the zone. Matt Boot and Jennifer Rubin are at one end, and David French and Jonah Goldberg, among others (and, if I may include myself in such august company, me) are at the other. Two, the horse is out of the barn, so the term makes it sound like conservatives who find Trump objectionable are untethered from the basic reality that he's president. Now, those closer to the Boot-Rubin end of the zone are the likeliest to declare they're going to vote for the Democrat presidential nominee, even if it's Sanders.

Since I think we can dispense with Sanders after last night, that means Biden, whom these folks have held up as some kind of beacon of "decency," a foil for the VSG, is the one for whom they'll be pulling the lever.

I still can't see myself joining them. For one thing, the decency designation doesn't fit:

You may have heard that Biden lost his wife and daughter in a horrifying drunk-driving wreck, the fault of a monster of a man who irresponsibly “drank his lunch,” as Biden puts it.

Biden’s wife and daughter did, in fact, die in a car wreck. That is true. It is not true that the driver of the other car was drunk, that he had been drinking, or that there was any reason to believe he was drunk or had been drinking — or even that he was at fault. The late Mrs. Biden “drove into the path of [the] tractor-trailer,” the police report says. But Biden, like every other third-rate ward-heeler of his ilk, thinks and speaks only in terms of good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats — and if something bad happens to good people, then it must be because somebody in a black hat did something nefarious. The driver of that truck went to his grave haunted by Biden’s lies, to the point where his children were forced to beg the vice president to stop defaming their late father. The casual cruelty with which Biden is willing to subordinate the lives of ordinary people to his political ambitions — for the sake of a petty tear-jerker line in one of his occasionally plagiarized stump speeches — is remarkable.

As Senate Judiciary Committee chair in the 1980s, he let Ted Kennedy's vicious smear campaign against the towering legal scholar Robert Bork cause Bork's nomination to go down in flames.

There's also the "put y'all back in chains" remark during the 2012 campaign.


And his pandering has been on full display in the current election cycle. He's cast his lot with the most radical of the climate alarmists. Now he's vowing to select a woman as his running mate and nominate a woman of color to the Supreme Court. Given that, as I say above, he is going to be the Democrat nominee, his insistence on these demographic criteria for these positions sets a precedent. There will be litmus tests for the foreseeable future, and a fealty to the original intent of the Constitution's framers will recede ever further as a requirement for consideration into the mists of antiquity.

Then there's the much-remarked-upon and obvious mental frailty which causes him to botch terminology and proclaim his happiness to be in states that are far removed from where he actually is.

My point in enumerating all these not-really-so-disparate matters on the nation's plate today is to say that their sum total is driving home for me that we, each and all, are really on our own. We're in the throes of an unprecedented public health crisis with huge economic ramifications, and the current ostensible leader in the effort to address it, as well as the figure who wishes to prove to us that he would lead far more effectively, are clearly inadequate to the task. And the actual experts and crisis managers on the case are having their stamina tested to the very limit.

There is absolutely nowhere to turn but to the sovereign Creator who is not surprised by any of it.

Is my certainty that he is in charge rock-solid every minute during these hair-raising days? I won't lie to you like that.

But I take very seriously the words of James, who spent a great deal of time in the personal company of the Lord of the universe, Jesus Christ, when he admonishes us thusly:

 . . . when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. 7 That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. 8 Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do.

As I see it, we have no choice but to rely on the Holy Spirit, not only to get us through our present juncture, but more generally to permeate our hearts and make us yearn to reclaim the unique birthright God gave us as Americans.

I know I have no choice. I've been circumstantially backed into a corner. This is the kind of scenario that forces me to decide if I think this thing called human existence has a purpose.

There's a vote I can cast.

I don't know if he has COVID-19 or not, but the Very Stable Genius is one sick individual

His need to be glorified knows no bounds.

I didn't see his presser yesterday at which he declared a national emergency. For that matter, I only caught a passing glance at his Oval Office address Wednesday. I try to avoid his television appearances if at all possible. But I'd heard that the presser was an appreciable improvement over Wednesday's event. (I'm also seeing quite a few assessments that Mike Pence indulged in a cringe-worthy display of sycophancy.)

That's good, I thought. This nation desperately needs an assurance that leadership is the executive branch's top priority at this moment.

But the observation I've made over the VSG years - that there's a cycle in which he follows a laudable move with two or three boneheaded stunts that pretty much negate the good impact of the first move in the cycle - kept nagging at me.

Now I know why. Behold:

That's his autograph on a chart showing the uptick in the stock market's performance Friday afternoon. He sent it to supporters. No mention of the national emergency.

Plus, there's this to remember about that uptick:

In boasting about the stock market, the President was cherry-picking a single day's rally amid a period of major selloffs and a 20% decline that was the fastest in history. 

Friday was the best day for stocks since 2008, but the S&P 500 ended the week with sharp losses and fell into a bear market on Thursday. 

The day's rally also came the day after the worst day for stocks since the 1987 crash. 

Three of our four most recent presidents have been flaming narcissists. (George Bush is the only one who hasn't been.) But the other two at least had some acquaintance with decorum. This guy has clearly never been told by anyone that he's overstepped any kind of bounds.

He has a lot of nerve ever depicting anyone else as being in over his head.

Jerry Falwell, Jr. dons the tinfoil hat

. . .and displays some rapid-fire cognitive dissonance. He goes from nothing-to-see-here to an assertion of microbe warfare in thirty seconds:

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Bobby Lewis

@revrrlewis

On Fox & Friends, Jerry Falwell Jr claims people are "overreacting" to coronavirus, the national response is "their next attempt to get Trump," and the virus itself is a North Korean bioweapon.

I'd like to think that there was a staff meeting after this morning's show at which an edict was laid down: We never book this guy again.

But I'm not betting the mortgage on it.

The smallest of the small

This statement by the VSG rings pretty hollow  . . .

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Stephen Hayes

@stephenfhayes

Trump, last night: "We are all in this together. We must put politics aside, stop the partisanship, and unify together as one nation and one family."

 . . . when you considered it was followed in short order by this:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

· 13h

Sleepy Joe Biden was in charge of the H1N1 Swine Flu epidemic which killed thousands of people. The response was one of the worst on record. Our response is one of the best, with fast action of border closings & a 78% Approval Rating, the highest on record. His was lowest!

There is only one thing in the entire universe the Very Stable Genius is concerned with: the glorification of Donald Trump.

Thoughts on the VSG's endorsement of Tommy Tuberville in the Georgia Senate race

Look, Tuberville seems like a fine person with credentials that would recommend him for an entry into politics. His football coaching career was distinguished. He's quite involved with his church and has contributed time and other resources to charitable causes.

So the argument could be made that Trump, in weighing all the considerations, concluded that a fresh face on the scene was the way for the GOP to proceed.

Still, when one considers that Sessions was the first Senator to come out forthrightly and full-throatedly for Trump and, as Noah Rothman puts it, "[give] Trump establishment credibility when no one else in the party would," and how Sessions's first television ads in his campaign to regain his former Senate seat was a shameless shill (including the donning of a MAGA cap), even after he'd been humiliated repeatedly by the VSG, it points up how one little lapse in loyalty, in Sessions's case,  recusing himself from the Justice Department's investigation of the 2016 campaign, saying, "I should not be investigating a campaign I had a role in," can sever the bond between sycophant and narcissist.

I obviously can't say for sure, but it seems to me that doling out punishment for insufficient ring-kissing had to be a factor, Tuberville's qualifications notwithstanding.