Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll advises LET’S GET A GRIP! She writes:

Long-married people may theologically be “one,” but as any Marriage Counselor will tell you, they are also two extremely separate individuals. Since famous novelist, Max Cossack and I are both hard-core political junkies, we have been discussing the latest election more or less non-stop for a week.

Though I am the Columnist of Record and hence will be writing in the first person, the thoughts herein are really a distillation of our thoughts, in this case most provided by my husband, most especially the research. In Comedy World it is a cardinal sin not to give creative credit where it is due, so this is kind of a once-in-a-lifetime joint column. Here are those thoughts.

Conservatives pride themselves on their devotion to reason. Yet what I am seeing from too many conservatives is not only hysteria but also a lot of pathetic and shamefully ungrateful blame-shifting.

I’ve never been a fan of hysteria. Well, maybe that one time that the Roseville Baker’s Square was out of Sour Cream Raisin Pie, but who could blame me? Certainly not the doughnut-loving cops on the SWAT Team that was eventually called. Haha, I kid. In the analysis of any situation, my favorite place to start is with the facts. I believe that Ronald Reagan once accidentally said “facts are stupid things.” He had meant to quote John Adams that “facts are stubborn things.” They are. And in analyzing the results of the 2022 midterm elections, the facts – though hardly cause for celebration — do not justify the level of hysteria.

As of November 10, Republican House candidates had won 50,113,534 votes, or 52.3 percent of the vote; Democrats had won 44,251,768, or 46.2 percent. (Updated mileage varies slightly.)

Famous novelist Max Cossack not only did the research but the math – you didn’t think it was me, did you? — and tells me that Republicans led by 6.1 percent, which is better than their average in those pre-election national polls, the source of the “red wave” prediction. The RealClearPolitics average had Republicans up by 2.5 percent.

If the 6 percent advantage holds in the 2024 presidential election, the 52.3 percent to 46.2 percent outcome should be a dream outcome landslide for the Republican candidate. Which would be only my sixth win in my pitiful Presidential election record. Maybe I was less devastated than many people because I have been so used to losing. And yet the sun rose in the East and Life went on…

Because I was an idiot left-wing Democrat voter during the GOOD Republican years (two Nixon wins, two Reagan wins, and Bush the Elder’s win) and have chosen NOW – the Very Bad Democrat Socialist Obama years – to be a Conservative, I have always been “running against the wind,” to quote Bob Seger. And voting against the “win.”

So despite the finger-pointing and gnashing of teeth, the voters came through. In fact, they did much better than expected. The Republican Party’s failure to translate this whopping 6 percent advantage into decisive control of the House is the responsibility of the people who ran the Republican congressional campaigns. If anyone’s to blame, they are. They blew it. And abandoned Arizona to throw money at Murkowski.

Those who point to Trump are using the failure as a pretext to dump on him and in some cases, to paper over their own failures. Some have always loathed Trump and were just waiting for this chance to work up a mob. Some of them need to look in their own states and come up with ways to do as well as Republicans do in Florida.

Hey, Trump critics, I know that many of you – especially our Power Line hosts — have toiled valiantly in the Republican vineyards for many decades. But for others just hatin’ on Trump, how many doors did you knock on? How much money did you donate? How many rallies the size of Trump’s did you organize?

If there is an important lesson here, it is “put not your faith in princes” that you can then rip limb from limb if they fail to do it all alone. Going forward, we are going to need all hands on deck. And a lot less sniping when everything doesn’t work out perfectly. The circular firing squad gets tedious. Especially when the Democrats walk in lockstep like North Korean soldiers in a parade on Kim Il Sung’s birthday.

The Florida result shows that the dreaded “locust” effect didn’t happen there. The voters who fled New York did not by and large bring their destructive progressive politics with them. Instead, they voted Republican. Heck, the Jewish voters (slow learners for generally smart people…) have voted 33 percent Republican this election! Okay, sure, 67 percent remain entrenched in idiocy, but if we could break away 33 percent of the Democrats’ African-American voting bloc, we would win every election.

I am a MAGA Grrrll on the ISSUES. I am a great admirer of Donald Trump, but not, as frequently accused in diatribes, any kind of “cult worshiper” of the man. I am mystified and appalled by his recent bizarre shots at DeSantis.

But my GRATITUDE to him knows no bounds. Without Donald Trump, may I just remind us all, we would be in the middle innings of the Hillary-Kaine double-header, with three more ultra-leftist members of the Supreme Court — amost certainly chosen for Youth and Equity rather than devotion to the Constitution. So we dodged that bullet thanks to the all-too-human phenom who is Donald J. Trump.

Circling back to the original topic of whether or not hysteria at this point is either justified or helpful, after a mere week, we finally have eked out a teeny tiny, teeny tiny majority in the House. How fun to see our Speaker sitting behind Biden during the State of the Union Address. Maybe he can wiggle his ears and roll his eyes and tear something up at the end in the grand Pelosi tradition.

Oh, one more glass of lemonade from the lemons – since Biden doesn’t believe it was a repudiation election and he intends to change nothing, it will probably be tougher for the few remaining sane Democrats to dislodge him in 2024 and pry Dr. Jill’s hands off the White House door. Various people have suggested – not at all in jest – that Fetterman could be his running mate in 2024. Suits me. Two white guys with room temperature IQs (and by that I mean an uninsulated room with the heat off in Minnesota). One has age-related dementia and the other brain damage from a stroke – so there’s your Diversity right there.

And still 40 percent of the electorate would belly up to the ballot box to pull that lever. Therein lies the fundamental problem. If the Founding Fathers had had any idea how shallow the gene pool would become, they might have said, “Screw it, this may not be worth all our blood and treasure after all. Let’s just switch to coffee and stay with the Crown.”