Stop Complaining, Get Off Your Ass, and Go Vote

Right now, I’m doing a lot of podcast and radio interviews, which is a thing you do when you have a book out — and of course I do, and of course it’s imperative that everybody here go to MikeHolman.com and grab your copy of The Necessary Men, or at least go to Amazon and do it — and I’m getting asked again and again about Republican candidates and the midterms.

I’ve contributed to some of this. Last week, for example, I lit up Sarah Huckabee Sanders, or more specifically her political consultants, for a stupid ad she released that insulted a chunk of her base while bragging about a good program she put in place in Arkansas. And I’ve been firing both barrels at John Cornyn’s little post-Appalachin mafia for their persistent ankle-biting of Ken Paxton, though I’d say that’s a bit different than what’s happening with Sanders.

The GOP’s messaging this cycle is a mess. For all the great things President Trump has been doing, it’s nowhere near sufficient to note that his accomplishments, and the communication of them, have not been strategic in building the case for the midterms. The Republican midterm convention in Dallas last month was, more or less, a fizzle — and that’s too bad.

The Iran war might very well turn out to be the singular foreign policy success of the American 21st century; if that regime falls (and on the current trajectory it’s impossible that it won’t) eventually, then it opens up the possibility that the Middle East will stop being an American problem ever again. But the political price to be paid for launching it without locking down domestic support for doing so was always going to be high, and the economic price — at the pump, I mean — only exacerbates that problem. One wonders what would have happened had Team Trump, in the aftermath of the Maduro raid, turned their sights on Cuba and pushed the Castroites out. Given the State Department’s report on the Cuban regime’s 67-year campaign of exporting communist revolution all over the Western hemisphere, including here, you’d think a full-frontal green revolution or friendly invasion of Cuba might have been a more strategic initiative.

On the other hand, the IRGC is now begging Americans to vote Democrat in order to save themselves, and it seems peculiar that a gang of jihadist thugs who have spent 47 years shouting “Death to America!” now think they deserve a voice in our electoral process. It’s not even properly an inquiry into Iranian chutzpah to consider this, but rather into the Democrats who’ve made themselves so indispensable to the world’s worst tyrants and America’s worst enemies.

And that’s the nitty-gritty of all this, isn’t it? Yes, Republican messaging sucks. Yes, John Thune sucks. Yes, his caucus is worse than he is — the Senate’s Republicans are a hair’s breadth from worthless; it’s inconceivable that these people couldn’t summon up the political will to pass the SAVE Act and prevent illegals from contributing to their losing power on Capitol Hill. There are some 700 legislative measures that the House of Representatives have sent over to the Senate in this Congress that have not, and in all likelihood will not, be voted on. The Senate is so bad that it makes the House look ineffective, and the House is operating on an atom-splitting margin.

No, the Republicans don’t deserve to keep their majority on Capitol Hill.

And it doesn’t matter. Get off your ass and vote for them anyway. Drag everyone you know to the polls to vote for these bums.

Drag your friends and relatives out and turn out the vote because whether the Republicans deserve power or not, the Democrats absolutely, positively don’t.

This is the worst Democrat Party since the 1860s. Back then the complaint about them was Romanism, rum, and rebellion. Now? It’s Marxists, Muslims, and misandry. And, when they do have power, malfeasance, and murder of multiple kinds.

When you were a kid was somebody like Abdul El-Sayed foreseeable? Was James Talarico? Troy Jackson? Darializa Avila Chevalier? The answer is no.

This is a group that literally wants to dismantle the American constitutional experiment and turn it into riotous mob rule. Don’t believe me? Look what they’re doing with this stupid moral panic around the Cornell University case.

If you’re intelligent about voting and elections, and if you aren’t 12, it’s one of the most basic things you should be intelligent about: you know that you’re rarely going to be excited about the candidate you vote for. When you are, you’re almost universally disappointed once that candidate is in office. Instead, you’re voting defensively. You’re voting to avert disaster.

You’re voting to prevent the place you live in from going to seed, like what the Democrats have done to Chicago and Newark and Jackson and Memphis and Los Angeles. They will do that to the whole country if you give them the chance. How many times do they need to prove this to you?

And that was with people like Dick Durbin and James Clyburn and Joe Biden — stunning mediocrities, to be sure, but more or less conventional liberals — in charge of the place.

Now? These are people who will literally regurgitate the narratives of Beijing, Tehran and Havana in judgment of the country and system you live in.

Your forefathers froze their fingers and toes off at Valley Forge to stave off the tyranny of a hostile elite and you can’t take 15 minutes out of a day to pull the lever against Talafreako or Abdul El-Sharia?

I don’t want to hear it.

Of course the GOP has RINOs. It’s hard to get good people. That’s true in all occupations, and with the cultural damage we’ve sustained, largely thanks to the efforts of people like the ones the RINOs are running against, it’s going to be more and more true.

But the way you manage the RINO problem is through the primaries. And this cycle has been fairly productive in that regard. It’s exceptionally rare to see an incumbent senator beaten in a primary, and it happened twice this year — to Cornyn and Bill Cassidy. That doesn’t even count some of the Republican incumbents in House and Senate seats who didn’t even make their race because they knew their time was up.

You don’t fix a generational problem in one cycle. It’s actually a good thing that you can’t. If you could, then you could create generational problems in one cycle.

Should you fail to get off your couch and block the communists from taking majorities in the House and Senate, that last bit would be very good news. Democrats in charge of Capitol Hill would absolutely remind you of the folly of letting them control anything, but they can’t bring the republic down. Not in one cycle.

In a decade, though? All bets are off.

And don’t put it past these people to do everything under the sun to rig the process so they’ll get that decade.

This is why you want to vote defensively. I don’t care if you like your GOP candidate for the House or the Senate. It isn’t required that you do. You just have to appropriately loathe the Democrat.

And your Democrat candidate is loathsome.

You think Iran has raised gas prices too high? Don’t forget they were higher when Joe Biden was in the White House.

You think your electric rates are too high and it’s the data centers driving them? Why don’t we have the electric infrastructure to accommodate such facilities? Why don’t we have hundreds, thousands of power plants built all over the country taking advantage of natural gas and nuclear energy? Why aren’t we already using thorium reactors to power cities and towns? Who’s standing in the way?

Bernie Sanders and AOC are not invested in your community having a fully initiated power grid. Why would you put them in charge of our national legislature?

Crime is down all over the country. You want to elect people who don’t want to just defund the police but replace them with social workers? Are you stupid?

Do you want to go back to an examination of which roads are racist, or do you want to build more roads so your commute isn’t as awful? Do you want a new or renovated airport, or billions of dollars for a “high-speed rail” line, the construction of which moves at a glacial pace? Do you want two years of nonstop impeachments, government shutdowns, idiots in kente cloth taking a knee for some dead career criminal in Statuary Hall?

Or do you want to see Trump get an opportunity to finish the agenda you voted for?

I can’t tell you that winning the midterms will mean Trump brings home the Golden Age for the next two years. Hopefully he can; I don’t know. But I can tell you there is nothing you’ll like about people like Hank Johnson and Mazie Hirono being the active ingredient on Capitol Hill.

The Democrats are kakistocrats. You can look that word up. You should, and you should consider what it means to put the worst possible people in charge.

And then get off your ass and go vote. And drag all your friends and family to the polls as well.

There are no excuses. Just do it. Save the country. And then make loud, obnoxious demands of the people whose careers you saved.