November 13, 2020

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

BUCHANAN and GOTTFRIED on the Stolen Election

Friends,

I had intended to write a column on what has happened—is happening, ominously—to the Fox News Channel, but that will have to wait. Certainly, that topic is very important, indeed crucial—and troubling—to how millions of Americans, normal Americans, get their television news. And it will be doubly critical during the next four years if the Harris/Biden forces and the resilient Deep State apparatchiks finally regain the presidency. 

But that can wait a bit longer.

Presently I offer essays by two individuals I consider mentors and dear friends, both of whom I have known for several decades, both of whom I profoundly respect, and from whom I have learned much over the years. And in these two pieces they take somewhat differing views on the required immediate post-2020 election strategy of those on the Right. As the issues and the stakes, indeed the future praxis and course we should or might take, are so pivotal, I think it important that we examine the questions raised in each article.

I have known Pat Buchanan since the late 1980s and was his North Carolina campaign director during the Republican primary of 1991-1992. Over the years we’ve continued to stay in regular communication. I admire Pat greatly and have profited from his thirteen superb published books. In the past I have called him a kind of “St. John the Baptist” precursor to the populist counter-revolution of Donald Trump. Almost alone for years he kept the flame of “America First” alive.

Equally important as a wonderful friend and mentor has been Dr. Paul Gottfried, the Raffensperger Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. Our friendship is almost as longstanding; his thirteen scholarly volumes have had a profound influence on me and my thinking. Indeed, I was able to bring Paul down to North Carolina as the keynote speaker for our Confederate Flag Day ceremonies back in 2007.

While not in any way questioning President Trump’s right, nay, duty to question what occurred with the 2020 elections, Pat speculates that just maybe we should be turning our attention more to saving the two GOP Senate seats in Georgia, to insure that Chuck Schumer doesn’t gain control of the US Senate where then he and Nancy Pelosi can fast-track every radical proposal spewed forth by the Harris/Biden administration (e.g, ending the filibuster, packing the US Supreme Court, adding Washington DC and Puerto Rico as new states, opening wide American borders to potentially millions of illegal “new” citizens, and insuring leftist Democratic control of this country for the foreseeable future).

These are valid considerations; but Gottfried raises some interesting points and respectful demurrers. The election is, as Gottfried states, far from over. In fact, the shenanigans which occurred in Pennsylvania are notorious and potentially could change things, and they are in many ways a priority.

Beyond Paul’s essay, I would cite here just two items I stumbled across this morning. First, there is news that,

“A Pennsylvania judge ruled in favor of the Trump campaign Thursday, ordering that the state may not count ballots where the voters needed to provide proof of identification and failed to do so by Nov. 9.”

This would significantly alter vote totals, but perhaps not enough to affect the outcome.

However, even more stunning is the careful and precise analysis done by Nick Chase, published by the respected American Thinker journal (“Examining the code, internet geeks conclude ‘Trump’s win was yuuuge’,” American Thinker, November 12, 2020). In this corrected verification, Trump would have won Pennsylvania, 3,550,163 to 3,159,698…in other words by nearly 400,000 votes. Such a result could well change the election outcome.

The Gottfried essay raises several points, most especially the necessity for Donald Trump to remain resilient in the face of what is and will be a progressivist tsunami: if the authoritarian Left can succeed in this patently stolen election without stout opposition, all bets are off: what will prevent them from securing the veritable end of legitimate elections in these United States? Do we then enter a time in America when the so-called “democratic elections” held in former Eastern Bloc countries become the model and rule?

Both Buchanan and Gottfried make significant points. We should consider them closely. We live in perilous times—the Deep States is circling for a final kill, final victory.  Is there life yet in our citizenry?

*****

Both essays come from Chronicles magazine which, as I have done in the past, I strongly recommend to you for intelligent and informed comment.

Will Georgia Halt the Radicals' Revolution?

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blog/will-georgia-halt-the-radicals--revolution-/

By Patrick J. Buchanan    November 10, 2020

"In victory, magnanimity... in defeat, defiance." That counsel about human conflict comes from Winston Churchill. And President Donald Trump, given all he has endured for five years from those piously pleading now for a "time of healing," cannot be faulted for his defiant resolve to unearth any and all high crimes or misdemeanors committed in the counting of ballots in the election of Tuesday last. Trump owes his people this, and he owes the establishment nothing. 

Yet, in making this his priority, Trump should be mindful of several realities. From what we have seen so far, the prospect that the decision in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, or Georgia will be overturned does not appear high. Indeed, it seems a certainty that not enough electoral votes could be flipped from Biden to Trump to overturn Joe Biden's electoral vote victory.

And Trump should realize that in alleging fraud, he is creating an imperative upon himself and his team to provide the evidence to prove it. In politics as in poker, there comes a time when you have to show your cards or fold your hand. Are the cards there?

Trump should also be aware that his reputation, the causes he has served, and the future of both, will be influenced by how he conducts himself in what appears to be an inevitable defeat. Richard Nixon, in the 1960 election against JFK, declined to challenge the returns from Illinois, which he lost by 9,000 votes, though journalists then and historians have contended that the state was almost surely stolen in Cook County. Nixon chose not to challenge the Illinois count. Among the reasons was that, even had he done so successfully, after a brutal battle like the Bush-Gore contest in Florida, and even had Illinois been shifted into his column, he would have been short of the 270 electoral votes needed to win. Nixon would have had to contest and flip Texas as well.

Also, while Trump and his campaign are devoting time and resources to the ballot count in battleground states, a last crucial battle is shaping up in Georgia, where the stakes are second only to the presidency. 

Minutes after Biden declared victory last week, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, exulted, "Now we take Georgia, and then we change the world." Schumer was referring to the two Senate races that will be decided Jan. 5, both runoffs where none of the four candidates got the Georgia-required 50.0 percent of the vote on Nov. 3.

Republican Sen. David Perdue won 49.7 percent, just short of the 50.0 percent that would have ensured GOP control of the Senate through 2022. Perdue faces a runoff against 33-year-old Jon Ossoff. The other race is between Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who is seeking to fill out the full term of Johnny Isakson who stepped down from the Senate in 2019 for health reasons. She is opposed by African American pastor Raphael Warnock. What is involved in these runoff elections?

If Ossoff and Warnock both win, Democrats take control of the Senate. Schumer will be the new majority leader, displacing Mitch McConnell. And all tie votes will be decided by the new Senate President and Vice President Kamala Harris, who, as of 2020, was, by her voting record, the most radical member of the entire body. What would this mean?

On Jan. 20, 10 weeks from today, Democrats would control the House with Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the chair, the Senate with Schumer as majority leader, and the White House with newly inaugurated Joe Biden in the Oval Office. The sole residual power Republicans would retain is the filibuster, the right of extended debate, the capacity to block the radical proposals of the new Democratic majority dominant in D.C. by talking them to death.

Before the "Green New Deal," "Medicare for All," and the Biden-Bernie tax hikes could be passed, before a trillion-dollar bailout of blue states like Illinois could be enacted, before the Supreme Court could be packed, the Senate filibuster would have to be eliminated. But, if it were, we would be transported back to the days of 1965, when LBJ, with veto-proof majorities in both houses, rammed through his Great Society, the failure of which is manifest today in Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia, New York—and in our staggering national debt.

Are Democrats ready for so radical a step? Indeed, they are. Even Barack Obama is calling for killing the filibuster as a "Jim Crow relic." Republicans who think that Democrats would not abolish the filibuster to advance their agenda are deluding themselves.

Yet, all that is needed to block this rising radical revolution is for the GOP to win one of the two Georgia Senate seats at issue Jan. 5. If the Democrats lose either Georgia race, the Bernie-BLM-Antifa-AOC revolution may just end up devouring its children.

What Pat Buchanan Gets Wrong About the Contested Election

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blog/what-pat-buchanan-gets-wrong-about-the-contested-election/

 

By Paul Gottfried    November 12, 2020

Despite Pat Buchanan’s record as a Trump-supporter sans pareil, his most recent column, on why Trump’s challenges to the Biden victory are both futile and possibly harmful, is profoundly unsettling. It is also based on questionable assumptions. 

“It seems a certainty that not enough electoral votes could be flipped from Biden to Trump to overturn’s Joe Biden’s electoral vote victory,” Buchanan declares. Even more ominously, Buchanan suggests that Trump is dragging out his legal challenges when his party should be turning to more urgent matters. While Republicans are “devoting time and resources to the ballot count in battleground states,” Buchanan argues, “a last crucial battle is shaping up in Georgia, where the stakes are second only to the presidency.” Presumably, the longer Trump focuses on himself, haggling over votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and other states that he in all probability lost, the harder it will be to marshal Republican forces for Georgia’s critical senatorial runoff races in early January, precluding the possibility of reining in a leftist administration. 

Although Trump may have gone overboard in his rhetoric about a “corrupt election” that had been stolen from him, the more important question is whether he should be pursuing legal challenges to Biden’s apparent victory.

Trump certainly has a legal right to do so, but for Buchanan, the more relevant question is strategic: Are Republicans putting themselves in a good position by engaging in massive litigation for a battle they may well lose? Like Buchanan, I, too, would be surprised if Trump’s lawyers came up with enough disqualified votes to flip the election. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of votes that will have to be thrown out or changed to give Trump an electoral victory. The odds of achieving this may be stacked against the president. 

Yet despite the improbability of winning their case, Trump and his lawyers have taken a wise and necessary action. It seems “irregularities” have abounded in this election and unconstitutional acts were committed. One example of this comes from my home state of Pennsylvania, where Gov. Tom Wolf circumvented the state legislature and induced the Democratic State Supreme Court to permit late mail ballots, including those without legible postmarks. The legal actions of the Trump team against these irregularities will put the opposition on notice. 

Such notice is particularly timely, given the nearness of the showdown in Georgia and the need to make sure that Democratic wards in Atlanta and Savannah behave properly in collecting and tallying votes. The present litigation will drive home the message that the counting of ballots going forward will take place with observers from both parties present, something that Democratic wards prevented while validating and counting votes after the presidential election. The court procedures pursued by Trump’s team will make it harder for the Democrats to cheat, even if the Democrats’ media and high-tech lap dogs try to cover for them.

Buchanan also offers a misleading comparison between Richard Nixon’s defeat in the 1960 presidential race and what has just befallen Donald Trump. In 1960 Nixon lost to JFK, partly because of 8,858 votes that the late Richard Daley pulled out of various cemeteries to allow Kennedy to win Illinois and thereby the election. Nixon declined to contest the results in Illinois because he also would have had to flip Texas to win. Presumably for the sake of civil peace, Nixon accepted defeat without a legal challenge. 

What makes Buchanan’s comparison misleading is the omission of the changed conditions in the U.S. since 1960. When Kennedy and Nixon ran for the presidency, there were few significant differences between their parties. Democratic court historian Arthur Schlesinger penned a short book in 1960 entitled, Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference?, to prove that the two candidates stood for different things. Supposedly Kennedy had “ideas” while Nixon had only a “method” of governing. 

Having read this pamphlet, I’m not sure the stated difference indicates much of a distinction. On social and cultural matters, the two national parties back then were hard to distinguish, although admittedly the Democrats were allied to labor unions and the GOP was not. Further, the Republicans showed a white Protestant sociological profile, outside the almost uniformly Democratic South. Growing up in Connecticut, I recall that Italians were generally Republican because the Irish ran the Democratic machine. But I would be hard pressed to identify any ideological differences between these partisans. Nor do I recall any between my Democratic father and more Republican mother.

The same is obviously not the case in the presidential election we just experienced. The country is deeply and perhaps irrevocably split between groups that are culturally and morally in conflict. In 1960 Richard Nixon could withdraw from the presidential race, knowing that four years later he might run again for the same office in a country that would remain pretty much the same politically. The withdrawal of Donald Trump from the presidential race would have much deeper consequences, particularly if the president-elect grows more senile and is succeeded in power by a far leftist vice president. Kamala Harris has made no secret of her desire to defund the police, and she idolizes Black Lives Matter. She also plans to ban opinions that she doesn’t like as “hate speech” and then seize guns from “bigoted” owners through executive orders. Kamala would spearhead a transformative administration that Donald Trump is still standing in the way of. May he continue to stand there!