Change Or Resign Mr. President

We’d really like to vote for a Democrat for president this year to help jumpstart the post-The Donald GOP. Our first preference is that the Democrats take out our current president, The Frontrunner, and replace him with the current vice-president, Triple A. In our fantasy, she makes a feint towards the center at the convention by taking some of the fringe Democrats to task. Of course Triple A wouldn’t really go far towards the center but it would attract lots of votes. Our 44th president was right when he said something like: “Don’t do stupid stuff.” The problem as he and his two successors have shown is that it is difficult model to apply.

If The Donald wins there won’t be much for conservatives so the Democrats have a real chance to attract conservatives, independents, and Nikki voters. Unfortunately, for us and the country, The Frontrunner Administration seems hellbent on driving us away.

Sidebar: We are going to emphasize The Frontrunner Administration for the rest of his term because it seems unlikely that The Frontrunner is really in charge. One of the problems we have in making a vote is we don’t know who is making decisions. End Sidebar

We have three examples: Sanctions on Alaska, mush, and anti-trust. The WSJ (paywall alert) has a great editorial on The Frontrunner and Alaska. First, his administration blocked oil and gas leases:

The Interior Department blocked new oil and gas leasing on 13.3 million acres in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. Congress expressly set aside the region in 1923 for oil and gas development, but the Administration ignores this and says drilling would disturb the Arctic’s “natural wonders.” 

Then they found a way to stop mining of critical resources:

Interior on Friday also denied a permit for a 211-mile road necessary to develop the Ambler Mining District, which is one of the world’s richest deposits of copper, cobalt, gallium, germanium and other critical minerals. The Trump Administration granted the permit, but Biden officials used a lawsuit by green groups to reconsider and veto the project.

You would think that being less foolish than The Donald would not be that hard. But it is again as we see in Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt. Jim has a section with the wishy-washy title (that is satire folks!) More Mush From The Wimp where he reviews The Frontrunner’s interview about antisemitism on campus. You should read it all but you really shouldn’t be surprised at the lack of leadership from our current president. Here is a bit from Jim who seems as frustrated as us:

Heaven forbid that anyone listening conclude that the explosion of antisemitism on college campuses in this country is a uniquely insidious and dangerous problem that must be addressed immediately. No, no, the president of the United States must announce, at every opportunity, that the Palestinians have it just as bad, too.

The Frontrunner whiffed on a great opportunity. We see, as the last post described, that a few people in the GOP are showing a lack of tolerance for the intolerant. The Frontrunner (or Triple A) might not be Harry Truman but at least they could be Bill Clinton.

Then there is the personal. One of the stocks we own is Live Nation Entertainment (LYV). Here is a report on a report telling us:

The DOJ is targeting a lawsuit as soon as the fall, according to a Politico report, which cited people following the matter. The suit may claim that the Live Nation is abusing its power over the live music industry.

LYV fell 8.5 percent despite higher than expected earnings. The regulatory agencies that The Frontrunner is charged with overseeing is attacking LYV, Apple (The DOJ Case Against Apple Looks Pretty Rotten), and many other targets.

The Frontrunner seems incapable of reining in any of the worst elements of the Democrat Party. If he wants our vote (and we think we are part of a pretty large group) he needs to change but we doubt that he will. That is why we would like a chance to vote for Triple A. Time to resign or change Mr. President.

How Not To Find Support For The Donald

It is a strange way to try to convince people to vote for a candidate. We’ve see a couple of columns like Kurt Schlichter’s Time To Rethink Your Never Trumpism. Kurt probably didn’t write the title so we will forgive that he is not trying to convert the Never-The-Donald crew. There are, however, conservatives like Men With Gloves, Nikki voters, and other people on the right and some in the center who might be convinced to vote for The Donald in 2024. So what does Kurt do to woo us? He insults us:

Let’s agree that he’s icky for the purposes of this discussion. Let’s agree that his tweets are mean, that he’s not a conservative ideologue, that he says dumb things and gets into useless fights, and that he does many other unseemly and annoying things. Let’s agree that this is all true. Let’s concede that in normal times, one might want to forgo supporting a guy like that. But these aren’t normal times.

It is true that The Donald’s foolishness and boorishness has and will continue to damage the GOP brand. But the real problems with The Donald are bad policies and lack of effectiveness on good policies. The Donald’s behavior cost him leadership like Paul Ryan who fixed corporate taxes during The Donald’s administration. Age cost him Cocaine Mitch who saw that the judicial nominations from the Federalist Society were approved. The stuff that The Donald tried to do himself like the wall between the US and Mexico never happened. And he did start the trade wars but, as expected, everybody lost.

The Donald received substantial support from conservatives in 2016 despite, as Kurt hilariously says, The Donald not being a conservative ideologue. He received conservative support because he promised to nominate judges selected by the Federalist Society. Many conservatives voted for him again in 2020 because he, well, Cocaine Mitch, kept that promise. Perhaps he intends to do it again but we have not heard much about selecting judges from The Donald. Instead we have heard about increasing tariffs, devaluing the dollar, ignoring entitlements, and, of course, revenge. Rarely have conservatives been offered such a large negative return for their votes.

We agree with Kurt that we don’t want The Frontrunner’s administration to win another term. As of today, however, we would rather spend the next four years trying to get to gridlock with a Democrat president and hoping that the GOP would become a useful party by 2028.

Still, we could be convinced one way or the other. As we have said, if our current vice-president, Triple A was to engineer a takeout of The Frontrunner and make a feint to the center we would vote for her. On the other hand, if The Donald was to nominate ND Doug (Doug Burgum) for vice-president we would only be a heartbeat or a conviction away from having a good president. We doubt either of those will happen but we can still hope for both.

Insults have gotten The Donald three nominations and one general election win to date. It is not surprising that his minion Kurt used The Donald’s playbook to try and help his master. And, as the last sentence shows, insults are really easy. We would suggest limiting insults to the opposition and offering policies that might attract those few voters still on the fence. We really don’t expect either of those to happen either.

Strange Events In Chocolate

We have recovered from COVID and got our tax forms filed so we are ready to write. To us, posting is a joy not a duty so duties come first. Shrink inflation has come for our chocolate. We were at the local supermarket today and there were two similar large variety bags of Dove Chocolates. We’d like to say that our expertise on Dove Chocolates is because we buy them for our bridge club. Don’t judge us. The old, mostly white bag with blue and red trim sold for $8.49. The new bag was mostly brown with red and blue trim and sold for the same price, $8.49. To our eye the new bag had more red than the old. The difference was that the old bag was 15.8 ounces while the new bag was 14.08 ounces. We wonder how many shoppers went for the new smaller bag. Our president, The Frontrunner, has another example of shrinking package size. This one reduced by over ten percent.

But strange events are afoot in chocolate. Although Dove has reduced the size by over ten percent, cocoa prices have gone through the roof recently. As you can see here, they have more than doubled since the beginning of the year. A drought is West Africa seems to be an important cause of the price increase in cocoa. So it makes sense to us. We can’t be certain but we are pretty sure that the prices for our Dove bags have been going up and it makes sense to us that we first paid more and then got less as the price of ingredients went up. Way up.

Here is what doesn’t make sense to us. Our investment club owns shares in Hershey. What one headline writer calls A Cocoa Price Crisis would seem to be bad news for our investment in the chocolate maker. Yet the six-month Hershey chart does not seem to have any direction despite the sky-rocketing price of cocoa. It opened the year at 185 and change and closed today at 185 and change. Although the Dow Jones Industrial Average does better than Hershey over the past six months, for the year-to-date, when cocoa prices have been exploding, both have been pretty flat.

We are convinced that the cocoa prices are coming down soon. Our question is: when the cocoa prices come down what will happen to Hershey’s earning and market price?

Entitlements, Climate Change, And Politics

Entitlements generate a horrible fiscal set of fiscal problems that grow worse every day. For reasons that no longer astound us, Climate Change and proposals to attempt to change Climate Change are always in the news but entitlements rarely make headlines. Below we will discuss an ad that explains why elected officials are reluctant to reform entitlements.

Sidebar One: Bjorn Lomborg’s latest at the WSJ is behind a paywall. If you can’t afford it the subtitle tells you what you need to know: Climate policy needs to take into account the costs of draconian measures, which are enormous. The reason foolish Climate Change proposals no longer astound us is that we recognize the importance of elected officials giving money to people who might have already been friends but certainly will be friends after the fact. End Sidebar One.

Reforming entitlements will require elected officials taking money away from folks and that will not make friends that are critical to winning elections. Particularly curious for us is the resurgence of the 2012 throw granny off the cliff ad. We thought it was hilarious at the time but perhaps it was effective. Our sudoku app has ads. Several times a week we are subjected to an ad attacking our local congress critter on Social Security.

Sidebar Two: We are well aware of the failing of human memory. So we are not certain of all the details because when the ad finishes it is gone. We are certain of the basics after dozens of doses. So we may have embellished or under reported some of the precise details. End Sidebar Two.

The ad has two characters. The first is an older woman from a local hamlet talking about how she worked on the factory floor for thirty (?) years and paid in to Social Security with every check. The other character is a youngish guy with a pickup truck that doesn’t understand why our congress critter would do such evil thing. No, he we don’t think he says evil. It ends with a text showing something like our congress critter is is proposing slashing Social Security while providing billions of dollars in corporate tax breaks. The cite for these claims is House Joint Resolution 21 (HJR 21). After watching the ad dozens of times we decided to look it up as it seemed strange that it wasn’t a proposed law. We were gobsmacked to find that HJR 21 is a proposed amendment to the Constitution for a balanced budget. The entire text is at the end of the post or you can read it here. As you would expect, a balanced budget amendment has nothing to do with entitlements or corporate tax breaks.

What is amazing is that the folks creating and paying for the ads think that such ads will be effective. And there is the possibility that congress critters are worrying about such ads. Surely our two presidential candidates are as they are both supporting 20+ percent Social Security cuts in 2033 or 2034 caused by the existing law rather than propose a possible solution.

This is where we sit in 2024. We love to spend money and make enormously costly regulations about Climate Change. We don’t consider what, if any, are the benefits associated with those costs yet we are unwilling to confront the serious problems related to entitlements, the deficit, and federal debt. An ad tells us that a balanced budget amendment will lead to all manner of “bad” fiscal outcomes through processes difficult to discern. We expect it will only get worse as the election nears.

JOINT RESOLUTION [21]

Proposing a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years after the date of its submission for ratification:

1. Total outlays for any fiscal year shall not exceed total receipts for that fiscal year. Total outlays shall include all outlays of the United States except those for payment of debt, and total receipts shall include all revenue of the United States except that derived from borrowing.

2. The Congress may by a roll call vote of three-fifths of each House of Congress declare an emergency and provide by law for specific outlays in excess of the limit in section 1 with respect to a fiscal year.

3. The Congress may provide by law for increasing revenue of the United States, except that derived from borrowing, only by a roll call vote of a majority of each House.

4. The limit on the debt of the United States held by the public shall not be increased unless three-fifths of each House of Congress provides by law for such an increase by a roll-call vote.

5. The Congress may waive the provisions of this article for any fiscal year in which a declaration of war is in effect. The provisions of this article may be waived for any fiscal year in which the United States is engaged in military conflict which causes an imminent and serious military threat to national security and is so declared by a joint resolution, adopted by a majority of the whole number of each House, which becomes law.

6. Prior to each fiscal year, the President shall transmit to the Congress a proposed budget for the United States Government for that fiscal year in which total outlays do not exceed total receipts.

7. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

8. This article shall take effect beginning with the tenth fiscal year after its ratification.

Democrats, Democrats

In the song New York, New York (and if you want to be picky The Theme From New York, New York) one of the lead-in phrases is: It is up to you. We were already convinced that our president, The Frontrunner was well past his prime. The transcript of The Frontrunner’s interview with Robert [Ben] Hur should be enough to convince everyone that the Democrat ticket needs a change.

We know, it is 159 pages so if you can’t make the investment you could read Dan McLaughlin or Andrew McCarthy at NRO. We’re still working on the transcript. Here is Andy’s conclusion:

So please, read the transcript, but not for what it says about [The Frontrunner]’s carelessness regarding the nation’s secrets. Instead, read it and ask yourself whether he should be president right now, let alone for the next five years.

The fact is that neither conservatives nor the GOP can get The Frontrunner off the Democrat ticket. Now that The Frontrunner has secured the nomination it is time for the Democrats to remove him from the presidency, make the Vice-President (Triple A) President, have her choose a new Vice-President, and have that ticket accepted at the convention in Milwaukee. It needs to be done by the Democrat Convention which starts on August 19. Why? Because it gives Triple A the best chance to win the election. She will be seen at the legitimate Democrat candidate and get her chance to make her pitch.

We’re not saying that Triple A is a great candidate or that she will make a great president. She just has to be more coherent than The Frontrunner, an easy task, and beat The Donald, a more difficult task. She has, however, a great pitch that we are open to: Let’s get rid of grumpy old men.

This is one of those times when what is best for the Democrats in congruent with what best for the country. It is up to you, Democrats, Democrats. Do it quickly.

Foolish Presidential Candidates

It is now official that our former president, The Donald, and our current president, The Frontrunner, have enough delegates to assure their nomination. David Zimmerman at NRO says:

Former president [The] Donald … and President [The Frontrunner] have officially clinched their respective parties’ presidential nominations, setting up a rematch in November.

So the general election campaign that majorities didn’t want is going to happen is going to happen unless the 22nd amendment or some other health issue comes into play. We like our description of the two candidates as nasty, angry, and foolish. We don’t see much to choose between the two on nasty and angry so, for us, it is going to come down to the least foolish.

During his State Of The Union (SOTU) speech The Frontrunner made many foolish proposals but the one that was within in ability to create was a three century update on Boston’s Long Wharf in Gaza. Sure enough, today’s Morning Dispatch has a lead story that US Ships Depart For Gaza. You should read the whole thing (paywall alert) as the authors try to find a reason to build the pier. Here is a taste:

The hope is that the pier increases the volume of aid that can be delivered to Gazans—but Goldberg warns that the plan, as currently conceived, might not greatly improve the current situation. “The problem that the president faces in trying to force the pier to work—before you have a plan for distribution and security on the ground when you reach the port—is that this can very quickly go sideways,” [Emphasis added]

We think sideways is the best outcome for the pier. And, of course, there won’t be US boots on the ground. They will be on the pier. No danger there. To us, the reason for the pier is clear. It is to shore up the pro-Hamas vote in Michigan and other key states.

Sidebar: It is a pro-Hamas splinter rather than pro-Palestinian because the splinter supports the government rather than the people in Gaza. If they were pro-Palestinian they would be calling on the Hamas led government to surrender. End Sidebar.

It is hard to believe that The Frontrunner is doing something as internationally foolish as building the Gaza pier. Yet, The Donald let out an even more foolish international idea the same week. Jim Geraghty in yesterday’s NRO’s The Morning Jolt tells us that The Donald’s plan on Ukraine is to let Russia win. Here is Jim’s quote from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, a darling of the populists:

“He ([The Donald]) has a very clear vision,” Orbán said in an interview to Hungarian broadcaster M1 broadcast on Sunday. “He says the following: first, he will not give a single penny for the Russo-Ukrainian war. That’s why the war will end, because it’s obvious that Ukraine cannot stand on its own two feet.”

In today’s Jolt Jim thanks the over 1200 commenters. It is now closing in on 1500 comments. One of the silly defenses of The Donald is that he has said he would sell weapons to Ukraine on credit. It is silly to think that Ukraine would ever pay us back.

We give this week’s foolishness award to The Donald although there are a few days left. Buckle up! It is going to be a wild ride from here to election day and probably beyond as these two Blue Footed Boobies try to outdo each other on the foolishness scale.

Nasty, Angry, And Foolish

Last night we watched Resident Alien on Peacock rather than The Frontrunner’s State Of The Union (SOTU) speech. Are we glad we did! Episode four of season three was an epic show in an excellent series. We don’t even mind that it took us an extra day to finish. The Frontrunner’s speech just confirmed what we strongly suspected. Usually in political races candidates are trying to find different lanes. In the 2024 presidential election we can be sure that both of these candidates are going to be in the nasty, angry, and foolish lane.

Let’s start with The Frontrunner. We were going to go with 43 cites of 43 sites but today’s The Morning Dispatch was enough for us. Their headline for the SOTU was: The State Of The Union Is Angry. Read it all and subscribe so you can read their editorial about the rematch between The Donald and The Frontrunner: The American People Should Demand Better. We agree but the American people didn’t.

For nasty we will use this from the the NRO’s real time analysis of the SOTU:

[The Frontrunner] leans over the lectern and taunts Republicans who scuttled the bipartisan Senate supplemental bill dealing with the border crisis. [Emphasis added]

Dealing is a bit of an overstatement. But this is even nastier:

[The Frontrunner is] now berating the Supreme Court justices, to their faces, about overturning Roe v. Wade, and declaring that “my predecessor” failed to care about the American people,

Well, foolish is too easy. To include just a few things from the SOTU: shrinkflation, caps on drug prices, raising the minimum wage, and increasing incentives to buy houses without trying to increase the incentives or ability to build them. For ongoing stuff check out Scott Lincicome’s recent Capitolism Newsletter at The Dispatch. Here is a bit:

Leaving aside the obvious entertainment value of having the federal government officially weigh in on the age-old internet debate over whether burgers, tacos, gyros and other bread/meat combinations are “sandwiches,” this—like the case against Big Sauce—is simply not something that requires the full force and attention of the federal government.

As Scott says, when administration focuses on trivial things, and he has the evidence that they do, it is less able to do important things.

When we compare The Donald to The Frontrunner on the Nasty, Angry, and Foolish criterion it doesn’t seem necessary to provide any evidence on the first two. The tricky thing is trying to evaluate The Donald’s policies for foolishness because as we think somebody else said (we don’t think there was a copyright), The Donald has moods rather than policies. So to look at something written we took NRO’s interview of The Donald’s minion, Kari Lake who is running for the Senate in Arizona. The first question can be summarized as: Do entitlements need to be reformed? Kari’s answer is:

I do not think we should touch [entitlements]. There’s so many other things that we could do. But this is something that the hard-working people of this country have paid into and earned. And to pull the rug out from under them at time when they need it most, especially as people are struggling so much — it’s wrong, it’s a promise we made, they paid into it. They never got the option to not pay into it. They paid into it and that’s the wrong place to be tinkering and moving things around, and at risk of those people not having that security blanket.

Check out the full questions and answers at NRO. Note that this first one ties into The Donald. At best Kari’s answer can be most kindly described as foolishness. Not reforming Social Security means about a 23 percent reduction across the board that will likely happen in 2033. Means testing is an important part of our preferred solution because it saves the security blanket.

Then there is the deficit and debt:

Well it’s going to be difficult. I mean, we’re in a dire situation, I don’t think there’s a lot we can do. This is gonna be difficult to pull ourselves out of this. And we’re gonna have to get very creative. And I’m not going to be able to sit here in three minutes and tell you how we’re going to fix the problem. If it were a problem we can fix in three minutes, it probably would have been fixed, but we’re certainly not going to do it on the backs of the hard-working American citizens who have worked hard and paid into this. I think a lot of the things we need to do is increase revenues by bringing manufacturing, home bringing back some high-paying jobs. All of the things that Joe Biden has done have hurt American workers. He’s on the verge of sending our auto industry overseas with these EVs to China. [The Donald] wants to make sure we’re keeping those good jobs here. We need to bring and reshore some companies in manufacturing and get some jobs that are actually paying Americans a good living wage, where they’re able to then pay into the system and pay into taxes.

More foolishness. We would be impressed if she was able to finish that answer with a straight face. We will translate and summarize: Kari is saying we need to increase tariffs so hard working Americans can pay more taxes and subsidize business we like.

Read the rest of it to get some foolishness on Ukraine and elsewhere. With The Donald and Kari we need to ask: Why do we need the GOP? Why would a person vote for the GOP when it is just a slightly different version of nasty, angry, and foolish?

Presidential Rumble II

Before we get back to important stuff like baseball, let’s talk about the election now that we seem destined for The Donald versus The Frontrunner II. We still advise the Democrats in the White House and Congress to take out or force out our current president, The Frontrunner, and make the Vice-President, Triple A, President before the convention. Barring that or some stoke of luck we are stuck with The Donald versus The Frontrunner II.

Jeffery Blehar at NRO says Charlie Cooke at the same site was eloquent when he said the loser this fall will be forever stained. Charlie concludes

Even before the election, it is rare that one meets a voter who is enthused by the choices on offer. Once the contest is over, it will be a veritable impossibility — and the aspirant who loses will be forced to start looking at impenetrable compounds high up in the Swiss Alps.

Jeff is just in disaster mode as he concludes:

That’s it, that’s all that’s on the itinerary for us in November. [The Donald versus The Frontrunner II]. The course is locked in. There can be no deviation from the path now, absent death or disability. One way or another, the result will incinerate the social fabric of the country. Set the controls for the heart of the sun.

Check out Jeff and Charlie and NRO. Time will tell but we think Charlie has it exactly wrong. We think the winner of The Donald versus The Frontrunner II will be forever stained. In part because Jeff is right about the election and that fraying social fabric will set the opposition to the winner. If one of them had the ability to heal that fraying fabric it would give us a candidate to root for but both of them are such fools that the winner will have a disastrous presidency. Our prediction is the winner will be forever stained while the loser can say you shoulda voted for me. We hope we are wrong and Charlie is right.

Kamala And The Democrats In 2024

Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt at NRO covers our earlier post on the Democrats replacing our current president (The Frontrunner) with our current vice-president (Triple A). Here is how Jim sees it:

And if 2024 is going to be a pure base-turnout election — certainly neither party seems all that interested in appealing to independents and centrists anymore — Harris’s loopy, off-the-cuff, Hallmark-card, haiku speaking style won’t matter as much. She raises money, pounds the podium on abortion, and presses the buttons for progressives in a way that Joe Biden can’t or won’t. Recast her as Obama, cast Trump in the role of Mitt Romney or John McCain — an erratic billionaire businessman who’s too old for the job — and roll the dice.

So Jim thinks the Democrats should:

Cut bait with Biden, nominate Harris, and have her select some normal, bland, pleasant middle-aged white male like Colorado senator Michael Bennet or Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate. Yeah, that’s a bit of a Hail Mary pass in presidential politics, but running it back with Biden in his current state is even less likely to succeed. [Emphasis added]

Cut bait with Biden doesn’t make any sense to us but yes we get the idea and it is pretty similar to what we proposed in our last post. We don’t see it as a Hail Mary pass. We see it a reasonable plan that has a high probability of working. We would go with a governor like Josh for Triple A’s running mate. We have one reminder and a new point to help convince the Democrats to force The Frontrunner out and nominate Triple A.

The reminder is the Democrats want to do the deed to The Frontrunner after he wins enough delegates to ensure his nomination. Then he is forced out or bows out and Triple A becomes president and the presumptive nominee. She doesn’t have to pander (as much) to the progressive wing to get the nomination. She becomes much more widely acceptable to soccer moms, independents and other important political subdivisions that Jim says are being ignored.

The new point is that Jim describes Triple A as: a healthy 59-year-old woman. We think it is important to add pretty as it is at least as important to the other attributes. Even the 44th president noticed. Pretty, as we learned with most of the elections starting with 1980, wins presidential elections. The way our eyes behold it, starting with 1980, only in 1988 and 2020 we couldn’t pick the prettiest of the two major party candidates. In every other year we could and in ever one of those elections pretty won. Your milage may vary on beauty but that is how we see it.

It is clear to us what the Democrats must do to win the 2024 presidential election: Make Triple A the president between the primaries and the convention, nominate her, and let her tack toward the center. The Donald will be sufficient to bring out the progressive base.

Why is a conservative telling the Democrats the “secret” solution? Because we want to get rid of The Donald ASAP and give the GOP a chance to rebuild in 2026 and 2028. Right now conservatives are getting next to nothing from the GOP. It is true that when you ask what could go wrong you usually find out. In this case, however, we think telling the Democrats and even supporting Triple A in the voting booth in November is worth the risk for conservatives.

Presidential Fantasy 2024

We agree with Philip Klein at NRO that our current vice-president, Triple A, is the safer choice for the Democrats in the 2024 general election than our current president, The Frontrunner. In fact, we would say that Triple A is the better choice for Democrats and conservatives in 2024. Read all Philip has to say and subscribe to the National Review. We will explain how our 2024 presidential fantasy works but first let’s put our cards on the table.

We’re conservative. We want a robust national defense including supporting Ukraine and Israel. We want the rule of law including enforcing law at the southern border and real judges. We want a free economy including free trade. We don’t care if is the Democrats with Truman on defense, JFK cutting taxes, Carter on deregulation, or Bill (and Newt) on domestic policy or the GOP that supports conservatives as they did from 1980 to The Donald. At this time, it doesn’t look like the Democrats are much interested in conservative ideas so we need to rid the GOP of The Donald to move in a conservative direction. The Donald winning in 2024 is just a waste of time for conservatives.

Sidebar: We would like Nikki to be the GOP nominee in 2024. Unfortunately, her best argument, that she would win, has been sabotaged by everyone actually realizing that The Frontrunner is well past his not too impressive prime. The chances that The Donald might beat The Frontrunner in a 2024 rematch have moved out the remote category. End Sidebar.

Our fantasy is that the Democrats, with GOP support, take out The Frontrunner via the 25th Amendment so that Triple A becomes president before the Democrat convention but after the primaries. She appoints Harry Truman as vice-president and…. Whoops, sorry, we veered beyond fantasy there. Triple A appoints a reasonable and experienced Democrat as her vice-president. Joe Manchin might be a nice choice if he is still a Democrat. 

Because Triple A becomes president after the primaries she can tack to the center immediately and has time to even take some actions to prove it. Her rallying cry should be that she is actually going to do what The Frontrunner promised in 2020. We’re not saying she will actually govern from the center after she wins in November 2024. It would be great if she actually governed from the center but she will win if she runs as such. And, it is just possible, that Triple A and the Democrats might like the popularity of moving to the center.

What is in it for conservatives to support Triple A in 2024? We don’t get much but it is a lousy choice. We avoid wasting four years while The Donald degrades the GOP brand. In any case, the GOP is unlikely to control either house of Congress starting in 2025 but the Democrats are unlikely to have big majorities. The GOP will have opportunities to rebuild its brand in 2026 and then in 2028. We don’t like the choices available but Triple A in 2024 seems like the best option for conservatives.