What do you suppose the Alliance for American Advertising has in common with the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists, the American Society of Civil Engineers, or American Apparel and Footwear? Apart from beginning with the letter “A,” they are among the nearly 3,500 trades or firms that have dedicated lobbying operations in Washington, D.C.

And that doesn’t count the union headquarters located in D.C., from AFSCME (“We make America Happen”) to SEIU (“the nation’s most diverse union”) and beyond, they’re all there, hands out, telephones working overtime to get a little bigger slice of the government pie, made with 100 percent locally sourced materials, namely your tax dollars.

Donald Trump came to office promising to “drain the swamp.” He has made a little, mostly rhetorical, progress around the edges. But the swampiness of the swamp is deep and inveterate. He will never succeed in that stupendous sanitary engineering project until he removes the thing that attracts the swamp creatures to Washington just as a rotting carcass attracts flies and other necrophagites: centers of power and influence.

How to do it? Several people, including the president himself, have tentatively suggested a promising mechanism. Disperse the government from Washington to the heartland and beyond.

Stability has always been the main promise legitimizing Vladimir Putin’s monopolization of political power in Russia.

Restoration of stability was the winning slogan for Putin in 2012, in claiming the presidency back from his pliant stand-in, Dmitry Medvedev, who had tried to experiment with modernization. And Putin’s reelection in 2018 also utilized a stability-centered propaganda campaign.

Yet, presently, this “majority” has shrunk to statistical insignificance. A recent opinion poll shows that 59 percent of Russians expect and see a need for profound changes, and 31 percent concede that at least some change is necessary (Vedomosti, November 6).

[Note by JW: In President Dwight Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the nation at the end of his two-term presidency (January 17, 1961), he warned of the dangers of a new “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry”:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Today, military historian Victor Davis Hanson warns of the dangers of a new Military-Intelligence Complex emerging on the Left.]

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Much has been written about the so-called Resistance of disgruntled Clinton, Obama, and progressive activists who have pledged to stop Donald Trump’s agenda.

Yet far more disturbing have been the furor of lame-duck and retired intelligence and military officers -- who compare the commander-in-chief to a fascist, declare him unfit, or dream of his “sooner the better” removal in a “Seven Days of May” plot for real.

This summer at a conference at a well-known university, I sat down with the head of a new institute on campus who was  blunt. “At this point, if you can’t answer yes to a basic question, nothing else counts. Doesn’t matter where you stand on taxes, foreign policy, regulations . . .”

“What’s the question?” I asked.

 “Are you ready to fight?”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah,” he replied with a shrug, “that’s it.”

The Left has been making war by other means for 50 years, changing history textbooks, peddling films that mock fatherhood and faith, designing bogus studies that show pay gaps and systemic racism.  No more compromise, no more calls for bipartisanship with them.  Now we fight.

Let’s face it: Democrats’ embrace of thuggery over democracy is not normal.

Democrats have become the party of thuggery, from the top leaders abusing President Trump as a traitor and criminal, to the Antifa black shirts beating up Trump supporters in Democrat cities. The ginned up hysteria over Trump’s election has grown with Trump’s triumphant successes with the economy and national security.

The Democrat Party has veered far left very fast, without any pushback from within the party. Their voters have turned, seemingly overnight, from normal American citizens to a deranged mob after Trump’s blood. This weird transformation is normalized by blaming it on Trump himself, and the shock of his victory.

A moment’s reflection shows how superficial that derangement explanation is.

"Why are Leftists so unreachable by reason? You can point out holes in their arguments but they are unmoved.  And some of their claims are entirely out of touch with reality." 

Later on in his introduction to another piece he posted, he cites Freud in calling what leftists do "displacement," meaning that, in their minds, their anger is always caused by something outside of themselves, like injustice for example.  Leftists do not want to solve problems though, they want to "luxuriate" in them; they need problems to explain their anger.

These are among the several reasons why the Dems’ plot against plot if falling apart.

What does it mean after the House of Representatives — on an almost one-hundred-percent pure partisan vote, save for two Democrats who wisely demurred — decides to expand an impeachment investigation on what they claim to be serious charges when... the very next day... the stock market zooms to all-time highs, breaking records substantially on all major indexes, and black unemployment goes to all-time lows?

Well, the latter spells big trouble for the Democrats a year from now and the former means the investment world thinks impeachment is a bunch of horse hockey that will never happen (the Republican Senate will never convict Trump, not even envious Mitt) and the real news was the job figures.

And it's easy to see why both of those are true.

What a world we live in. A confidential asset of a hyper-political CIA director, handpicked by the director to spy on the Trump White House, is now called a “whistleblower.”

All the while the mainstream propagandists gaslight us by shrieking that Trump is the corrupt one, that Trump’s ideas are destructive as the economy soars and unemployment remains at 50 year lows. When the Washington Post intones that “Democracy dies in darkness” they evince no apparent awareness of irony. They’re knifing democracy to death every single day.

In the meantime, as our constitutional republic faces the wrecking balls of the Left and is asked to endure as they smash away at every norm that has made this country great, many Republicans find themselves conveniently absent from the action.

“I killed my parents so now I ask for mercy on the grounds that I’m an orphan.”

That's the canonical definition of chutzpah -- shameless effrontery -- and it summarizes the Democrat position on the attempted impeachment of President Trump.

The Hillary Clinton campaign paid for the Steele dossier, assembled out of bits handed to ex-MI6 spook Christopher Steele from his Russian intelligence sources, and the FBI used this concoction to obtain FISA warrants to bug the Trump presidential campaign.

Now, THAT'S foreign interference. And those facts aren't in dispute. When the Trump administration tries to get the truth out of foreign governments about their involvement in nefarious activities in the U.S., the Democrats scream, "Impeachment!"

The Wall Street Journal editors got this exactly right:

More than 2 million Californians were recently left without power after the state's largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric -- which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year -- preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds.

Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment.

Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In many places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents and infectious diseases.  These are but a few of many examples that the once-golden state has reverted to a primitive premodern age.