The Oasis for
Rational Conservatives
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
We’ll focus on what went on this week of note in the US later. Of far more import is what’s going on in Chicom China.
Google these words – coronavirus collapse communist china – and as of this morning (2/21) you’ll get 539,000 hits. There are predictions galore of the COVID-19 virus precipitating the end of Communist rule in China, along with every conspiracy theory human imagination can devise.
Then there are voices of reasoned caution, like Princeton Professor Rory Truax, observing on Monday (2/17) in The Atlantic that China’s Chernobyl Never Seems to Arise.
At this point, it looks to be increasingly likely that there will be no worldwide pandemic. The world is not in danger here. China, on the other hand, is screwed, and in more ways than one.
The Chinese communist government increasingly poses an existential threat not just to its own 1.4 billion citizens but to the world at large.
China is currently in a dangerously chaotic state. And why not, when a premodern authoritarian society leaps wildly into the brave new world of high-tech science in a single generation?
The Chinese technological revolution is overseen by an Orwellian dictatorship.
Which is why, predictably, the Chinese Communist Party has not developed the social, political or cultural infrastructure to ensure that its sophisticated industrial and biological research does not go rogue and become destructive to itself and to the billions of people who are on the importing end of Chinese products and protocols.
Wednesday night's (2/19) Democrat debate in Nevada allowed for a sharp focus on the candidates' personalities. It wasn't pretty.
They were the six unappealing dwarfs — Supercilious, Shrill, Angry, Confused, Smug...and that unpleasant nameless something that is Klobuchar.
This was Elizabeth Warren's debate, for she aggressively dominated the available airtime. As the debate progressed, the other candidates fell silent when she spoke out of instinctive deference. With her hoarse voice and scolding manner, she was every mean old lady that children learn to fear.
"Cruelty is the expression of hate and of the will to power. ... The sadistic traits, the tendency to barbarousness, the impulse to destroy, manifest themselves in a manner that is senseless, brutal, scornful of every cultural achievement. ...As everyone knows by now, the Left is outraged that A.G. Barr has intervened with regard to the prosecutors' absurd sentence recommendation for Roger Stone. Dennis Prager, on his radio program last Friday (2/14), observed that the Left is truly sadistic and cruel. Leftists enjoy destroying those whose views they find unacceptable.
The sadist revels in the fear, the anger, the humiliation of his victim. ... The sadist pictures to himself what is happening in the mind of his object, whose resistance he calls forth and breaks. Only this feeling of himself into the affective life of the object brings him the expected pleasure."
—Wilhelm Stekel, Sadism and Masochism: the Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty (1929)
The Deep State run by Democrats is worse than a swamp; it devours those who presume to buck its system of skullduggery in search of wealth and power.
President Trump appointed Richard “Ric” Grenell to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the surprise appointment begins immediately. Within minutes the media intelligence apparatus displayed apoplexy at the announcement.
All of the right administrative state interests are visibly triggered by the appointment; and it appears this could be a key turning point in President Trump’s push-back against the permanent intelligence apparatus that has targeted his administration for three years.
However, this appointee will now have the full and focused attention of the SSCI and Intelligence Community, the Eye of Sauron.
Yesterday (2/17) was not Presidents Day. If you enter “Presidents Day” into Wikipedia, you will be redirected to the entry for “Washington’s Birthday” – because by federal law, the third Monday is a national holiday in honor of the First President – the “Father of his country” – George Washington.
Not every president, including Millard Fillmore, Woodrow Wilson, or Bill Clinton.
George Washington’s birthday was celebrated yesterday. So consider this thought experiment:
It is 2020 and Washington and close military advisers like Alexander Hamilton return for a 235th-anniversary ride on the eight decisive battlefields where American independence was won, finally at Yorktown in 1781. They would be shocked and disgusted. Here’s why.
For four years, polling has documented that the president’s strongest support demographic is America’s Orthodox Jews.
The support runs between 70 percent in radical Los Angeles to 90 percent most everywhere else. This has been documented here and here and here and here and here.
Although much of that support stems from a deep affinity with his stands on the whole gamut of traditional American cultural and social issues, an underestimated factor is that community’s natural acquaintance with Borscht Belt humor. Those who “get” that humor know precisely how to understand Trump, what to take seriously, what to brush off, and what deeper messages to take away from his speeches and tweets.
Those who do not get the style and nuance end up completely misunderstanding him and then attacking him for communicating thoughts he never contemplated. Like the Corrupt Journalist Corps.
According to TTPer Mike Guidone, the Dems in Vegas had a dwarf-tossing contest featuring Mini Mike Bloomberg. Here’s an exclusive photo of what it looked like.
Welcome to the Valentine’s Day HFR!
Today is for celebrating the love and friendship that bless our lives. A day for feeling an infinite gratitude for having love in our hearts and being fortunate enough to have it returned.
Let’s hope that on this day, Democrats and their media poodles will take a break from their TDS, and have moments of happy fulfillment with friends and those they love. It’s a tragedy – for them as much as for the rest of us – that they will quickly return to their world of hate and rage tomorrow.
You’d think that after the most humiliatingly disastrous week of recent years – last week – they might engage in soul-searching, asking themselves what lessons they need to learn. But of course they didn’t, doubling down on their TDS instead.
I think those of us on the left need to take a long look in the mirror and have an honest conversation about what’s going on.
If you had told me three years ago that I would ever attend a Donald Trump rally, I would have laughed and assured you that was never going to happen. Heck, if you had told me I would do it three months ago, I probably would have done the same thing.
So, how did I find myself among 11,000-plus Trump supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire? Believe it or not, it all started with knitting. Yes, knitting. I kid you not. Here’s my story.
MANCHESTER, N.H. – Democrats running for president here in the snow-blanketed hills, valleys, towns and villages of this legendary New England political bellwether need to lighten up a bit.
We all know that politics is a serious business, but not so serious that we can’t share a joke or a quip once in a while. However, humor among this batch of Democrat contenders appears to be in short supply.
If any of the Dem candidate crowd were saying crazy angry things to be funny, that would be one thing. But these Democrats are all serious, all of the time. They are on a mission for change that doesn’t allow for the light touch. They are all Total Buzzkill.
Just as an aside, it’s pretty funny that Bernie Sanders’ initials are BS. Why aren’t there bumperstickers saying “BERNIE SANDERS IS BS”?
Now that the four-and-a-half-month-long Ukraine impeachment bookend to the 22-month Mueller charade is over, it clearly accomplished nothing other than substantially raising the polls of both Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
The public was reminded that Representative Gerald Nadler (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are every bit as childish, peevish, and absurd as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
Eventually, someone will sort out whether that post-election effort on the part of federal officials to abort the Trump presidency, abetted by the media and #TheResistance, was a simple follow-up to the Clinton-DNC-Perkins Coe-Fusion GPS collusion against candidate Trump.
Or a sick preemptive attempt of the administrative state to smear Trump as a “Russian asset” because of their worries about the exposure of their own prior criminality and Trump’s iconoclastic agenda.
But for now, the following statements are irrefutable.
Now that Bernie Sanders—once an obscure socialist senator from Vermont—is officially the front-runner for the Democrat presidential nomination, it is time to confront what that means.
It does not mean the U.S. is flirting with socialism. That’s not going to happen. The meaning of Bernie’s ascent is that the Democrat Party, older even than he is, has simply run out of gas.
The Democrats’ floundering to find a candidate is deeper than the split between moderates and the left. It looks to me like the accumulated costs of its long history as the self-declared party of government are finally coming due.
Unlike Gaul, the Democrat primary electorate is divided into only two parts.
Bernie Sanders's victory in Tuesday's (2/11) New Hampshire primary reminded observers of what we have known for a long time, namely that the smaller of these two parts remains united in favor of his candidacy for the Democrat presidential nomination.
The larger moderate one remains split, not quite evenly, between Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, and Joe Biden.
We know which side the Democrat National Committee, the party's leadership in Congress, wealthy mega-donors, and luminaries like the Obamas and the Clintons are on. We also know that they are willing to do pretty much anything to prevent Sanders from winning the nomination in 2020.
The question is whether they will be able to. It is increasingly doubtful the answer is yes.
