After missing last month for good and varied reasons, I’m shotgunning this year-end entry more as a stream of consciousness meandering than a focused assessment.
For context:
In 1992, 40th anniversary of her coronation, Queen Elizabeth spoke of Annus Horribilis, with sufficient reason.
Not one, not two, but three royal breakups:
Princess Ann and longtime husband Mark Phillips
and
Prince Andrew and Fergie
and
Princess Diana’s tell-all book about her vastly unhappy marriage to Prince Charles (who 28 years later still remains a prince while Mum retains the throne), ending in divorce in 1996.
Then there was the disastrous palace fire that gutted or affected 100 rooms.
Well...
2020 makes the short list of Worst Annus Horribilis for reasons the CCs know all too well.
Trying to maintain some perspective for a moment:
Massive wildfires ravaged the American West, but far worse than previous years. Depending upon one’s sources, nearly 60 fires killed almost 200 people and seared 10 million acres. In my home state of Oregon five small towns were “substantially destroyed.”
Down Under in Australia, the “black summer” bush fires were responsible for 30 or more human deaths, millions of animals, and destruction of almost 60 million acres.
In March the Chinese-Wuhan-Corona Virus engulfed the world either because the Chinese Communists erred massively or sprung a global pandemic for their own nefarious reasons. In either case, Beijing refuses to accept responsibility while global politicians’ pledges to Hold China Responsible remain just that…broken pledges.
President Donald Trump, pilloried as a Russian agent for three years by propagandists masquerading as journalists, launched Operation Warp Speed.
(Sidebar: in nine congressional hearings accessing over 300,000 documents, more than seventy witnesses were asked for evidence of Trump’s “collusion” with Moscow. None were unable to do so.)
https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/intel-committee-no-evidence-trump-campaign-colluded-coordinated-or
Despite the fact that he was dissed daily for the erratic response of the Centers for Disease Control, Food and Drug Administration, etc. (the same bureaucracy inherited by every president), Trump streamlined procedures and seemingly did the impossible—got the first Wuhan vaccines to market in months rather than the usual two or three years. Or more.
The one-time good deal—praise from hard-over Democrat governors of New York and California—came and went in a single 24-hour news cycle. Both reverted to type thereafter, and since. And therein lay the open secret: the president has no authority to dictate health policy. That's the province of governors and mayors.
Those same liberal governors and mayors--and the rest of the leftist establishment--stood mum for months while Democrats and anarchists rioted, looted, and assaulted people and businesses. All in the name of...well, whatever blank you care to fill in. (Occasionally I still hear from liberal colleagues who insist that those black looters were White Supremicists.)
Then of course there was the presidential election, still officially uncertain at this printing. The scandalously brazen Democrat usurpation of the election process in multiple states—including Arizona where I live—remains a “secret in open sight.” Few of the conspirators have even been identified, and in the unlikely event that they are, there is Absolute Zero chance that any will be prosecuted. Lest anyone doubt it, consider the litany of criminal offenses attributed to the Obama administration, still high-centered on the political roadway.
Ohio Republican congressman Jim Jordan—a collegiate wrestler whose trademark is no jacket with shirt and tie—recently was interviewed by Fox News (that’s a story in itself, seemingly swayed to The Other Side of the Aisle.) He said that time after time constituents and strangers approach him on the street and in airports asking when-o-when somebody—anybody—will go to prison. His response is always the same: Congress cannot sentence anyone. That’s up to the Department of Justice, which has been notoriously unresponsive.
And, in a tip of the hat toward objectivity—Trump has a horrible record of selecting people for key positions: attorneys general, FBI, intelligence, secretary of defense, four-star officers, etc. For a TV mogul whose trademark was “You’re Fired,” he’s exercised the motto while tolerating non-performers.
However, Donald J. Trump has a way of confounding the “experts.” He defeated a heavyweight roster of 16 Republican candidates to win the nomination and perhaps the last honest presidential election in U.S. history. The industrial-grade toxicity of his opposition will not change, nor can we reasonably expect it to. After all, seven decades after Lyndon Bastard Johnson stole his 1948 Texas congressional race, “winning” by 87 votes as “Landslide Lyndon,” the Democrat activist responsible was still laughing about it to LBJ biographer Robert Caro.
Meanwhile…
With a birthday this year I have concluded that 72 is the new 71. I’m grateful for friends and relatives, another award to hang on my I Love Me Wall (thank you for the second time, Naval Institute), and a book nearing completion.
In appreciation to one and all.
