Barbenheimer

Of course, the analogy is a bit stretched. And it is, as Niall Ferguson recognizes, off by a year. 

Last summer everyone was talking about a return to the box office, by films like Barbie and Oppenheimer. So Ferguson suggests that we are currently witnessing an election between Kamala Harris, a modern Barbie, and Donald Trump, a man who brings to mind the threat of nuclear destruction. 

As I said, it’s a bit of a stretch.

Nevertheless, Ferguson is on to something, especially when he concludes that in a nuclear world, we do best not to pin our faith and hope on the most vacuous and vapid presidential candidate ever.

For we do not live in a Barbie world. We live in a world of nuclear weapons and other instruments of mass destruction. We live in a world with five major wars (conflicts with an annual death toll of around 10,000) and dozens of smaller conflicts. We live in a world with more than 117 million forcibly displaced people, of whom 49 million have been driven abroad. We also live in late-Soviet America, where the cost of paying interest on the federal debt now exceeds the defense budget. 

This election may be over for the journalists who have signed up uncritically to spread the vibes for the Harris campaign. But for the voters in the real world, it surely is not. Like it or not, we live in Oppenheimer’s world—with the difference that the next Manhattan Project, the weaponization of artificial intelligence, will not be the kind of government program Democrats still love.

True enough, Kamala has the ultimate girlie vibe. I prefer to see her as courtesan in chief, appealing to a lost sense of femininity, indulging in effortless and mindless girltalk while pretending to be supremely qualified.

Kamala is the outcome of diversity hiring. She cannot do any of the jobs that she has assumed over the years, so she has gotten promoted. As for why she giggles all the time, it is a sign that she is receiving credits she did not earn. 

A fawning press, now become a propaganda machine, tells us that schoolgirl giggles constitute a qualification for the highest office in the land. They call it vibe or some such thing, and it seems to represent the women who were elevated to jobs they could not do, but who do not want to admit it. Think of the former presidents of Ivy League colleges, women who got their jobs because of their sex, and who lost their jobs for being incompetent.

Did they have the right vibe? Does that count as a job qualification? Does the Kamala giggle add something to her candidacy, something that no man could equal?

At the least it means that we have overcome merit and achievement as qualifications for important jobs. And yet, at a time when companies across America are dialing back their DEI programs, the Democrat Party is highlighting incompetence.

Those who are up in arms about Trump warn us of pending chaos. Under the Biden leadership, or lack of same, wars have broken out in various places across the globe. The Trump reaction, with which one would have difficulty finding fault, was simply that when he was president, we did not have a war in Ukraine and did not have October 7 in Israel. 

I fail to see why that makes him the chaos candidate. It would be more accurate to say that the Biden team, through its singular ineptitude, has undermined the world order. Trump’s great achievement, the Abraham Accords, had nothing to do with nuclear energy.

Fair enough, those who are drooling over Kamala Harris live in a Barbie world. They are detached from reality and believe that wishing makes it so. In place of competence they have joy and vibes. It is a sad story, but it is only part of the story.

No one seems to notice but the enemies of Donald Trump mounted their own insurrection during the spring and summer of 2020. The George Floyd riots did not fall from the heavens. They enacted the rhetorical violence so often used to attack Donald Trump. 

Is it an accident that the Democratic candidate for president was leading the march to bail out the Minnesota rioters or that the Democratic candidate for vice president sat on his hands while rioters burned down his city?

Clearly, the insurrection did not stop with 2020. In truth, cities across America have seen an epidemic of smash and grab robberies, of organized retail theft. Leftist prosecutors have refused to prosecute the miscreants.

So, for all the talk about vibes and joy, the Democratic party is threatening the nation. The chaos they are warning against is the chaos they are going to visit on the nation if their candidate loses.

Dare we suggest that the frenzy over January 6 was largely designed to obscure the other insurrection, the one that surrounded the George Floyd killing. 

One can find much to criticize in the Donald Trump political performance. But, we ought also to notice that he has been subjected to constant vitriolic attacks since he stepped foot on the political scene. The rhetoric does not bespeak respect. It manifests derision and a wish to destroy.

One ignores the simple fact that in our system of government, political opponents should show respect for their adversaries. It might be limited to a perfunctory expression-- as in, the right honorable gentleman. After uttering those words, politicians proceed to say whatever they have to say. Normally they limit themselves to the issues at hands and avoid ad hominem attacks.

With the advent of Trump, his opponents have done everything in their power to destroy him, not to debate with him, not to address his ideas.

You cannot have a government defined by deliberative debate when you are spending your time trying to destroy the opposition, to dismiss everything he said on the grounds that you consider him to be dishonorable and evil. If you are not smart enough to argue the issues, you reduced everything to name-calling, slander and defamation.

Surely, Donald Trump has not been a model of decorum. He based no small part of his political career on insulting his opponents. 

And yet, as he has pointed out, Democrats have been inventing laws in the effort to put him in jail. By his lights, as he often mentioned, it was not a good idea to prosecute or jail Hillary Clinton, on the grounds of decorum, but doing the same to Trump was acceptable. 

By now, many of Trump’s supporters have been trying to stage an intervention, to show him that the best response to slander and defamation is not slander and defamation. 

The Biblical saying has it that we should do unto others as we would have others do unto us. It does not say that we should do unto others as others have done unto us.

See the difference?