Oh, Mike Pence, you soft, naive little man. Oh, Tim Scott, you kind and friendly gentleman. I like you both. I really do. I would love you to be my neighbors. If I ran short of sugar or charcoal, you'd square me away. Not so much bourbon, but whatever. If I asked you to help me move or give me a ride to the airport, you suckers would be all in because you are nice guys. And that's your problem and the problem of Republicans like you. You are nice guys in a time that calls for ruthless killers who want to destroy our enemies and leave them on their backs, figuratively cockroaching on the floor.
We want vengeance and victory. You want hugs. I guess that's nice. Hugworld would be pleasant, but it's the hardcore bomb throwers who get us to that stage by pummeling our enemies into submission. You find that unsavory, disconcerting, unseemly. You would prefer a world of comity, collegiality, and unicorns. And that ain't happening until we warrior cons have broken our enemy – yeah, I used the "E" word – and exacted our payback and thereby ensured that their pain is so great that they will not dare even dream of repeating this nonsense again for a generation for fear of our righteous wrath.
Your problem is that you live on forever in a world that no longer exists, if it ever did. You live in a world where there are norms. You live in a world of rules and guardrails, where the institutions are at least nominally neutral and where we all share some basic premises that provide common ground. But we don't. They hate America. They hate believing Christians and Jews. They hate the idea of free speech, freedom of religion, the right to due process, and not killing babies three seconds before they poke their heads out. They think kids should be mutilated to conform to gender delusions. They want us normals disarmed, disenfranchised, and, more often than you softies will admit, deceased.
You both want to run in 2024, but you think it's still 2005, and you both talk like a pre-failure Weekly Standard article about "empowerment" and "opportunity." Buzzwords like that are worse than meaningless in an environment where our basic liberties are under constant assault by these communist bastards. There's a war on and you people want to sing Kumbaya. That's why you cannot be allowed anywhere near the levers of power in 2024.
You just can't accept what time it is. The FBI, Crusty Joe's personal Stasi, invades President Trump's home – they rifle through his wife's panty drawer – and Tim Scott tells CBS News that we need to wait for all the facts. All the facts? Like the FBI hasn't spent the last six years trying to frame our president and everyone around him? "Sure, they made up a lot of things in the past to imprison Trump and his staff, but this time it might be totally true – let's give them the benefit of the doubt!"
Mike Pence then tells us we need to go easy on the Bureau flunkies who did the deed because, after all, the institution is full of good apples. Yeah, good apples. Where are these good apples? Who's the guy who quit because he refused to be part of the Democrats' political hit squad? What's his name? Jim Jordan says 14 whistleblowers have come forward. Awesome – 14 out of 35,000. That's a good apple tart, not even a good apple pie, much less a good apple barrel.
You always want to give the benefit of the doubt to the institutions because to not do so pushes you outside of your comfort zone. You desperately want the system to work. But so do we hardcores. The difference is that our response to the manifest proof that the system is totally broken to the point where only drastic reforms under a ruthless leader like a Trump 2.0 or Ron DeSantis 1.0 can save our country is to accept the harsh reality. We have made peace with the fact that there is nothing left to conserve, that we must loot and pillage and fight to rebuild upon the ruins.
But you softies, you cannot get your heads around the truth of the situation because to do so would require you to go hard, and going hard is not in your wheelhouse. It's not your brand. So you simply ignore reality and pretend that it is 20 years ago and that if you are only a good person, good things will happen.
Ned Beatty in "Deliverance" was a good person too.
It's time to accept reality and embrace the suck. The suck is that we are in a fight. It's not going to be over when we pass a few laws or overturn some terrible precedents; those are necessary but far from sufficient actions. No, we are in a long and brutal political struggle where the stakes are our liberty, and while you want to figuratively clutch your pearls and worry about whether this is who we are, we know who we are. And we are the guys and gals who want to figuratively don our plate armor, sharpen our broadswords, and get some, Knight Templar-style.
Mike Pence, Tim Scott, I like you. And I would love to live in your world. But that world exists only in your imagination, and I and the rest of us in the base are stuck here on Planet Earth. You guys can't be president because you are not wartime consiglieres. You are both Tom Hagan, reliable and soft Tom Hagan, when we are Michael and we need a Sonny to go after the Barzinis and Tartaglias of the left.
It's sad that your dreams of the presidency in 2024 must die, but you don't get it, and you can't fake it. This was a test, and you failed. If you are still imagining that there might be some set of facts awaiting public disclosure that makes it okay to send guys with guns to invade the domicile of your primo political opponent, if you still can't bring yourself to demand that the disgraced FBI be defunded and dismantled so it can never try to frame another GOP politician, then you are not up to the job. You don't get to be president because you don't know what time it is.
Sorry about your shattered dreams, but this is our liberty, and to preserve that, we can live with you being disappointed. Maybe someday, after those of us who are based destroy the enemy's ability to make war upon us, you can have your shot and preside over an era of good feelings. But that will only come after someone else does the dirty work you are incapable of. So step aside, and let the warriors do their thing. In the meantime, I need a ride to LAX – pick me up at 5:30 am.
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