The real problem with Biden and Trump

Winds of uncertainty swirl inside the imperial beltway as prominent Democrats continue to call on President Biden to abandon his campaign for the presidency due to his now acknowledged cognitive issues. The Atlantic last week went so far as to call for Biden to resign as president, saying it would “give American democracy its best chance of surviving.”

The Democratic Party and the media (but I repeat myself) would have you believe Biden’s cognitive issues present America with two grave problems. One, that he is presently unable to fulfill his present duties as president; two, that he will be unable to defeat former President Donald Trump in November and “save democracy” from the candidate who could potentially get the most votes.

Trump supposedly presents a third problem, that being the “danger to democracy” he represents. This despite the fact that we’ve already lived through four years of Trump being president and “democracy,’ at least the way the empire defines it, is alive and well.

None of this is true. The first clue to its falsity is the media saying it. Since Trump first entered politics and at least since 2020, the national media has served as a perfect contraindicator for the truth and the narratives related to the 2024 election are no exception. Biden’s incompetence poses no danger to everyday Americans in the present. It will likely matter little for his chances to defeat Donald Trump in the November election, just as it mattered little in 2020.

And no, Donald Trump represents no danger to “democracy,” whatever the power elite actually means by that, nor to the republican form of government created by and guaranteed to every state in the union by the U.S. Constitution.

Make no mistake, Biden and Trump are a problem, but not for Americans. They are a problem for the empire. Ultimately, they represent the same problem for the empire, although it would have you believe otherwise.

To understand this, one must put aside civic fairy tales and acknowledge how the American political system really works. The fairy tale says the American system is “a democracy,” and the president is elected by a majority vote of the people and directs the federal apparatus according to the “will of the people.”

The Congress is also elected by a majority vote of the people in the states and districts therein and writes the laws the president executes and must abide in fulfilling his duties.

That is certainly what the Constitution says, but it is not how the American political system works. Nor has it worked that way for close to a century.

In reality, that system of government was replaced during what Garet Garrett called “The Revolution Was,” referring to the New Deal. The revolution consisted of Congress creating myriad federal agencies to “regulate” the economy and then delegating its legislative power to the unelected bureaucrats comprising those agencies.

At first, the bureaucrats took their direction from the president, drawing praise from both Hitler and Mussolini due to the system’s similarity to the fascism that had inspired it. But over time, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. The bureaucrats began telling the president what they were going to do instead of the other way around.

Yes, the elected president may still make the final decision on this or that policy. But he makes that decision between two choices presented by the bureaucrats, their Choice A and their Choice B. This is why so little seems to change even when the incumbent party is swept out power in an electoral landslide. Thus, even after the Republican Revolution of 1996 or the election of supposed ubermonster Donald Trump in 2016, nothing really changed. The imperial machine kept grinding on as if there had been no election at all.

After WWII, foreign policy was reconstructed in similar fashion. A national security state was created wherein permanently employed bureaucrats in the State Department, Pentagon, and “intelligence community” assumed the power to direct foreign policy in the same way the administrative state runs domestic policy. Again, the president may make the final decision but it’s usually after being presented with a binary choice between two options amenable to the bureaucracy.

“Mr. President, do you want to bomb Syria or merely impose economic sanctions?”

All of this begs an obvious question: if the permanent bureaucracy is really running things, how do either Biden or Trump pose a problem?

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Chevron decision is just more hacking at the branches by SCOTUS

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“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” – Henry David Thoreau

In LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES ET AL. v. RAIMONDO, SECRETARY OF COMMERCE, ET AL. (“Raimondo”) the Supreme Court of the United States overturned the “Chevron deference,” a doctrine dating to the 1980s that said in judging whether a regulatory agency had exceeded the authority delegated to it by Congress, courts must defer to the agency’s interpretation of any ambiguous language in the law.

This is being decried by liberals as a crippling blow to the federal government’s ability to regulate and lauded by conservatives as a welcome return to stricter obedience to the Constitution.

In reality, it is just more hacking at the branches by SCOTUS rather than striking at the root.

The root of the problem is Congress delegating any authority to make rules at all to the executive branch. The Constitution is clear that the legislative power is delegated exclusively to Congress, meaning any rules either prohibiting or requiring human action must be written by legislators elected for that purpose, passed by both houses of Congress, and signed by the president. Calling the rules federal agencies write “regulations” instead of laws doesn’t change anything. It’s still legislating and any person honest with himself knows this.

Congress has no constitutional authority to delegate this power to another branch of government. There is a legal doctrine older than Chevron expressing this called the “nondelegation doctrine.” SCOTUS referred to it in its decision on President Biden’s proposed Covid vaccine mandates. But rather than striking down Congress’ ability to delegate its legislative power to the executive, rampant since the New Deal, the Court merely ruled Congress can’t delegate this power too much.

Hacking at the branches.

This has been the case with all the supposedly monumental decisions by the supposedly “hard right” Court that includes three appointments made by former President Donald Trump. Presented with opportunities to confront three spurious legal doctrines from the 20^th century that allowed power to be unconstitutionally transferred to the federal government in general and its executive branch in particular, the Court has largely affirmed these doctrines, merely massaging them differently to get results conservatives like.

The problem is that if even this Court, considered extreme by today’s standards, will not fundamentally enforce the nondelegation doctrine or strike down the Incorporation Doctrine, there will never be a chance to do so again.

This is a consent of the governed issue. It is not so much a matter of whether one or another of the particular laws or powers exercised are good or bad in a vacuum. It is a matter of who is exercising the power and how they acquired it. Our founding document preceding even the Constitution says government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. And no one ever consented to the federal government striking down state laws or the executive branch legislating. On the contrary, the delegates at the constitutional convention emphatically denied the former power to Congress although proposed by Madison throughout the summer. The latter power wasn’t even considered as their separation was a foundation pillar of the constitution itself.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupidand Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Comprehensive Study on Government Covid Policies Concludes They Did Nothing (but harm)

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As Covid authoritarians attempt to weasel out of accountability for the destruction they visited upon American society, new data continue to suggest Covid “conspiracy theorists” were right all along. A comprehensive study published in Science this month by Standford Professor of Medicine Eran Bendavid and Harvard Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics Chirag Patel was no exception. The study made use of “daily data on 16 government responses in 181 countries in 2020–2021, and 4 outcomes—cases, infections, COVID-19 deaths, and all-cause excess deaths—to construct 99,736 analytic models” and concluded, “we find no patterns in the overall set of models that suggests a clear relationship between COVID-19 government responses and outcomes.”

In case the sanitized, academic language reduces the impact of that statement, allow me to translate it into plain English: the maniac bureaucrats who run most civilized countries shut down society for over a year, destroyed small businesses, kept loved ones from visiting dying parents and grandparents, permanently damaged an entire school-aged generation, loosed the worst inflation upon the public in fifty years, and transferred trillions of dollars in wealth to the richest one percent of society and it was all for nothing.

All. For. Nothing.

The study is only concerned with whether the measures affected Covid outcomes. It does not consider the societal effects of the measures. But no one needs a clinical study for that. Neither do the perpetrators of this crime against humanity substantively deny the negative fallout from the Covid Regime. That’s why disgraced former New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo was out doing media hits claiming lockdowns and other mandates were “really all voluntary,” while his idiot brother Fredo calls for a government commission to investigate the responses.

Cuomo has since been called before a Congressional committee to answer questions about his handling of nursing home Covid patients. Cuomo infamously ordered New York nursing homes to admit patients who tested positive for Covid, allegedly causing the deaths of over 15,000 nursing home residents. In a vacuum, this is a good thing. If 15,000 people died who otherwise might not have, there should be accountability.

But too much focus on this ostensible error is a distraction from the main issue: neither politicians nor the government’s bureaucrat “experts” should have had the power to do any of what they did during 2020-21 – which again accomplished nothing.

Many of these petty tyrants are now hiding behind the excuse, “We didn’t know a lot in 2020 and 2021; now, we know more.” There are two problems with that.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupidand Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Vaccine Mandates and Fauci’s Big Pharma Royalty Scandal

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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) stripped “Mr. Anthony Fauci” of his professional title, as least for the duration of her questioning on the floor of the House, citing the explosive revelation in The New York Post that, “NIH scientists made $710M in royalties from drug makers — a fact they tried to hide.” The figure cited in the headline refers to royalties paid by pharmaceutical companies to the government agency and its scientists for patents they held on drugs or drug technologies utilized by the companies in developing the Covid vaccines and/or other drugs during the Covid pandemic years.

There is a clear distinction in the article, missing from the headlines, that these royalties were paid, “the agency and its scientists.” In other words, $710 million was not paid out to individual scientists in varying amounts based upon their patent claims. Rather, some portion of the money was paid to the government agency as a whole and some went to individual scientists.

Fauci has previously answered questions from Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) on this matter, refusing to disclose the full details of the royalty payments, but indicating his personal gain from such payments was nominal. While we don’t know that’s true, one suspects that if the details of the $710 million were fully disclosed, the lion’s share of the money was likely paid to the government and some small portion paid to individual scientists who developed the patents, with no one scientists becoming fabulously wealthy because of them.

But even with this most charitable assumption, there is still a massive problem here. The vaccines these companies developed were mandated by the government. There are plenty of arguments against such mandates without the royalty aspect, but knowing an agency like NIH had a financial incentive to recommend these vaccines for such a mandate is particularly egregious, even if most of the money wasn’t paid to private individuals employed by it.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupidand Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

The Libertarian Party Once Again Signals No Threat to the Establishment

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The Libertarian Party held its national convention over the Memorial Day Weekend, nominating its presidential ticket and hosting high profile guest speakers including Vivek Ramaswamy, RFK, Jr., and former President Donald Trump. While controversial within the party, inviting these non-libertarians to speak to the party’s delegates garnered massive national attention for the party which is traditionally only lightly covered by the media outside C-Span.

Thanks to the Herculean efforts of party Chair Angela McCardle and the support of one of the highest profile libertarians in the country, Dave Smith, the net result of the convention was to once again signal to all paying attention for the first time that the party poses no threat to the establishment.

It was supposed to be different this time. After uninspiring presidential campaigns for four straight presidential election cycles, the party was taken over in 2022 by the Mises Caucus, which promised to bring a more “hardcore,” Ron Paul-style brand of libertarianism to the party. While Jo Jorgensen was certainly a marked improvement over Johnson/Weld and (ugh) Bob Barr – she’s actually a libertarian – her campaign’s decisions to support Black Lives Matter and offer no resistance to the Covid Regime disappointed those who would eventually take over the party.

Yet, despite winning supermajorities in 2022 and re-electing their preferred chair, McCardle, the party’s convention ended up, intentionally or not, broadcasting the same signal to America as had Johnson/Weld: we won’t rock the boat.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupidand Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

What does it mean to ‘love America?’

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Declaration of Independence with feather quill on wood surface

“They hate America” snarls a conservative pundit regarding the American left. And while Democratic Party politicians would never admit to this, many of their constituents would. After all, the United States was built upon the backs of slaves, the exploitation of workers by greedy capitalists, and destruction of the pristine environment previously safeguarded by the people they call “Native Americans,” at least as far as they’re concerned.

However, most people, whether they identify as conservative or liberal, would emphatically claim to “love America.” And there is no reason to believe they are insincere.

But what exactly is it about America they love? Do they know?

Certainly, everyone develops an affinity for the place where they were born and raised. Having lived in more than one state and traveled to most others, as well as abroad, I can understand this affection. No other place feels like the place one was brought up.

There is nothing special about America in this regard. The natives of every country feel the same, even those countries whose governments make them difficult to love. But when Americans say they love America, they mean something more than that. They recognize America as different from most or all other countries in some way. Some even describe it as “exceptional,” although that modifier has acquired a somewhat unsavory connotation due to its use by American neoconservatives.

If pressed, most Americans who say they love America would make vague references to the U.S. Constitution or Declaration of Independence, although most probably couldn’t tell you much about either. Even many elected officials don’t seem to realize they are separate documents that the Constitution does not contain the words “all men are created equal” or endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…among these Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Regardless, most Americans who say they love America could at least paraphrase that paragraph (or the parts they like) from the Declaration. But most don’t actually agree with the political views of the people responsible for it.

Let’s start with “all men are created equal.” Like the rest of that famous paragraph, this is a concept drawn straight from John Locke’s Second Treatise, the document Jefferson told people to read if they wanted to understand “ the general principles of liberty and the rights of man in nature and in society” as Americans understood them. Its meaning is extremely limited.

All Jefferson and the Continental Congress meant with this statement is that no one person is born with a natural right to rule over another. Period. It doesn’t mean people of different races should earn the same incomes or men have a right to compete in women’s sports leagues or any of the other bizarre beliefs about equality 21^st century Americans seem to hold. It was purely a political statement about what Locke claimed could be observed in the “state of nature” (the state without government).

It is because people are equal in this very limited, political way that their consent is required to any type of government over them. This is also the basis for Locke’s argument about the limits of government power, that even a democratically elected government could exercise no power than individuals had in the state of nature.

That’s a severe limit that virtually no American believes should apply to government today.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupidand Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

If Kristi Noem is a monster…

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“I wish I owned half of that dog…Because I would kill my half.” – Pudd’nhead Wilson

The fictional genius who invented fingerprint analysis to solve a murder case had already cemented his reputation as a fool decades before with a clumsy joke about killing a dog. Neither his apparent talent nor his subsequent accomplishments could overcome the first impression made on the simple townsfolk of Dawson’s Landing. It was decided then and there, on Wilson’s first day in town, that he must be and would thereafter be referred to as a pudd’nhead.

One hundred years later, not much has changed. Kristi Noem’s anecdote about shooting a vicious dog decades ago has all but ruined her political prospects, which included consideration as Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate.

For all the similarities, though, there are important differences. First, the Dawson’s Landing townsfolk don’t descend into moral panic over Wilson’s remark. Their objection to it was its apparent absurdity. 1830 Missourians understood dogs got shot when they were a nuisance, especially if their offenses included killing livestock and attacking humans. These weren’t people who could afford to be hysterical over killing an animal. They were employed mostly in agriculture, where animals were killed for food on a daily basis, far away from pristine dining rooms where dwelt the few at that time who may have objected.

Neither was this Noem’s first day in town, figuratively speaking. She has been in politics since 2007, serving first as a representative in South Dakota’s State House of Representatives and then as a representative in Congress for several terms. She is halfway through her second term as governor, having won reelection in a landslide after being the one and only governor in the United States who did not lock down her state for even a single day during Coronasteria, a.k.a. “the pandemic.”

It is a mystery how someone with Noem’s wisdom and political experience could commit such a colossal blunder. And let’s be clear, it wasn’t shooting the dog that has sunk her; it was including the anecdote in her book. Had she simply shot the dog and went on with her life, nobody would have known. Even if some opposition researcher had found out in a hypothetical campaign for higher office, nobody would have cared.

Like Wilson, Noem has managed to torpedo a career that featured notable good deeds with the poor choice of a few words.

That words count far more than deeds says more about the American public than it does about Noem. The firestorm that has erupted over poor, vicious “Cricket” (the late canine) certainly includes opportunistic political opponents. No Democrat wants to see Noem picked as Trump’s running mate or otherwise continue to ascend the political ladder. But even conservatives and other heretofore allies have joined her detractors, shrieking their self-righteous indignation on social media under the hashtag #KristiNoemisamonster.

Given the behavior of American presidents just in the years since Cricket met his demise, it is truly terrifying to consider how infantile the American public has become, especially in a democratic republic with most restraints upon the democratic part all but destroyed.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupidand Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Why are most people so eager to accept the suicidal climate change narrative?

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Most people probably don’t realize what terms like “net zero” really mean in terms of their way of life. I use the words “way of life” purposely instead of “standard of living” because I don’t believe the latter term conveys the magnitude of the effect eliminating fossil fuel use would have.

Eliminating fossil fuels would return civilization to a pre-industrial existence, one which a large percentage of the current world population would not survive. Those who did survive would live at a level far below what anyone living in the fossil fuel-powered world could even imagine.

So, why are so many so eager to embrace a narrative that promises such hardship for themselves and their children? Certainly, there is some delusional belief that “renewable” energy will replace most fossil fuel energy, but it seems impossible that most people honestly believe that. Regardless, their leaders are coming right out and telling them a substantial lowering of their standard of living will be necessary – what Barack Obama often called “shared sacrifice.”

Whether Mr. Obama or his ilk will be doing any of the sharing is a subject for another day.

Before trying to explain the average American’s willingness to believe, I will tell you my own reaction to the climate change narrative from the perspective of one who remembers when it was not a major issue, even for environmentalists. It is only fair that I do my best to explain my own biases as they were when “climate change” first became a thing.

Unlike most people I know, I’ve always had a predisposition towards the free market. I had it long before it would have ever occurred to me to say the words “free market.” But even while working those first, minimum wage jobs everyone works in their teens or early twenties, I had a general impression that commerce was a good thing and business owners were making a positive contribution to society.

This despite a liberal arts education that, in retrospect, did everything it could to convince me otherwise.

This impression was bolstered by my even earlier interest in history. History, or “social studies,” as it was called in my Catholic grammar school, was my favorite subject. I did well in it. If you asked any of my grammar school classmates in 1979 what I was going to be when I grew up, most would have guessed history teacher.

An interest in history and a predisposition towards the free market aren’t mutually exclusive, the overwhelming anti-capitalist bias in modern college history departments notwithstanding. In fact, any objective look at the history of the past five hundred years would only confirm one’s belief in the free market.

All this is relevant to the way I saw the climate change narrative when it first became one of the dominant narratives in the major media. Having a knowledge of history that supported my pro-free market disposition, I found the climate change narrative extremely dubious right from the start.

Let’s review what we were asked to believe at the time. We have a certain political movement that promoted an alternative economic system to capitalism for hundreds of years. That economic system was implemented to various degrees in virtually every country in the world. And at the moment it spectacularly failed, its proponents suddenly discovered a threat to the planet that could only be solved by adopting that failed system.

Are you kidding?

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupidand Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

The Trump show trial is just the Clinton impeachment fiasco all over again

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Most Americans have an unhealthy and unjustified reverence for the federal government. The presidency is the apex of this misplaced devotion, such that any diminishment in its hallowed trappings is an existential crisis. Thus, when the supposed “dignity of the Office of the President” is compromised, one can always count on sanctimonious calls for its restoration, both sincere and insincere, in language one would normally expect to be used while deploying holy water and incense.

The Trump show trial is no exception. His supporters correctly object to its purely political motivation for charges no one cares about related to alleged crimes with no discernible victim(s). In that sense, this is just a replay of the 1990s Clinton impeachment, also over a sex scandal, and also about a crime with no victims other than the sanctimony of the oath taken in a Congressional hearing.

Clinton lied under oath to a room full of liars. No one but the most fervent partisan supported his impeachment. It ended up boosting his approval ratings.

Trump’s case sets the new precedent of bringing criminal charges against a former president. Even those who support the prosecution see it as some unimaginable journey beyond the pale from which only a president who satisfies the divine requirements of the holy office can restore “our democracy.”

This thinking is completely upside down. If anything, Americans should be ashamed it’s taken this long to indict a president given the crimes virtually all of them commit. Prosecuting former presidents is something the framers clearly anticipated when expressly providing for it in the Constitution. They knew executive power was dangerous and fully expected to make use of the criminal justice system for any presidents that got out of line.

The problem today is almost everyone in imperial DC and far too large a portion of the American public approve of, or at least do not strongly object to, most of the crimes U.S. presidents commit. And so, we are left with politically motivated impeachments and prosecutions over trivialities like the Trump trial and Clinton impeachment.

Obviously, these powers to check the executive were created for far more important matters. Abusing war powers would be an obvious example. Presidents Biden, Trump, and Obama have all violated the War Powers Act of 1973 and that certainly is not an exhaustive list. This isn’t a theory. Here is the relevant language from the statute:

The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.

Every president named above has bombed Syria under circumstances when none of the three required circumstances applied. They broke a law that actually matters, risking war with Russia and inviting further terrorist attacks against the United States. They also killed innocent civilians in a country that had never attacked the United States; just in case anyone cares about the moral question anymore.

Not only were these presidents not prosecuted; they were applauded by the media and most of DC. For Trump, it was one of the few times he was complimented by the establishment, with even Bill Kristol tweeting out his unbridled joy that the president was being “presidential” for a change.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Why haven’t Republicans indicted Obama (or done anything else)?

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“He pulls a knife, you pull a gun, he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.” – Officer Jim Malone, The Untouchables

CNN gleefully reports, “Trump is just days from his first criminal trial after latest legal gambit fails.” According to the “analysis” piece, Trump being the first president to be brought to criminal trial would mark him with a “historic stigma.” If convicted of a felony, it could also render Trump ineligible to hold public office, even if he were elected president in a landslide.

Whether or not the Democrats would risk overturning an election in such a way is anyone’s guess. Odds are they would. Either way, they have nothing to lose in moving forward with these indictments because, as usual, Republicans are putting up no resistance whatsoever. Yes, they’re crying about it, calling the persecution of Trump “lawfare” and wringing their hands about the precedents being set.

No one cares. No one ever cares when Republicans complain about Democratic enormities. Republicans complain (and fund raise) and Democrats continue to act. This cycle needs to be broken.

The Republicans must indict Barack Obama and arrest him. And they have to make it look worse than Trump’s arrest. Issue a warrant and film him, cuffed, being put into the back of a police car, with the cop helpfully pushing his head down as is their custom for the suspect’s safety.

He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue, figuratively speaking.

It’s not as if this is some Herculean task. Every president commits indictable crimes while in office. They all use the IRS to go after political opponents. Obama did. Republicans screamed about it. Indict him for it. Find a right-wing court in a red state and bring the charges. As the Democrats have shown, they don’t even have be legit. “Trumped up” charges will do just fine, pun intended. Let Biden know he’s next, the minute he leaves office.

The Republicans could even bring legitimate charges, like violating the War Powers Act while in office, which Obama did on hundreds of occasions. He bombed Syria not only without Congressional approval but after Congress refused to grant his request for authorization. Who cares if Trump and Biden did it, too? This isn’t about fairness or consistency or proving some academic point. It’s war. You either fight, surrender, or die.

I can already hear the sanctimonious objections from conservatives who “don’t want to live in a country where the sacred trust of enforcing the law is abused in this manner.” Newsflash: you already do. The only question is whether you’re going to do something about it other than cry.

But cry about it is all Republicans ever do. When in power, the Democrats act; the Republicans talk (and fund raise). Consider a sports analogy.

Back in the early 1990s, the Buffalo Bills had one of the most explosive offenses in NFL history. They scored so many points so fast that Jim Kelly’s and Thurman Thomas’ statistics were actually muted in some seasons because they were taken out of the game so early. The Bills blew out teams that badly (and then lost the Super Bowl four straight times).

During a playoff game in Buffalo against Kansas City, analyst and former coach Bill Walsh remarked that the Chiefs’ strategy of “dive right, dive left” for three yards and a cloud of dust was never going to work while the Bills were busy gobbling up yards throwing the ball downfield.

He was right. The Bills were up 17-0 by halftime and never looked back.

This Republicans have been the 1992 Chiefs for the past one hundred years. When the Democrats have power, they make one great leap forward after another in expanding the reach of government. Republicans kick and scream while they’re doing it but when handed the reins of power they do nothing. Once the Democrats are back in, another great leap forward. Lather, rinse, repeat.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupidand Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?