Inflation is eating into the disposable income of almost everyone. Crime is on the rise in cities across the country. The China Virus just won’t go away, no matter what medicines we seem to throw at it. Deaths from drug overdoses and suicides are reaching new highs. Our southern border has been left wide open by design allowing fentanyl, meth, criminals, terrorists and dependent people to flood in the country. Cancel culture is in full bloom. Your rights to speak freely and carry a firearm are being reduced everywhere you look. Education at all levels in the United States has deteriorated into places of politicized wokeness with little learning. Russia may invade Ukraine. China may invade Taiwan. North Korea is shooting missiles. Iran is back trying to destabilize the middle east.

I read a lot. That’s how I try to stay up on events.

Many times I read something and say to myself, that’s really good. I wish I had thought of that. It happens more than I might like to admit.

Every once in a while, I will pass one of these along. Here is a recent piece by Victor Davis Hanson. His stuff is always worth reading but I thought this one was particularly good and interesting.

Dear John,

When you emailed that you would like to get back into politics, I was hopeful that you were returning to be a reasonable conservative, and would bring some common sense into the Republican party. The main problem with our government today is the total lack of cooperation between the two parties, so there is no progress in improving our country. You have returned to blame liberals for all our problems, and not even try to figure out some compromise solutions. I am very disappointed in your approach to reasonable conservatism.

Dear President Trump, You and I have never met. I left Congress nearly a year before you came on the scene as a major presidential contender in late 2015. That said, I voted for you both in 2016 and in 2020 including in the primaries. I made a number of donations to your campaigns over those years. I have both a 2016 MAGA hat as well as a 2020 one.

There are certain axioms in politics. These are bipartisan. It’s just the way things work no matter on which side of the aisle your chair may be.

One of them is that no majority leader should put vulnerable members up on a tough vote if that vote is not going to pass.

Dennis Prager often says “the left ruins everything it touches”.

Truer words were never spoken. Amongst the many things that the left has ruined or is trying to ruin are some words. Words that we used to use often in common speech. But now, to use them will give a completely different meaning than what you intended.

These are not ordinary times. And our responses should not be ordinary responses. The trampling on our rights, freedoms, beliefs and culture from the authoritarian left is astonishing in its scope and depth. Let’s look at just a few examples to indicate why the threats we face from inside our borders are a grave as they have ever been.

Have you heard of the “good Germans” in the 1930s? This is a phrase created to describe the majority, or at least a plurality of the German people in that time who went to church, had a job, raised a family and were generally not much different from you and me. Most did not vote for Hitler and were not members of the Nazi Party. Many did not agree at all with Hitler’s policies as they developed. But they did little or nothing to stop what the Nazis were doing.

The decennial census wrapped up some time ago counting everyone in the United States as of April 1, 2020. Hopefully they only counted citizens and not visitors or people here illegally.

I was in the retail car business (car dealerships) for 25 years from 1978-2003. I held various positions during that time starting in accounting and finance, since I am a CPA. That said, I always understood we were in a sales business. There was a saying, old but true, that “nothing happens until you sell a car”. You can’t service it, finance it, sell parts for it or anything else until you sell it.

You’ve been trapped before. Certainly, I have. I don’t mean physically trapped as lost in a maze or caught in barbed wire or something. I mean you are in a social, economic or vocational position wherein your options are now limited, and none of them are very good. You are trapped.

I am a nerd. I am not ashamed of that but even if I were, there is no denying it. I actually wore a pocket protector in high school, which pocket contained multiple-colored pencils, a small protractor, and a small slide rule. Of course, my main slide rule (which I still have) hung from my belt like a sword. Didn’t yours?

When one is a Member of Congress, you sign a lot of things. Letters responding to constituent requests; Letters asking for campaign contributions; thank you letters; constituent newsletters and all manner of things not to mention the electronic communications that probably dominate correspondence today.