FJB made the fringe mainstream

Letters of marque and a Kennedy are marching toward a comeback.

After 4 years of Biden and a week of Trump, Americans have spoken. 31% of voters have a favorable opinion of Democrats; 57% unfavorable.

43% of voters have a favorable opinion of Republicans; 45% unfavorable.

A Gallup Poll shows that when FJB took office, only 41% wanted all illegal aliens deported; 56% said no.

Last year, 50% said send them back; only 46% opposed.

Give credit where do. FJB did more to rally the public behind deportation than The Donald did.

FJB also enabled the appointment of RFK Jr. as secretary of the largest spender of government money, the Department of Health and Human Services, whose budget topped $1.6 trillion ($1,600 billion or if you prefer, $1,600,000 million) in 2022.

Biden’s mandate of the covid shots rehabilitated the word anti-vaxxer. What the public sees as a failed vaccine could have been blamed on Trump’s rush to find a cure.

But FJB took ownership of the vaccines-in-name-only when he started firing good soldiers and sailors for refusing to take an unproven medication. That is criminal.

Really.

FDA approval be damned, I believe it is an experimental drug until it passes testing on human volunteers. As such, international law forbids ordering soldiers take it.

I want to make it clear, I took the Moderna vaccine with eyes wide open to protect my invalid wife. It likely worked as a deterrent. We’re still here at 71 and if there are any ill-effects, well we had a nice run, didn’t we?

My body, my choice. You do you.

I am not a doctor. My point today is political. FJB bidened up the vaccine, which RFK Jr. questioned. Millions of Americans now agree that the federal government failed to protect us from the virus and many believe the government’s cure made matters worse.

Thanks to that, Kennedy may run the medical industry in America. As much as I oppose granting the feds this power over health care, I find it amusing that our bureaucrats are bitten by the creature they created.

Then there is Dr. Ron Paul, the kooky ex-congressman who has a bad habit of being proven right decades later. And by kooky, I mean someone who has actually wants to apply the Constitution to governance.

On October 10, 2001—29 days after 9/11—he introduced H.R.3076:

September 11 Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001 - Authorizes and requests the President to issue letters of marque and reprisal to commission privately armed and equipped persons and entities to seize outside of the United States the person and property of Osama bin Laden, of any al Qaeda co-conspirator, and any conspirator with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda who are responsible for the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, including any similar planned acts against the United States in the future. Authorizes the President to place a bounty, from amounts appropriated on September 14, 2001, in the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Recovery from and Response to Terrorists Attacks on the United States or from private sources, for the capture, dead or alive, of Osama bin Laden or any other al Qaeda conspirator responsible for the act of air piracy upon the United States on September 11, 2001.

A retired military doctor, Paul knew another war would not result in the capture of Osama bin Laden but would wreck Afghanistan and result in another expensive humiliation for the U.S. military by our politicians.

He offered an alternative by outsourcing the job of killing OBL to mercenaries through letters of marque and reprisal.

FJB’s surrender of Afghanistan after our military defeated the Taliban sadly proved Paul right.

The politicians had the military blow Afghanistan to smithereens only to discover, after a decade of searching, that OBL was living in Pakistan with his subscription to Penthouse. We would have been better off sending druglords, gangbangers and Mafiosos after him. We have the best criminals in the world. Unleash their potential.

But give the CIA credit. They noticed his home was the only one on the block without Wifi. They checked it out and raided the place.

This week, Senator Mike Lee has picked up on Paul’s plan. He posted a long string of tweets, including:

Using letters of marque could be a novel, but effective response to unique threats posed by drug cartels—especially in response to threats by the cartels to target U.S. planes returning illegal immigrants to their countries of origin.

How Could They Be Applied?

Authorization: Congress could issue letters of marque and reprisal authorizing private security firms or specially trained civilians to intercept cartel operations, particularly those involving drug shipments or human trafficking across borders

Targets: Focus on disrupting supply lines, capturing high-value targets, or seizing assets like boats, vehicles, cash, gold, or equipment used in criminal activities

Well, Lee’s call certainly beats having our military square off with the druglords and risk a war with Mexico because the last thing we want to do right now is take over Mexico, a failed state that makes California SSR look sane.

Does anyone believe President Trump would turn this down if the public supports the idea? After 51 years of the DEA, drug abuse and overdose deaths soared from 6,413 in 1973 (3.2 per 100,000) to 91,799 in 2020 (28.3 per 100,000).

We did not lose the war on drugs, we bureaucratized it. How interesting that within a week of Trump taking office, the government suddenly found all these drug peddlers. It is almost as if someone paid people off.

The power to hire pirates to do our dirty work is embedded in the Constitution.

Jean Lafitte was the most famous of them all. He was a smuggler working in the Gulf of America two centuries ago. He got caught. Andrew Jackson hired him for the Battle of New Orleans, offering him pardons instead of cash. It was a real life The Dirty Dozen.

Thanks to FJB’s ineptitude, the American people are willing to set the clock back to 1814. While patriots still respect the military and appreciate their sacrifices, Americans want to protect them and not send them in to another war, which our troops will win only to see politicians give the victory away.

As for RFK Jr., a curious thing has happened in the wake of covid. Communists now hate him and MAGA now supports him.

Junior once was a hero on the left. He successfully sued DuPont for polluting waters in West Virginia.

On October 22, 2007, Pollution Online reported, “A jury in the Circuit Court of Harrison County, West Virginia, has decided that DuPont must pay $196,200,000 in punitive damages to residents in and around the town of Spelter, West Virginia. This comes as one more victory in a sweeping series of successes for the plaintiffs.

“In the environmental class-action trial which lasted for over a month, E.I. DuPont, the nation's third largest chemical company, was found negligent in creating a 112-acre waste site, putting area residents at a higher-than-normal risk of diseases, including cancer, cognitive problems, cardiac disease and lead poisoning. The waste was generated from a zinc smelting operation once owned and operated by DuPont.

“Residents in this small, West Virginia town and surrounding communities were represented by attorneys from The Cochran Firm, Levin Papantonio, and Kevin & Madonna, LLC. Co-lead attorneys for these powerful environmental law firms are Farrest Taylor, Mike Papantonio, and Robert Kennedy Jr.”

On November 5, 2008, Politico reported, “President-elect Barack Obama is strongly considering Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Environmental Protection Agency, a Cabinet post, Democratic officials told Politico.”

And Politico noted, “The selection of Kennedy would be a shrewd early move for the new presidential team. Obama advisers said the nomination would please both Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

“It also would raise the profile of the EPA, which would help endear Obama to liberals who may be disappointed on other issues important to the Democrat left because of budget restrictions.

“The EPA enforces clean air and clear water laws. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and son of the late senator and attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, has long championed a cleaner water supply for New York City.”

16 years later, he’s a bum.

Also 16 years later, he may be the next HHS secretary because of the covid failure by Fauci, Birx, FJB and just about everyone else in government. Democrats do not realize how much covid damaged their little federal bureaucracy. RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearing made that clear.

MARK WARNER: Will you pledge that you will not fire federal employees who work on food safety, who work on trying to prevent things like Salmonella?

KENNEDY: Senator, there are 91,000 employees.

WARNER: Will you commit not to fire anyone in the health arena who currently works on protecting Americans from cyberattacks in their healthcare files?

KENNEDY: I will commit to not firing anybody who’s doing their job.

WARNER: Based on your opinion? Based upon your opinion or your political agenda, or Mr. Trump’s political agenda?

KENNEDY: Based upon MY opinion.

WARNER: I guess that means a lot of the folks who’ve had any type of views on vaccines will be out of work.

I should hope so.

Trump once attracted foaming-at-the-mouth critics. Now his bandwagon is overloaded. Christopher F. Rufo wrote, “The Trump Coalition Is Forming. Who Should Be in It?”

Rufo wrote, “In my judgment, all potential members of the coalition should be evaluated based on two key criteria, or filters. The first is whether they have skin in the game. The second is whether they have a bias toward action, which will help accomplish the president’s goals in the real world.”

The tech giants passed Rufo’s test.

He wrote, “Dissident Democrats are another valuable constituency. Figures such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard took immense personal risk in endorsing Trump, burning their bridges not only with the Democratic Party but also with most of their elite social circles. Whatever disagreements one might have with them on policy, it’s clear that they are joining the administration from a sense of mission and purpose, not simply to collect another accolade or credential. They also offer value in providing an off-ramp for Democratic voters who feel abandoned by the party. These high-profile defectors model the kind of behavior Trump will have to show to bring over moderate Democrats and others who had previously shied away from the GOP.”

Rufo made a solid case for including Kennedy and Gabbard. Their inclusion is a small price to pay for deporting millions of illegal aliens.

In his first term, Trump flipped the Supreme Court from a 4-4 tie to a 6-3 majority. That not only sent abortion issues back to the states but laid the foundation for de-clawing the bureaucracy with rulings that rein in regulatory authority and the power of administrative law judges.

In upholding Obamacare, Justice Roberts said elections have consequences, nyah, nyah, nyah.

Failure, too, has consequences. In FJB’s case those consequences are President Trump’s second term, the deportation of illegals and the shrinking of the bureaucracy that Democrats control.