So goes the old adage – “History is written by the victors.”  And so, as we have been talking about for a while now, we are being treated to story after story about the failures of the Obama-Biden administrations.  Consider three pieces written in the last day or so.  The damage wrought by California’s fast food minimum wage nonsense.  Joel Kotkin on the major change Trump represents in foreign policy and how badly the Biden bunch has failed at it.  Byron York with a laundry list of Biden-based wreckage.  It’s like a breath of fresh air to finally see people acknowledge what a mess things have been for quite a while now.  Pieces like these were written throughout the failure that was the Biden administration.  But when there was no hope that we could change anything, they rang hollow, increasing our pain instead of providing relief.

The fresh air is indeed wonderful, but it should come with a word of caution.

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If you are hiring, there is a problem.  Young people do not want to work and those that do get jobs seem to lack initiative and ambition.  It can be quite frustrating.  Young people with extraordinary academic records get into the workplace and deeply underperform in comparison to that record.  If you talk to them, they are quite knowledgeable, but they seem to want to keep that to themselves.  Most frustratingly, they never take any initiative – even to simply inform a higher up when they see something.  It is as if they wish to be as invisible as possible.

Then there is the whole issue of people that “fail to launch.”  You know, people that sit in their parent’s basement and play video games until well into their 30’s.

What’s up with this?  Why are young people trying to hide their success, or never reaching for it to begin with?

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Bullying is bad…unless liberals are doing the bullying.  One of the reasons this election was so overwhelming was Americans are just flat tired of being pushed around.  The process is simple.  First create an enemy – sometimes just attaching a label works, other times you find some sort of excuse – it doesn’t really matter, the basic idea is to rhetorically put those you disagree with into a category that justifies making the disagreement more than merely rhetorical.  In other words, you argue that what you view as wrong is actually evil.  Now “the rules” of civil disagreement no longer matter and things get ugly.  You end discussion and go to war.

Three stories this morning brought all this into a new and much clearer focus.

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Republicans are using the pardon to shine their trophy.  Democrats are embarrassed.  I cannot help but believe it is all posturing.  Joe Biden pardoning his son, Hunter Biden, for crimes definite is entirely logical.  Everyone has an opinion and is busy expressing it.  This is the reasonable outcome of decades of Democrat policy, policy pursuit and politics.  Let’s consider some facts.

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Last night’s presidential pardon has rocked the political world.  But is it really news?  It is the least surprising develop of the entire campaign and transition.  The question was never “if,” but “when” and “how broad” – which as it turns out is “very.” We’ll get back to this in a minute. But first…

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It is not often we celebrate the First Sunday of Advent on December 1, but here we are.  It is kind of exciting.  Hope Sunday on the first day of a new month, the first day of a new year in the liturgical calendar.  And it is a hopeful time in America.  The elections just concluded give us hope of better times to come.  In that hope there will be a temptation to lionize the new president.  I would bet someone, somewhere, will preach this morning of hope in the new administration.  I am not one of them – I see things just a little differently.

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I have spent this holiday week focusing on the good news in the wake of the election.  Republicans have yet to take power, but we can already see many of the worse trends of the last couple of decades beginning to reverse.  But let’s not kid ourselves.  Things don’t change overnight, and the progressives are not going to stop trying.  As I perused my end-of-week stack of stuff I find the not so good news, A reminder, the road is long.

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I wish we could blame all of the insanity that was covid on overbearing government, but we can’t.  Overbearing government, which indeed our government was and still is, needed and needs fertile ground upon which to work.  We were that ground, and we bought into it hook, line and sinker.  (Yeah, I know, mixed metaphor.)  But shouldn’t government’s job in such circumstances be to reassure us, not capitalize on our fear?  Shouldn’t we be able to expect better from our government?  We should – but just as our public health agencies failed then, FEMA is failing now.

The election results tell me that we, the voters, have learned our lessons.  We did our job and threw the bums out.  But the new administration and Congress have a huge job in front of them.  They have to reform the great administrative state.  POTUS-elect Trump clearly understands that.  Hegseth at Defense says that.  Bondi at DOJ says that.  But nothing says it more loudly than Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at NIH.  This man, appointed to this position, is a direct repudiation of the people and agencies that brought us covid.

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