The Pendulum Of Time

h/t Borepatch

From Borepatch's blog, an interesting laundry list:

The Republican Party has been in a civil war for 2 years.  The Chamber Of Commerce faction (call them the Optimates) is in a knife fight with the Trump wing (call them the Populares).  The rhetoric is ugly, a continual violation of Reagan's Eleventh Commandment.  This will feature prominently in the upcoming Supreme Court confirmation hearings, with center-left Republicans like Susan Collins possibly splitting and voting with the Democrats.  The Democrats have been watching with a mix of glee and horror, depending on whether the Trump wing wanes or waxes.

The Democratic Party looks like it has also descended into a civil war, with the establishment wing (Clinton, Schumer, Pelosi, Cuomo, Brown) arrayed against a nascent but growing socialist insurgency.  Hillary had to stack the deck to beat Bernie in 2016, and establishment bigwigs are getting knocked off in primaries.  Republicans grin and pass the popcorn, ignoring the fact that this is the first time in my lifetime that actual hard core socialists are on the ascendent in this Republic.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel looks to be hanging by a thread, with her "conservative" allies pulling the rug out from under her feet and forcing a humiliating change in policy.  We'll see if she survives politically but it looks like there's blood in the water.

UK Prime Minister Theresa May seems to be in the same cookpot as Merkel, only this time over Brexit.  Voters in Britain decided to leave the UK, but she seems to be trying to do a sneaky "leave but don't leave" swicheroo and is bleeding cabinet ministers because of it.  There is talk of a vote of no confidence which as far as I can remember hasn't happened since Margret Thatcher over two decades ago.

Italy (to great consternation in the European Parliament) has voted out its old center-left/center-right duopoly and voted in a Nationalist-left/Nationalist-right alliance.  There is talk about ITALEXIT, where Italy leaves the EU.  Whether it happens or not, this is a political earthquake.

Everywhere we look, the political establishment is being rejected.  Reform is in the air.

But the curse is funny because it's true: interesting times are uncomfortable times.  What if real Venezuela-style socialism comes to one of the 50 states?  [**cough** California **cough**] ...

RTWT. Anyone who quotes Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary is a gentleman and a scholar, and there's damned few of us left.

Chavismo , however, only works in a disarmed populace.

Since 1989, several MILLION M4geries and AR-clones have been sold in CA, compared to scarcely a few hundred thousands of (not)"Assault" weapons prior to the original ban.

Picture Venezuela after a couple of trainloads of rifles and live rounds have been distributed amongst the disaffected, and that's how communism would (and will) fare in CA.

It's also, not coincidentally, what we should be doing in Venezuela now: sending in small arms by the hundreds of thousands, and passing them out to the opposition. (Of course, this would require the CIA to start fighting communists, rather than trying to stage a coup on the US presidency, so it'd be swimming pretty strongly upstream at Langley, among other places.)

Last I looked, we were still sitting on crate-loads of a few hundred thousand cosmoline-packed AK-47s ever since the Grenada Summer Camp in '83.
Time for those red hens to come home to roost, somewhere outside Caracas.
Ollie North is president of the NRA now; put him in charge. He has some experience with this, IIRC.

Let's give the Left some interesting times, for a change. Literally.