Howdy from Buddy,
I’ll have to be brief as I’m up against a hard deadline, it being already 3:45pm. Fortunately, after last week’s flurry of emails, this week I got almost none. If that is the future trend, I sure won’t mind.
I remain confident that the election was won by Donald Trump and that serious election irregularities rendered a different tally. A lot of people, millions, share my skepticism that a candidate who could barely attract a bus load of people at his rallies beat a man who attracted thousands of wildly supportive people.
If I am right, and the election was stolen and nothing is done about it, it marks the beginning of the end of our democratic republic, more than 200 years of nationhood right down the tube. That is of great concern to me. I’m 74 and won’t be around that many more years. I don’t matter. But my country does matter a lot to me. Too many people over long generations didn’t build this country so that one day it could end up a socialistic dictatorship such as Venezuela.
Two excellent sources for getting the conservative perspective on the election issue are One America News (OAN) and the online newspaper Epoch Times (they also have a weekly print edition). They report stories, true and honest news stories, that the legacy media ignores—such as Hunter Biden’s curious income streams and his laptop, or Democrat connections to a company that supplies Democrat states with voting machines.
I’ll close—my time ran out—with a plug for Larry Elder’s wonderful documentary, Uncle Tom, narrated entirely by black men and women, each telling why they are conservatives (spoiler—it isn’t because they decided to be racists). Judy and I viewed Uncle Tom with friends last Saturday and were thoroughly impressed. Many blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities are conservative, they just don’t know it yet. Between now and the next presidential election, these folks need to see how little the liberals are delivering to make everyone’s life better, and how, through jobs and personal empowerment, conservative ideas lift everyone.
Whites and blacks alike are more and more often choosing not to have children. My own city of Arlington is already a minority majority city with the Hispanic population destined to be the dominate voting bloc. Thus minorities, with Hispanics in the lead, need honest elections and a consequent hones government as much as anyone. It is for them, as well as me, that I hope this election is shown to have been won fair and square. That is what matters most. Not which man this time out won. I can live with Biden and his crew if the election was aboveboard.
Buddy
Recommended
Hi, Buddy,
Michelle and I just watched the documentary THE WAY I SEE IT, about Pete Souza, the official White House photographer for Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.
REALLY good, filled with some great behind-the-scenes stuff never before released with the Reagans and Obamas, both video and still photography.
No matter if one disagreed with the policies of either President Reagan or President Obama, it’s a fairly straightforward look at two elected leaders in the White House, showing them as human beings rather than the “figureheads”, “icons” or “celebrities” most of us feel when we think of ANY President of the United States.
At the very least, good food for thought about the Office of the President in general and this great, miraculous country we live in.
Best, Steve
Consider me your Sancho Panza!
Forgot to tell you this, Buddy,
I loved your comment in your last e-mail about “tilting at windmills”.
Consider me your Sancho Panza!
Look, I think, as I feared, you opened yourself up to an amount of controversy you may not have expected. Or maybe you did expect it. I don’t know what your original intentions were. To me, all you were doing is stating your position. No big deal. All of us have that right and you’ve always respected that, as I have.
As you know from our lengthy correspondence, I’ve never owned a business. Sure, I’ve employed a few college students over the years to help with my paperwork during some involved projects, but in the end, I’m a freelance writer who has tried to keep the lights on since my mid-20’s. Our paths have been very different in that respect. I run a business consisting of ME… of the work I produce, period. You run an ACTUAL business that encompasses much more real and potential expense, rising or falling on the fortunes of employee expense, overhead expense and a thousand other things I’ve never had to worry about. We have different experiences based on the paths we’ve chosen. NO DIFFERENT than anyone else. No different than the experiences of my son Julian, my daughter Kylee, my wife Michelle, or of all your employees, of Conan and his wife, of your wife, etc.
You don’t require that your son or your wife or your employees think exactly as you think. If they do, or don’t, it’s just the way of things. That’s what you understand and it is the understanding of someone who is truly enlightened.
Buddy, you are 15 years older than I am. That’s 15 years on Earth more than me. You have experienced things I will never experience. I tell my 20-year-old son the same thing, with tears in my eyes because I know he will experience things that I never will long after I’m gone. And I see in him a better future, as I’m sure you see in Conan.
Perhaps we — you and I and everyone we know — have missed the mark. Perhaps we have at times been wrong-headed or simply wrong.
But at least people of goodwill such as you and I, are spending some of our energies trying to figure it all out for our kid’s sake.
You’ve taken a lot of shit since the 70’s for your views, Buddy. You and I could debate our differences for a hundred years to come, I have no doubt. But I’m also certain that, for all the shit thrown your way and mine for our political views, we’ll never have none of that between us. As it should be in a civil and civilized society of free people.
I stand ready to hand you the sword to fight every windmill we encounter, you crazy conservative, you!
Your crazy liberal friend, Steve
Subject: Your recent blog post
Hi Buddy,
First of all, I appreciate you removing political issues from the regular newsletter. I love receiving that newsletter because I am a comic book fan. I don’t really want to read about politics there.
Having said this, I read your recent blog post and I have a couple of comments, always in the spirit of discussing politics together in a peaceful way.
You write: “I’ve gone to work for seven months now and never lost a moment’s sleep over the virus.” I am happy that you have not been impacted by the virus, but I think that never losing a moment’s sleep over something that is affecting millions of people all around the world, something so devastating that has taken away so many lives is a little bit superficial if not disrespectful. You should consider yourself very, very, very lucky. Unfortunately, many people have not been so lucky.
Aaron, you misunderstand me. When I say I’ve never lost any a moment’s sleep over the virus,” all I’m saying is that I am not one of those people who worry about something that amounts to a force of nature, something beyond our human control. In no way am I making light of the fact that many have suffered and died due to the Chinese virus. As to luck, yes, there is always an element of luck involved in everything, but to a great extent, I have made my own luck, as have my employees, by following what we understand to be best practices in avoiding the virus. –Buddy
I am originally from Italy. I still remember the incredible stress I had when my family was impacted by the virus during the first wave. Hospitals in Italy were completely full, people were left dying, the Government had to send the military to pick up corpses, there were just too many to deal with. And now Italy and Europe are going through a second wave that looks even worse than the first one. I know so many people who died because of Covid…and these were not old people who were already close to death, these were also young and healthy people. A dear friend of mine is a doctor and he was also telling me the stories of many colleagues who contracted Covid while working and died.
And now the US has completely lost control on the virus. We are seeing the results now, with more than 1,000 deaths per day, and unfortunately the numbers will go up and up and up. Hospitalization is going up like crazy and this will be reflected in the death count soon. And the current totals of deaths are most likely undercounted. Take a look here: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6942e2.htm
Yes, this will be over, thank god, but who knows when.
Second point. This fraud over the elections issue. We need to be realistic. Courts are the places where these issues are discussed and where these things must be proven. So far, the Republican Party has not been able to bring any real evidence. Nothing. Zero. Have you followed today’s hearing in Pennsylvania with Rudy Giuliani? It was embarrassing for him. Will they bring new evidence in the future? We will see. As of today, this fraud argument is just anecdotal. The issue here is that Trump has lost and you should not be surprised about this. The entire world is making fun of him, I can’t think of any world leader supporting him. Either the whole world is wrong, or maybe it’s the Republican Party that is living in a bubble. I truly hope Trumpism will be over soon and the Republican Party will go back to produce strong leaders that can represent the conservative way of thinking in a much stable way. Best, Aaron