Politics

During the entire past two years of Covid hysteria I never stopped traveling. “Work from home” wasn’t a privilege awarded to me. My love of logic and language was perpetually bothered by a frequent airline announcement: “Federal law requires” mask mandates, a statement most untruthful. There is no law. Congress passed no new legislation; there is only regulation, the demon spawn of power-hungry politicians and a bloated bureaucracy. For those who can’t be bothered with the democratic process of elected officials proposing bills and deliberating, voting and enacting legislation, the immeasurable, and not enumerated, power of the bureaucratic state is an attractive work-around.

You don’t have to be obsessed with racial calculations to consider the possibility that the next presidential election in the United States could be fought between two American-born women with roots in India: Nikki Haley in the red corner and Kamala Harris in the blue, the Republican Sikh and the Democratic Tamil Brahmin (on the side of the sainted mother who raised her), duking it out for leadership of what’s left of the Free World. The probability of this happening dwindles by the day, of course, as Vice President Harris makes it ever clearer that she’s too lightweight for the White House, and that nominating her for president would be electoral suicide for the Democrats. (Besides, hubris may drive Joe Biden to run again.) As for Ms.

Biden’s never-ending infrastructure week During the Trump years, “infrastructure week” became a lame Washington in-joke. “It’s infrastructure week!” someone would tweet sarcastically to underscore the administration’s ongoing failure to deliver the bipartisan infrastructure package that Trump promised early in his presidency. Biden has reversed the Beltway gag. The joke in Trump’s Washington was that it was that the president’s failure to deliver the bill meant that, Groundhog Day-style, it was always infrastructure week. In Biden’s Washington, it’s always infrastructure week because the president has failed to deliver on anything other than a bipartisan infrastructure package.

What Canada’s truckers reveal about America’s realignment Every now and then, you can see the political realignment happening before your eyes: impossible-to-ignore examples of shifting voter coalitions and ideological sympathies that render old rules and assumptions redundant. And so it is seems with the Canadian trucker protests — and our reaction to them south of the border. The truckers’ proximate grievance is a Canadian mandate that would mean unvaccinated truckers would have to quarantine for two weeks every time they returned from the United States. But it’s about more than that too, of course: broader frustration at a whole regime of Covid rules.

On February 14, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued an edict granting himself emergency powers to rule Canada by martial law with the intent of making all those trucks back up. He wants to confiscate them along with freezing truckers’ bank accounts. His soldiery is not altogether with him. Ottawa’s chief of police, Peter Sloly, abruptly resigned. Things aren’t looking bright for North America’s newest autocracy. But, OK.  Let’s back up. On December 18, 2020 a French musician known as HK (Kaddour Hadadi) and his group the Saltimbanks released on video a song titled “Danser encore” (“Dancing Again”).

Justin Trudeau, still the prime minister of Canada, is the first person in history to invoke the Emergencies Act, a law enacted in the 1980s to allow the government to take special, temporary action to deal with an “urgent and critical situation” that “seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians.” Little Justin is embarrassed by the thousands of truckers in Canada who are protesting, first of all, the country’s vaccine mandate but, more to the point, the government’s intrusion into the lives and livelihoods of the people. Justin is embarrassed. That’s the real national emergency. In response, Trudeau is transforming Canada into a police state. People with tow trucks, he said, will be “coerced” into moving the rigs of recalcitrant truckers.