Our new Secretary of Education enters under historic circumstances: every now and then, the Vice President is called in to break a 50/50 tie regarding a piece of legislation, but never in the history of the country has a Senate confirmation vote required 101 ballots cast. The mainstream media helpfully informs us that her confirmation was “rough” and “contentious.” Another den of journalists gives us the breaking news that Trump’s appointments are taking longer to clear the senate than Obama’s.
I say all this only because it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Betsy DeVos has been confirmed and that is all that matters now. She is in. She is going to shake up the Department of Education, an earthquake that will open up a rift big enough to house what is left of the progressive agenda in.
Watching the Trump nominees take more time than the Obama nominees fills me with joy. These are not safe and they most certainly aren’t conciliatory. The Democrats are desperately trying to drag out the process, which is more or less fine with me as well. They won’t be able to drag it out over the next two years, which is what they would need to do to have the slightest chance of stopping her with a midterm flip of the Senate, but given the number of at-risk seats the Democrats will have to defend in 2018, it looks like pretty much all of Trump’s picks are going to go the distance.
And they are extraordinary choices, all of them. One of the absolute highlights of the three months in this Parade of Winning was watching the confusion on the part of the progressives, especially journalists: Why, this Trump idiot has appointed a man as head of the EPA who seems to want to destroy the EPA! Don’t you conservative idiots out there in fly over country understand that?
Here’s a newsflash, newsboy: this is not a bug, and it’s not even a feature. This is the entire reason the product was made in the first place.
James Mattis being appointed Secretary of Defense is a shot fired across not only the bows of ISIS, Russia and China: I think, most importantly, it was a message to members of our armed forces saying that if they can just hang on for a few weeks, they will get to be warriors again. They did not enlist to socially engineer this country. They enlisted to protect it. The appointment of Secretary of Defense Mattis is the bugle call of the cavalry coming to the rescue of what looked all year to be a Last Stand.
The announcement that we were going to have a Mad Dog as SECDEF immediately put some spruce in the stride of just about everyone wearing the uniform. It was a parting of the storm clouds admitting the rays of a golden sun. A rising golden sun.
DeVos does not have that pleasure. The department she is going to shake to the foundations has been as happy under eight years of Obama as warfighters were miserable. Mattis is a ray of sunshine for the military, but DeVos will inherit staffers who believe they are on the Titanic and Betsy is the iceberg.
Donald Trump’s cabinet picks are not just “good” for conservatives; instead they all seem to be the kind of paradigm-shattering earthquake of a magnitude that no one – no one I know, anyway – had dared to believe possible.
Los Angeles used to be the earthquake capitol of America. Washington is Shaky Town now, and the reverberations of Tuesday, November 8th, 2016 will be felt not just across the entire globe but likely down the Halls of Time as well.