02m23s The Senator from Bray. (My 2004 campaign song for John Kerry.)
09m44s Midterm voting dilemmas. (Making the best of lousy choices in '06.)
11m29s Democrat '08 candidates on parade. (Not quite as loony as the '20 crowd.)
16m05s Retrospective hopes on GOP '08 candidates' debate. (I get debate fatigue.)
18m47s Obama is the nominee. (I was unimpressed.)
22m57s Eight wasted years. (Post '08 reflections.)
26m07s Tea Parties: the Empire strikes back. (First stirrings of Trumpism.)
31m18s 2011 GOP debate: The National Question. (Clueless on immigration.)
38m20s Signoff.
01—Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! … sort of.
Yes, same deal as last week, listeners. I left the U.S.A. on September 9th and am currently, on September 20th, somewhere in China, either happily getting drunk with old friends or having my fingernails pulled out by Xi Jinping's secret police, depending on how much attention the ChiComs have paid to the stuff I've been writing about them this past 36 years.
Before leaving the States I recorded three sessions of Radio Derb: last week's, this week's and next week's. Naturally I couldn't make them very newsy and topical, so each one is a trip down Memory Lane.
For these purposes, Memory Lane goes from May 2004 to April 2012, the eight years that Radio Derb was hosted by National Review. Audio clips from the sound files for those years follow, bracketed by little pip-pip sounds. [Pips.]
This week's theme is political. Those eight years included two and a half Presidential election cycles: the last few months of the 2004 cycle, all of the 2008 cycle, and the first few months of the 2012 cycle. I'm hoping that by looking back at my commentary from those time spans, I may get some insight into how this current 2020 cycle will play out. There were mid-terms in there too, of course; I had things to say about them.
Let's see.
02—The Senator from Bray. The 2004 Presidential contest was between incumbent George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.
There was a lot of fuss during the campaign over Kerry's war record. He'd served as a Navy Lieutenant for four years. For four months of that he'd served in Vietnam, commanding a Swift Boat—a fast patrol boat working the rivers of the Mekong Delta.
Kerry had engaged in combat and was decorated. Back in the States in the early seventies, though, he joined the antiwar movement, and, in a demonstration with hundreds of other veterans against the war, publicly threw away his medals.
In the '04 election, some of the men who'd served with him on the Swift Boats claimed he'd inflated his war service. Whether he had or not I don't know, but it was a talking point all through the election campaign, along with other evidences of Kerry's cold opportunism.
Hence the following, posted on National Review Online as part of my 2004 Christmas sing-along, recorded on Radio Derb a couple of years later.
[Pips.]
[Pips.]
03—Midterm voting dilemmas. In late October 2006 I was not in the most elevated spirits, voter-wise.
[Pips.]
[Pips.]
04—Democrat '08 candidates on parade. By April of 2007 we had two good fields of candidates shuffling into position for the '08 election. And yes, they were setting up debates. Here I was on the April 27th '07 Radio Derb commenting on a Democratic candidates' debate.
[Pips.]
Democrat '08 candidates on parade.
[Pips.]
05—Retrospective hopes on GOP candidates' debate. There was no incumbent President running in '08; the Presidency was up for grabs by both parties. So there were GOP candidates' debates, too.
By September 2007 I was suffering from debate fatigue. Here I was venting my boredom on September 7th that year—just about the same point in the '08 election cycle that we are right now at in the 2020 cycle.
[Pips.]
Retrospective hopes on GOP candidates' debate.
[Pips.]
06—Obama is the nominee. By mid-February 2008 we knew that Barack Obama would be the Democratic candidate for President that year. I was unimpressed.
[Pips.]
[Pips.]
07—Eight wasted years. So on November 4th 2008 Barack Obama got elected President. Here I was that Friday on Radio Derb, reflecting on it.
[Pips.]
[Pips.]
08—Tea Parties: the Empire strikes back. One consequence of Obama's election was the Tea Party movement, whose first stirrings Radio Derb had noted in April '09, just a few weeks into Obama's Presidency.
The Tea Partiers represented the first major sign of the anti-elite populism that brought Donald Trump to power eight years later. They were disliked equally by both Cultural Marxists and the Republican establishment.
They also generated the first spasm of openly nasty anti-populist feeling among Cultural Marxists, the spasm that later manifested as Trump Derangement Syndrome. Progressives were particularly thrilled with their own wit for referring to the movement as "Tea Baggers," apparently a reference to an intimate practice among male homosexuals.
As promising as it seemed, the Tea Party movement was inchoate and ineffectual. It was easily co-opted by the Republican Party establishment, just as I predicted in this podcast segment from February 2010.
[Pips.]
Tea Parties: the Empire strikes back.
[Pips.]
09—2011 GOP debate: The National Question. Here's a clip from September 2011, just the point in the 2012 election cycle that we are now at in this one.
There had been a GOP candidates' debate that week, and it included questions about immigration. What this part of the debate mainly revealed was the utter cluelessness of all the candidates about immigration issues. Then as now, candidates' debates reach peak stupidity when they are asked questions about immigration.
[Pips.]
2011 GOP debate: The National Question.
[Pips.]
10—Signoff. That's it, ladies and gentlemen, for this second dip into the Radio Derb archives. Thank you for listening; I hope I brought some little shards of the political past to life there.
The third and final such dip will be next week, when my theme will be The Culture. The week after that, October 4th, Radio Derb will be back to the normal schedule, commenting on current events as usual.
[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire Marches]
