The 2024 Election in Wyoming. Will anyone rise to the challenge, and is there even a point?

Lex Anteinternet: The 2024 Election, Part XI. The Winter of Disconte...: January 4, 2023

Harriet Hageman announced her bid to be reelected with the release of a video:

Harriet Hageman is running for reelection.  This is not a surprise.

John Barrasso is as well. This is also not a surprise.

The difference between the two races, so far, is that Barrasso has drawn a challenger. . . from his own party, in the primary.

Hageman is unlikely to.

Neither candidate, so far, faces a Democrat.

Just the other day, December 28, I had an entry that mentioned Wyoming's Congressman, Teno Roncalio.  On that day, he was one of the overwhelming majority of House of Representatives members who voted for the Endangered Species Act, one of the greatest pieces of legislation in recent history and one of the real achievements of the forever tainted Nixon Administration.

Roncalio, a lawyer from Rock Springs, and a veteran of D-Day, was a Democrat.  

Nearly everyone in Rock Springs was.

At that time, one of our two Senators, Gale McGee, a former University of Wyoming professor, was also a Democrat.

Now, to use the term "Democrat", even in street speech, is slanderous in the state.  It's like calling somebody a wife beater or something.  Republicans vying to be as extreme as possible accuse their fellow Republicans of being Democrats (even though many of those who do that routinely are imports from the South or elsewhere and are really, even if they don't know it, Dixiecrats or Rust Belt Democrats).

Gale McGee was our Senator until 1977, when he was replaced by Malcolm Wallop, a very conservative Wyomingite of English peerage, in a race in which it appeared that McGee didn't really have any interest in running.  McGee was our last Democratic Senator, and he simply gave the race to Wallop.  

Roncalio served in the House in 1978.  He didn't run for reelection.  He was replaced by Dick Cheney in a race that pitted Cheney, fresh out of the Ford Administration, against Cheyenne attorney Bill Bagley.  Cheney won with about 60% of the vote against a lawyer who is now forgotten, but who held on in practice too long.  Interestingly, showing part of how we got to where we are now, one of his county chairs was a then Democrat who would later be in the legislature as a very conservative Republican.  

That's telling, as a whole herd of Democrats who were later conservative Republicans share that history in the state.

No Democrat has gone to Washington from Wyoming since 1978, but the party remained significant and a power well after that.  It twice took the Governor's office and twice reelected Democratic Governors, with the last Democrat leaving Cheyenne in that role as recently as 2011. Either one of the Democratic Governor's could have had a House, and maybe a Senate, seat if they had wanted one.  The Democrats routinely took the Secretary of State's office for much of the 20th Century, with the last Democratic Secretary of State, Kathy Karpan, leaving office in 1995.  Karpan went on to become the director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement in 1997, being the first woman to hold that position, and being unanimously confirmed back when Congress still did its job.  Like Governors Sullivan and Freudenthal, Karpan could have stepped into the House or perhaps the Senate if she had wanted to.  

Freudenthal remains a significant figure in Wyoming politics.

The last really significant Wyomingite to make a serious run for office with a serious chance of success was Mary Thorne, a lawyer who ran against Governor Gordon in 2018.  There have been other real Democrats who have run for office, with Sergio Maldonado for State Superintendent of Education coming to mind, but since the mid 1990s It's become increasingly difficult and many of the Sullivan/Freudenthal Democrats have dropped out of the party, in part because of the Democratic leftward (and anti-democratic) drift, and in part because at some point being a Democrat was pointless and the Republican primary race became the real election.

2022 really demonstrated the direction that the cancer of Donald Trump had brought about.  

In 2022 the Republican Primary became a referendum on Donald Trump, with the Wyoming electorate, influenced by the import of Rust Belt and Dixie immigrants into the state, basically giving the insurrectionist a big wet kiss on the mouth by tossing out Liz Cheney.  The whole thing was more than a little ironic, as Cheney, who had risen to her office late in her occupation of it, really was never a Wyomingite in the first place, but the party dearly loved her, in no small part because it had embraced Dick Cheney, after having elected him cynically originally.  The Cheney's aren't Wyomingites and Dick Cheney had only won as the voters in 1978 were given a choice between somebody who seemed to have influence in Washington, Cheney had been Ford's Chief of Staff, and a Cheyenne lawyer who had, if I recall correctly, held off a challenge from a younger Casper lawyer who later became a Federal judge.  Wyomingites of that era were pretty practical and cynical, and they never developed a love for their politicians like occured later. Cheney seemed to do a good job, so he held office.  Liz Cheney won as the primary split the vote three ways.  Chance are high had that not occured, Tim Stubson would have been our Congressman, and have gone on to suffer the same fate as Cheney by not searing allegiance to the Dear Leader for life.

Hageman was a Cheney acolyte but was good at reading the wind and beat out her former friend.  Her competition was Lynette Grey Bull, a really interesting Democrat who had run twice and who drew 24.4% of the vote in spite of the times, in spite of being a Democrat, and in spite of being a Native American.

Who will run now.

Since 2020 the State's GOP has gone into a civil war, with the old party at war with the "Freedom Caucus", one of whose (California migrant) members wrote an op ed in the Tribune which clearly indicates their intent to wage a second Stalingrad in the 2022 Legislature.  Two county organizations, Natrona and Laramie Counties, are in revolt against the GOP Central Committee who has fully adopted the Meine Ehre heißt Treue ethos.  Hageman hasn't been as noisy as might be expected, in part because she probably correctly read the tea leaves over the trouble that Trump ass-kisser Kevin McCarthy was in for not kissing even more private parts before he fell to a quiet and scary Johnson.  The House of Representatives had done nothing this term, and is on the edge of losing power due to attrition.  Pundits claim that the GOP will gain House seats in 2022, but they claimed that about 2020 as well.  The stench of Trump kept that from happening.

And so we have a non-functioning democracy, locally.

No Democrat can win any office in 2022.  The House and one Senate seat will be up, and both of the Republicans contending for those positions will pledge their true honor to the Leader without question.  Some in the race to come this year will go further with a full-blown Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer appeal.  The Senate primary will see a GOP opportunistic upstart attempting to claim that John Barrasso is a "RINO", which really means that he's not a Dixiecrat or Rust Belt Democrat.  While I've discounted that campaign, I don't really put it past it that it has a chance of success.

Will any Democrats run?

I sure hope so.  And I mean a real Democrat, not the Left Wing Flavor Of  The Month Democrats that the party has been fielding in some races locally.  Putting up somebody who self declares to be a homosexual polyamorus trangendered drag queen Pacific Islander is not going to win any hearts at all, and really isn't believeable (the same people would decarel themselves to be cocker spaniels if that was edgy, or Orthodox starets if that was edgy).  Soembody like Sullivan, Fruendenthal, Karpen, Thorne, or, once again, Grey Bull.

But who can be asked to be a sacrificial lamb.

Well, somebody had to be. 

The state's honor, and the preservation of democracy, require it.  With no choices now, we get further down the road to there being no choices, ever.  

The Democrats are faced with that burden.  What little there is the way of third parties here do as well.  

Fish on Fridays, the Environment, and somewhat missing the point.

Here's an odd item that I found through a British newspaper:

Catholic Church can reduce carbon emissions by returning to meat-free Fridays, study suggests

Eh?

This found:

In 2011, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales called on congregations to return to foregoing meat on Fridays. Only around a quarter of Catholics changed their dietary habits—yet this has still saved over 55,000 tons of carbon a year, according to a new study led by the University of Cambridge.

FWIW, 10% of the British population remains or has returned to Catholicism (more Catholics go to services on Sunday than any other religion in Britain).  England in particular was noted for its strong attachment to the Faith before King Henry VIII, and even after that, as it was not at first clear to people at the pew level that he'd severed ties with it.  This gets into our recent discussion on the end of the Reformation.

Indeed, Great Britain's Catholic roots never really completed faded at any one time.  Peasants rose up in 1549 over the Prayer Book, a good 30 years after Henry has severed from Rome.  Catholic hold outs continued on, on the island, under various penalties of the law, some extremely severe.  And the illogical position of the Church of England that it wasn't really Protestant, while not being able to rationally explain why then it wasn't that, or wasn't, if it wasn't that, schismatic, lead High Church Anglicans to continually flirt with returning to Rome. King Charles I was so High Church his position in regard to not joining the Church didn't make sense, something that his son, Charles II, ultimately did, in spite of his libertine lifestyle.The Oxford movement by Anglican churchmen in reaction to Catholic assertions that their Apostolic Succession was severed lead at least one famous Anglican cleric, John Henry Newman, into the Catholic Church, where he ultimately became a Cardinal.  In recent years, notable British figures have converted to the Church, along with many regular people.

Abstaining from meat on all the Fridays in the year, which in Catholic terms doesn't include fish, was a long held Latin Rite tradition that fell in the wake, in some places, but not all, following the reforms of Vatican II.  It was not part of Vatican II, as some improperly assume, but something that occurred in the spirit of that age.  It was a penitential act, not an environmental one.

For a variety of reasons, I'm pretty skeptical of the "blame it on cows" part of the climate change discussion.  But as a localist and killetarian, I am game with grow or capture it on your own. That isn't really what this is about, but it's worth noting that anything you buy at the grocery store, or wherever, has had a fair amount of fossil fuels associated with it.  The Carbon reduction here would be because fish don't burp much, if at all, or fart much, if at all.  But for that matter, neither do deer or rabbits, ducks or geese, or for that matter grass fed cattle.

Go out there, in other words, and get your own if you really want to save on the carbon.

For that matter, I might note, for those who are vegan, production agriculture is the huge killer of animal life.  I always laugh to myself when vegans think they're saving animals, they're slaughtering them in droves.  Anyone who is familiar with the agricultural logistical chain or how production agriculture works knows that.

I'm for growing it yourself as well, of course, although I've now been a hypocrite on that for years.  I need to get back to it.

Anyhow, the "this would be a good thing for the Catholic Church to do globally in the name of the environment" might be true, or might not be, but it misses the overall point.

Related threads:

The secular left's perpetual surprise at arriving at the Catholic past.

Secular suffering for nothing

Pancake Day.

Blog Mirror: “A Good Dish for the Meatless Meal” Recipe

Losing in Afghanistan.

 

United States Navy photograph by Lt. Chad Dulac.

A recent article I saw somewhere stated that a lot of Vietnam veterans are having an unwelcome recollection of the end of that war.  One Vietnam vet I know personally told me that.

And the reason why is that they're seeing an abandonment of a cause we fought for in Afghanistan, just like we did in Vietnam.

It's an open question how long a democratic country can maintain a fight against an enemy that doesn't threaten to overrun it.  The US fought for four years in the Civil War over what the nation would be, and twice that long to bring the nation into existence in the 1770s and 1780s.  World War Two was fought, by the US, for four years as well.  All those wars, and others, were fought to a conclusion, so obviously the US will do that.  We more or less did that with Iraq, actually completing what we had started with the second Gulf War.

We didn't do that with Vietnam.  We entered, in a minor way, in 1958 and left officially in 1973, but in reality we didn't really get rolling until 1964 and had pretty much gotten out by 1972.  Still, Vietnam was a pretty long war by American standards, and we'd grown tired of the whole thing by 1968.  Nixon was elected on a promise to get us out, which he did. 

By the time we left Vietnam the American Army had basically been destroyed.  Not a battlefield destruction by any means, the NVA and the VC were not capable of doing that. But its moral had completely been destroyed.  Of the four services, probably the Marines and the Air Force were in the best shape. The Navy actually experienced a late war mutiny on an aircraft carrier, showing how bad things were for it.  That's important to know, but it doesn't change the fact that we entered Vietnam in strength in 1965, converted the war to an American style war, were complicit by omission in the assassination of its civilian head of state, and then left.  The US could have prevented the North Vietnamese victory in 1975 by the application of air power, but we chose not to.  

That may beg the question of what would have occurred in the war had the US simply not become involved.  Frankly, the Republic of Vietnam stood a good chance of falling on its own.  But we did become involved and even had a bit of a role in seeing a non-democratic civilian government become a series of military ones.  Only the first one arguably understood the country itself.

Intervening in a nation militarily imposes obligations on a country, wish for them or not.  Wars don't end when the party initiating them concludes they're over.  They end when both parties do.  When we left Vietnam we did so under a fiction that we were turning the war over (back?) to the South Vietnamese.  But we'd converted the war's nature into something else by that time, and taught the ARVN to fight like the US Army, with US equipment, and US airpower.  It's no wonder the rank and file of the ARVN collapsed in 1975. They no longer had all of that like they had before.

And that's what is going to happen in Afghanistan.

Somebody whose feed I get on Facebook, at least for the time being, claims that we entered Afghanistan on a limited "punitive expedition" and should have gotten right back out. There's some merit to that claim, but that isn't what we did at all.  Indeed, we botched the war there right from the onset, and that set the path for the next twenty years.

Donald Rumsfeld, who just died recently, was Gerald Ford's Secretary of Defense and therefore was familiar with punitive expeditions. The US reaction to the Mayaguez's taking by Cambodia was sort of that.  But by the time he was George Bush II's Secretary of Defense, he'd become a member of the technology v. troops trap that has so often ensnared Americans.

Moreover, while U.S. troops first touched ground in October 2001, the US put the war on a back burner preferring instead to take on Iraq in a war that was completely unconnected with the 9/11 attacks and which didn't need to be fought, or if it did, it didn't need to be fought at that time.

Indeed, often missed in the story of "America's longest war" is the fact that the US never committed to it in the way that was either required or really military necessary.  At a high point, in 2011, there were 98,000 US troops in Afghanistan, which is a lot, but pales in comparison to the 500,000 men commitment that was made to Vietnam and Korea.  Of course, those were large wars in comparison as well.  By and large, however, the US kept its commitment to Afghanistan low and slow, which meant that the Taliban was able to adjuster, and for that matter so was Al Queada.  That kept the war running.  In December 2002, well after the US commitment had commenced, there were still just under 10,000 US troops in the country. 

Fighting guerilla wars isn't easy to start with, but to really have caught and addressed the Taliban, the initial commitment should have been heavy and exclusive.  We never did that.

It's also easy to now forget that Osama bin Laden wasn't killed until May 2011.  It took us a full decade to achieve that goal, which had been part of the initial goal in the first instance.  Having engaged the war in Afghanistan in 2001, and having not achieved that goal until a decade later, those who argue that the effort was to be a punitive raid have more or less missed that point.

As we were in the country for that length of time, it was necessary to attempt to restore a functioning Afghani civil government.  But that sort of thing takes a very long time, which we should have been well aware of.  As we're addressing in another post on a completely unrelated topic, democracy isn't instinctive and building a democratic culture takes a very long time.  Germany and Japan, which had functioning parliamentary systems that were not completely democratic, but which did function, flunked it in the mid 20th Century and didn't achieve democracy until they were occupied after World War Two.  China, which started off attempting in 1911, has never pulled it off.  The US, our own example, started off with the reputation of being radically democratic, but only 6% of the population could vote in the country's first democratic election.

Given this, we can't really expect the Afghani government to be stable for a long time.  It's had twenty years, some might note, but many nations have taken longer than that.

And its military is collapsing in the face of a Taliban onslaught.  The best we can now hope for is that some regions of the country will become self-governing under their own local warlords.  Not a cheery thought, but the best one.  A 30,000 man strong body of Afghani commandos continues to fight well, but they are about it. The best they can hope for is that the Afghan central government becomes one more contesting force, sort of in the model of Lebanon of the 1970s.

None of this had to be.  We could have avoided this by fighting the war intelligently and according to well established military principals in 2001 and 2002.  But we botched that.

Having failed that, that committed us to the long haul. That would mean keeping some troops, and more particularly air assets, in the country for a long time, perhaps another twenty years.  If that seems outrageous, we've now had troops in Europe since they landed in Italy in 1943, and some forces on Japanese soil that have been there since 1945.  Our troops in the Philippines were there, under somewhat analogous conditions, from 1898 until the country was really made free in 1945, and continued on for various reasons decades after that.  We've been in South Korean since 1950 in a technical state of halted hostilities.

When we left Vietnam in 1972 it took three years for the country to fall, giving the US the hoped for illusion of "peace with honor" that Nixon had hoped for, even as he knew the country would fall.  The country has followed the Communist path since then, with all that entails, including a slow move towards a market economy directed from above.  Lenin's New Economic Policy may never have taken root in the USSR, but it seems to have elsewhere in the Communist world, save for the Stalinist theme park of North Korea.  No such hope can be realistically conveyed for an Afghanistan with the Taliban back in power.  It never had any interest in anything other than a strict Islamic rule. And that's what is most likely to return in that country.  We'll be complicit in that.

Addendum

Prior to the US announcing its intent to withdraw during the late portion of the Trump Presidency, total non Afghani forces supporting the government amount to 7,500 troops, of which 2,500 were Americans. The Afghan National Army was doing 98% of the fighting.