[American Thinker] Cheered on by the media, presumptuous Democrats are already popping the corks and picking out the drapes for the Oval Office, giddy that more than 70 million Republican voters will be handed their red caps and shown the door.
Not so fast. Upended state election protocols, systemic machine software glitches, Stalinistic vote count irregularities, and ballot deliveries in the dead of night are not always enough to snatch victory from defeat. Fighting against the Tammany Hall playbook may be challenging, but each day brings a stronger indication that a reversal of fortune is forthcoming.
On the other side of the world, a gentleman sporting a thick bootblack pompadour and a disarming smirk nonetheless considers the prospect of an upper hand in the American presidency. Xi Jinping has wagered this bet by hook into Wall Street, media moguls, show business, and academia, and by crook through the gluttony and hubris emblematic of some of America’s most powerful political families.
The Chinese are the epitome of patience, measuring history in eras and dynasties going back four millennia. They have fought hundreds of wars, almost all of them internal and tribal, conveying valuable lessons on warfighting and the use of intelligence to defeat rivals of far greater strength and resources by turning those attributes against them. Their spoken language and artistic ideographs are incomprehensible to most outsiders and vexing even to scholars of the Orient. Simple words, such as shi, seem repartee spoken with a smile, but describe military and diplomatic schemes crafted to discredit or eliminate an opponent. So long as we view China through a Western aperture, we will continue to overvalue their assurances while their ill intentions go unnoticed. |