Thread by @ThyConsigliori

John Minford, #SunTzu 9: 45 "Excessive punishments are a sign of exhaustion."

As I've recently confessed, the angry Italian Papa in me can be a real problem. Master Sun gives us the ultimate key to the situation in today's verse. Exhaustion. Do you have a severe side that comes out when you're exhausted? Giles term here is "dire distress." How exhausting!

Giles further explains, "...in such a case discipline becomes relaxed, and unwonted severity is necessary to keep the men to their duty." Relaxed discipline results from distress and exhaustion. Yes, absolutely. Unwonted severity, however, isn't necessary, it just seems so.

And just where did the discipline become relaxed? It's me. It's when I failed to do my duty. But I project outward, and suddenly everyone else needs to do their damned duty. This is quintessentially bad leadership. My wife tells me to take a nap when I get nasty. She learns.

In those cases where rest isn't an option, there's a far better answer than severity. The answer is always there to be found in the mission itself. You look at the real situation, the challenge itself, and simply ask, what must be done? The mission always gives its own answers.

Allow a bit more self-reflection. I awakened 272 days ago, and some strange synapse went off in my brain. The MAGA mission will be with us, still, long after 2024. What will we still need? And I knew the answer. Master Sun, Sun Tzu's counsel. The MAGA movement needs it.

I immediately whipped out my Minford and counted out - mistakenly - 442 verses. I recently discovered my error, the correct number (I believe!) is 456. No matter the number, it was big. So far in my life I don't recall doing anything for 442 days consecutively, let alone 456.

I got started instantly. I knew I'd best not allow any self-doubt, hesitation, or procrastination. And every day since, the mission has given its own answers. Here's an example. When I got started, I had no idea that leadership was the real challenge for MAGA. Local leadership.

Our leader is great. Trump created us, the MAGA movement, almost from whole cloth. He certainly established this moment in American history. And to see how important that act was, just look at the news today. You'll hear the word Impeachment hundreds of times.

They'll torture their logic. They'll lie unendingly. They'll exaggerate and be shocked and horrified. They'll stop at nothing to remove Trump BEFORE 2020's election. Why? He's that great a threat. Worse. We're that great a threat. They are in dire distress, and they're exhausted.

What is the most severe punishment you might give to the American populace? You can remove their duly elected president by whatever means required. They have no time to consider the long-term ramifications. And they're not, I assure you. So, let's go there.

The only possible way that Impeachment can convert into conviction is in the Senate, as we know. Mitch McConnell runs the Senate with an iron fist. Can they get to him? Can they turn him against the Republican base, utterly? If so, they might win.

McConnell can easily procure enough Republican Senators to oust Trump if he chooses to do so. They may not be cheap, but they're certainly for sale. It's not so farfetched. Severe, definitely, but not a threat to be readily dismissed. So, okay, Trump's out, Pence is President.

What happens next? Pence runs, and is elected, or not. Say he gets elected. What then? He either continues the MAGA movement or he betrays us. In either case, what will they have achieved? The answer is the ultimate awakening in all of American history since 1776.

Go the other way. They oust Trump, and we end up with Biden, Warren or Sanders as POTUS. Talk about an asterisk! The only way they won was by means of Mitch McConnell's betrayal of his base. I'm thinking 1776 again. It's simply far too severe a punishment to accept.

Come back to Master Sun's verse. Such severity is a sign of exhaustion, of dire distress. How can they even think that Impeachment will be good for them? Truth is, they're not thinking. They're reacting under the worst threat they've ever faced.

Walk into the future again, past 2024 and 2028. Who will we be as Americans? Will we, we few, we 63,000,000 who elected Trump have forgotten about his Impeachment by then, should they succeed? Will we still be awake? I'm thinking, yeah, we'll still be awake. What say you?

I'm thinking we'll never be quite so asleep again, as we were up until 2015. Maybe not you, but I sure was. I was utterly heartbroken, utterly without hope for my beloved country, and I didn't even know it. Here it is 3 years after we won, and now they're still trying to undo it.

I recently determined that 1932 is my year for the founding of the swamp. I know it goes back much further, but well, maybe I should call it the modern swamp or The Swamp 2.0 or something like that. But 1932, FDR's election, is my year.

If we win 4 more years in 2020, we will essentially rewind the clock by 90 years. If we don't, the rewind won't happen so readily, but we will never go back to sleep again. Nope. They're not thinking. They've got no way to actually put us back down.

Do you see it? This is Master Sun's point. The severity of the punishment reveals the desperate exhaustion of the punisher. Back in 1776, not one prognosticator could conceivably have imagined we'd survive if we rebelled, let alone become the most powerful nation on earth.

13 little colonies, all at each other's throats and as different as could possibly be. Yet joined, we became the snake that bit the worlds' great powers, and its greatest empire fell, and then fell to begging our help to survive. We've always been a ragtag crew. We still are.

But now, 63,000,000 strong and growing, we're not tired or weak, and we're absolutely not severe. Not that we might not grow so, if we do get exhausted with their machinations. But we are mighty. They are weak. You can see it in their idiotic severity. It's obvious.

273 verses completed, 183 to go.

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