Pressure Cookers Need Safety Valves

When I was a kid, we lived for a while in Boise, Idaho. At 2700 feet, water boils at about 207 degrees instead of 212, so cooking took longer. My mother bought a pressure cooker to speed things up.

Like all pressure cookers, it had a safety valve to release excess pressure before the gasket let go and superheated vegetables sprayed everyone in the room. This was required by law as well as common sense.

But the same principle holds elsewhere. Politics needs a safety valve as well, to relieve popular discontent before a violent explosion occurs. Common sense tells us this, which excludes a large fraction of the political class, whose brains overflow with dogma but are empty of common sense.

French courts just banned popular conservative candidate Marine Le Pen from running for president. This leaves French conservatives with nowhere to go, except violence. And French history teaches us that street violence is not an infrequent event.

And what if Trump had been removed from the ballot by leftist courts or an assassin’s bullet? Do progressives really believe that conservatives, who own most of the guns in this country, would have meekly laid their necks on the chopping block, like so many chickens? As the Brits say, not bloody likely, in both senses of the word “bloody.”

Remember my mother’s pressure cooker? One day she was inattentive, and a bunch of scalding hot peas wound up on the ceiling instead of people’s faces. My  advice: Let Le Pen run, and let Trump live. It beats the alternative. By far.