Category: Politics

No Fool Like an Old Fool

Ed is an 80-year-old neighbor of mine. We've been casual acquaintances for years, running into each other on the trails, exchanging greetings and snatches of conversation. The other day politics came up for the first time, and to my surprise I learned that Ed, originally a Republican, had become an Independent, and was now a Democrat. I said, perhaps with a bit of surprise, "How can you support the Dems, given their current leadership?"

Ed, the quintessentially nice guy, said, "Let's stay friends, Bill, and avoid politics." I agreed that this was the wisest course, and we parted amicably. But my opinion of old Ed had dropped, and I resolved to limit my contact with him, limited as it already was. I knew there was no reaching him.

What explains the utter political stupidity of otherwise good, intelligent, and basically conservative people? Doesn't Ed understand what is in his and his family's interest?

One factor is mindless Trump hatred. A second is that old people live in the past and simply cannot see what is happening. A third is a life too much absorbed in the private and the quotidian. Luckily, old Ed probably won't be around to wake up to the day when the private life is no more.

No fool like an old fool.

Anthony Flood Reviews David Horowitz, Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win

An Amazon review by our long-time correspondent. I award it the plenary MavPhil endorsement.  Tony coins a brilliancy, 'academedia complex.'  I would add a qualifier, 'academented.' 

Anthony Flood
5.0 out of 5 stars The Blitzkrieg the Berserkers Have Coming to Them

Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2020

 
“The virus and its consequences will eventually be resolved. Far more ominous for the future of our country is the war described in the pages of this book.”

Thus David Horowitz, in a note penned as this book went to press, anticipated this question: how will Trump meet the challenge of the virus-predicated lockdown, now aggravated by the Left’s violent (and lockdown-undermining) assault on America’s institutions?

A few days after Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win was published, the answer came: millions of jobs were created in May 2020, more than any analyst predicted. (They predicted job losses.) That would have been impossible had the economy’s fundamentals not been as sound as they were in early March—which they wouldn’t have been had Trump not been at the helm of state for the preceding three Marches.

Following up his best-selling Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America, Horowitz surveys the landscape of Trump’s vindication, recording the genuine (i.e., anti-“progressive”) progress America has made in the face of past onslaughts and those that threaten us a season away from the general election.

For divide, sabotage, resist is the battle plan of the anti-American contingent we call the Left. Truth means nothing to them; power, everything. They align with every movement that holds out the promise of “transforming” America: environmentalism, Islam, solicitude for criminals (homegrown or foreign trespassers).

The English word “blitz” contracts the German Blitzkrieg, “lightning war,” which entered our vocabulary during the Second World War. It makes for a snappier book title, but the reference to war should not be lost, given Horowitz’s own words.

“Traditionally [Horowitz notes] Democrats have approached politics as a form of war conducted by other means, while Republicans have entered the political arena as pragmatists and accountants. But the siege of Donald Trump has begun to create a new Republican Party, passionate and combative in defense of a leader they believe has stood up for them, and—equally important—who exceeds them in his appetite for combat. ‘Populism’ is the term political observers have drawn on to describe this phenomenon. The energy populism creates adds up to the blitz that is described in this book, and that has enabled him to overpower his opposition.”

By itself, of course, the German Blitz means “lightning,” suggesting the speed of the response. But speed is not to the point: Trump’s counterpunching is, and that’s what Horowitz shines a Klieg light on.

For three years, Trump’s supporters have put up with what Blitz chronicles: the vicious innuendos against, potty-mouthed slanders of, and outright lies about the man they put in the White House. Feigning fear he wouldn’t accept the results of the 2016 election, Leftists in the academedia complex have demonstrated repeatedly that they wouldn’t and didn’t.

There’s nothing so vile they won’t impute to him, his family, and those who work for him. Modeling a derangement syndrome not yet listed in the Physicians’ Desk Reference, Democrats project onto him the defects they major in. Trump has survived a battery of personal attacks that would have felled lesser men. It’s useful to have its details arrayed compactly in one place. Even those familiar with them need to be reminded of them.

Passing in review are the stages of the coup that began even before its object materialized: from its inception in the counterintelligence effort against Trump and his campaign (which only Obama’s White House could have authorized), with every vendor of mainstream opinion cheering it on; the rival-financed foreign intelligence, even as foreign collusion was imputed to him; the predicateless FISA “investigations”; to the hysterical cries of “illegitimacy” and the importuning of electors to be faithless; the Mueller “investigation,” whose “investigators” knew they had no foundation; through the Ukrainian phone call fiasco, to the impeachment farce that distracted Washington from the Beijing-spawned and -spread virus that became a global pandemic.

Horowitz reminds readers of the reputation Trump enjoyed long before he announced his candidacy: the businessman who kept an eye on how the world in which he made his fortune works, who never hesitated to voice his disgust with the way the New York’s liberal establishment (of which he had been arguably a member in good standing) ran his city and country (that is, into the ground). The promoter (and terminator) of a string of apprentices was a pop icon, a favorite of the very people who now vilify him.

Given his record of success, however, especially among African Americans—criminal justice reform (now undoing the mass-incarcerating effects of the legislation Joe Biden co-wrote), the First Step Act, Opportunity Zones, record low unemployment, and so on—the Black column holding up the edifice of vilification is cracking. If it crumbles, costing the Democrats another ten percent of the Black vote, it’s over for them. (For details, see my Amazon review of Robinson and Eberle’s Coming Home: How Black Americans Will Re-Elect Trump.) No wonder the Left is going berserk on all platforms, all issues, throwing everything against the wall to see what, if anything will stick. So far, nothing has.

For those who like numbered lists, Horowitz appends two. The first is “The Nine Biggest Dangers to America from the Anti-Trump Left”: Resistance; Identity Politics; Open Borders; Green Communism; Communist Health Care; Support for Criminals and Contempt for the Law; Hostility to Religious Liberty and the First Amendment; Support for America’s Enemies; and Attack on America’s Heritage.

The second: “The Top Ten Lies the Democrats Have Told You.” Each charge is reversible, and Horowitz reverses them all, concisely and unanswerably: Republicans Are Racists; Democrats Care About Minorities; Republicans Betrayed the Constitution; Democrats Care About Minorities; Slavery and Racism Are America’s True Heritage; The Iran Deal Prevented Iran from Getting Nuclear Weapons; Donald Trump Colluded with the Russians; Republicans Are Religious Bigots; The “Green New Deal” Is Scandinavian Socialism; Israel Occupies Palestine; Single-Payer Health Care Is a Human Right. Even Trumpistas who think they know how to refute these canards will benefit from Horowitz’s refresher course. (For instance, this reviewer.)

“From the beginning of the Resistance to Trump,” as Horowitz concludes Blitz, “Democrat attacks on the president have been attac
ks on America’s foundations: resistance to the results of a fair and free election; abetting a deep state coup to undermine the presidency, and the pursuit of a transparently sham impeachment. All this added up to a campaign of baseless slanders against the nation’s commander-in-chief, worthy of America’s most determined enemies. Collectively these constitute the greatest crime against America committed by its own citizens since the Civil War.”

This November Americans will have an opportunity to repel those attacks. Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win provides an armamentarium for the counterattack.

David French, Donald Trump, Christianity, and Politics

David French maintains that Christians cannot, if they are to remain true to Christian teachings, support Donald Trump:

The proper way for Christians to engage in politics is a rich subject . . . but there are some rather simple foundational principles that apply before the questions get complex. For example, all but a tiny few believers would agree that a Christian should not violate the Ten Commandments or any other clear, biblical command while pursuing or exercising political power.

But of course we see such behavior all the time from hardcore Christian Trump supporters. They’ll echo Trump’s lies. They’ll defend Trump’s lies. They’ll adopt many of his same rhetorical tactics, including engaging in mocking and insulting behavior as a matter of course.

Farther down:

I fully recognize what I’m saying. I fully recognize that refusing to hire a hater and refusing to hire a liar carries costs. If we see politics through worldly eyes, it makes no sense at all. Why would you adopt moral standards that put you at a disadvantage in an existential political struggle? If we don’t stand by Trump we will lose, and losing is unacceptable. (Emphasis added.)

French has just touched upon the deepest issue in this debate.  He is right that it makes no sense for conservative Christians not to support Trump if politics is seen through worldly eyes. The question, however, is whether one can avoid doing so. Can one see politics and pursue it through unworldly eyes?  Can one participate in politics at any level, and especially at the higher levels, while adhering strictly and unwaveringly to Christian principles and precepts and while practicing Christian virtues?  Can one combine contemptus mundi with political action?

I don't believe that this is possible.

Christian precepts such as "Turn the other cheek" and "Welcome the stranger" make sense and are salutary only within communities of the like-minded and morally decent; they make no sense and are positively harmful in the public sphere, and, a fortiori, in the international sphere.  The monastery is not the wide world.  What is conducive unto salvation in the former will get you killed in the latter.  And we know what totalitarians, whether Communists or Islamists, do when they get power: they destroy the churches, synagogues, monasteries, ashrams, and zendos. And with them are destroyed the means of transmitting the dharma, the kerygma, the law and the prophets.  

An important but troubling thought is conveyed in a recent NYT op-ed (emphasis added):

Machiavelli teaches that in a world where so many are not good, you must learn to be able to not be good. The virtues taught in our secular and religious schools are incompatible with the virtues one must practice to safeguard those same institutions. The power of the lion and the cleverness of the fox: These are the qualities a leader must harness to preserve the republic.

The problem referenced in the bolded sentence is very serious but may have no solution.  That's the aporetician in me speaking. 

The problem as I see it is that (i) the pacific virtues the practice of which makes life worth living within families, between friends, and in such institutions of civil society as churches and fraternal organizations  are essentially private and cannot be extended outward as if we are all brothers and sisters belonging to a global community.  Talk of  global community is blather.  The institutions of civil society can survive and flourish only if protected by warriors and statesmen whose virtues are of the manly and martial, not of the womanish and pacific, sort. And yet (ii) if no  extension beyond the private of the pacific virtues is possible. then humanity would seem to be doomed  in an age of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.  Besides, it is unsatisfactory that there be two moralities, one private, the other public.

I say that we need to face the problem honestly.

Consider the Christian virtues preached by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.  They include humility, meekness, love of righteousness, mercy, purity of heart, love of peace and of reconciliation.  Everyone who must live uncloistered in the world understands that these pacific and essentially womanish virtues have but limited application there.  Indeed, their practice can get you killed. (I am not using 'womanish' as a derogatory qualifier.)

Si vis pacem . . .You may love peace, but unless you are prepared to make war upon your enemies and show them no mercy, you may not be long for this world.  Turning the other cheek makes sense within a loving family, but no sense in the wider world.  (Would the Pope turn the other cheek if the Vatican came under attack by Muslim terrorists or would he call upon the armed might of the Italian state?)  My point is perfectly obvious in the case of states: they are in the state (condition) of nature with respect to each other. Each state secures by blood and iron a civilized space within which art and music and science and scholarship can flourish and wherein, ideally, blood does not flow; but these states and their civilizations battle each other in the state (condition) of nature red in tooth and claw.  Talk of world government or United Nations is globalist blather that hides the will to power of those who would seize control of the world government. United under which umbrella of values and principles and presuppositions?

What values do we share with the Muslim world? Do they accept the Enlightenment values enshrined in our founding documents? Obviously not.  Christianity has civilized us to some extent. Has Islam civilized them? Their penology is barbaric as is their attitude toward other cultures and religions. 

The Allies would not have been long for this world had they not been merciless in their treatment of the Axis Powers.  

Israel would have ceased to exist long ago had Israelis not been ruthless in their dealing with Muslim terrorists bent on her destruction.

This is also true of individuals once they move beyond their families and friends and genuine communities and sally forth into the wider world. 

The problem is well understood by Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin 1968, p. 245):

     The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all
     earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular
     — be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian — have been
     frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended
     protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of
     the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the
     wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned
     against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who
     for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good
     for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for
     others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth
     interests of the community.) [Arendt cites the Nicomachean Ethics,
     Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]

There is a tension  between man qua philosopher/Christian and man qua citizen.  As a philosopher raised in Christianity, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic "Better to suffer wrong than to do it" and the Christian  "Resist not the evildoer." But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare.

This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to  influence public opinion, people like Catholic bishops many of whom are woefully ignorant of the simple points Arendt makes in the passage quoted. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.

What is applicable to me in the singular, as this existing individual concerned with the welfare of his immortal soul over that of his  perishable body, is not applicable to me as citizen. As a citizen, I   cannot "welcome the stranger" who violates the laws of my country, a stranger who may be a terrorist or a drug smuggler or a human trafficker or a carrier of a deadly disease or a person who has no respect for the traditions of the country he invades; I cannot aid and abet his law breaking. I must be concerned with public order.  This order is among  the very conditions that make the philosophical and Christian life possible in the first place. If I were to aid and abet the stranger's law breaking, I would not be "rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" as the New Testament enjoins us to do.

Indeed, the Caesar verse provides a scriptural basis for Church-State separation and indirectly exposes the fallacy of the Catholic bishops  and others who confuse private and public morality. 

David French is such a one.

Bernie the Buffoon’s Borscht Belt Bushwa

We will hear it no more. His is the last spasm of state-side socialism that speaks its name plain. The coming brew will be of the stealth-ideological variety. Comrade Bernie has bowed out to make way for Biden the Senile. 

Long ago, my friends, in the fabulous and far-off days of Camelot and for some time thereafter, everyone called it the Democratic Party, and it was no joke. It has now petered out into the precincts of left-wing lunacy achieving what is perhaps the absolute nadir of political self-enstupidation.   The Democrats have become Dementocrats. The Ragin' Cajun must be gnashing his teeth down in the bayou while in the enclaves of the sane there is much jubilation, but also much speculation as to what the Dementocrat operatives have up their sleeves.

Lay in your supply of popcorn before the hoarders get it.

The really fascinating case, however, is Elizabeth Warren, who had an excellent shot at the nomination before she committed suicide by intersectionality as I observe in Did Sexism Bring Elizabeth Warren Down?

 

Nancy Pelosi and other Corona Meltdowns

Victor Davis Hanson lays into Nancy Pelosi with severity, but with justice:

Nancy Pelosi: Gone are the mythologies that Nancy Pelosi was a pragmatic liberal voice of reason among the otherwise polarizing American Left, honed after years of paying her dues to the Democratic Party, as the mother of five dutifully ascended the party’s cursus honorum.

It does not matter whether her political and ethical decline was a result of her deep pathological hatred of Donald Trump. Who cares that her paranoia arose over the so-called “Squad” that might align with socialist Bernie Sanders to mesmerize Democrats to march over the cliff into McGovern-like oblivion? All concede that very few octogenarians have the stamina and clarity to put in the 16-hour work-days and transcontinental travel required by a Speaker of the House.

Instead, all that matters is that for a nation in extremis she is now puerile, even unhinged—and increasingly dangerous.

Continue reading “Nancy Pelosi and other Corona Meltdowns”

Anthony Flood Reviews David Horowitz, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America

Excerpts:

Cultural Marxism is but the latest form of the cultural cancer now metastasizing throughout the body politic. (Marxism-Leninism was only the deadliest form, not the first, but even today old-fashioned Communism does not lack adherents.) That the Democratic Party is now this malignancy’s host is the grim, but well-documented, conclusion of Horowitz’s long literary career.

In Dark Agenda’s last chapter, Horowitz puts forward the metaphor of civil war to define what might be in front of us. It’s a possible outcome of the divisions that beset us and which we’re all supposed to want to “heal.” One prosecutes a war, however, not to heal one’s enemies, but rather to incapacitate them.

For Americans only the Age of Lincoln offers the closest comparison to our parlous state. But shall Christians and their Jewish allies (agnostic and observant alike) prepare for military conflict and await—or initiate—our Fort Sumter? Is it not quixotic to put all our eggs in the electoral consensus-building basket? Are we restricted to chronicling our enemies’ crimes, as Horowitz has masterfully done in dozens of popular and scholarly tomes? Urgency calls forth a response, but if Horowitz has an idea of how Americans might defeat the Left’s dark agenda, he doesn’t share it here. No suggested plan of action follows the note of urgency he sounds.

In the third paragraph, Flood touches upon a point that troubles me as well. We have reams of incisive conservative commentary on what the Left has wrought but precious little by way of concrete proposals for ameliorative action by individuals. In  fairness to Horowitz, however, it needs noting that in the concluding chapters of Big Agenda (Humanix 2017), he lists various things the Republican party and President Trump can do. So he does outline a plan of action, and he is appropriately combative:

The movement galvanized by Trump can stop the progressive juggernaut and change the American future, but only if it emulates the strategy of the campaign: Be on the offense; take no prisoners; stay on the attack. To stop the Democrats and their societal transformation, Republicans must adhere to a strategy that begins with a punch in the mouth. That punch must pack an emotional wallop large enough to throw them off balance and neutralize their assaults. It must be framed as a moral indictment that stigmatizes them in the way their attacks stigmatize Republicans. It must expose them for their hypocrisy. It must hold them accountable for the divisions they sow and the suffering they cause. (Big Agenda, Humanix, 2017, p. 142)

Still and all, I would like to see a list of what individuals can do beyond voting and writing letters and blog posts.  Does Tony Flood have any suggestions?  I suppose I myself should put up or shut up while well aware of the dangers of saying anything that might incite violence among the unhinged. (But violence is being done every day by leftists to the unborn and to our Constitutional rights and sacred American values). So here are three suggestions, just to keep this post short. I invite Tony to e-mail me with any thoughts he may have.

  • Buy guns and learn how to use them. The idea here is deterrence and not aggression. A well-armed populace is a mighty check against both the criminal element that leftists work to empower, and against leftists themselves and their agents. We can demoralize them without firing a shot. Call it winning through intimidation. They will never respect us, but they can be brought to fear us. (An analysis of respect might show that fear is is a large part of it.) Grandmaster Nimzowitsch's remark is apropos: "The threat is stronger than the execution."  2A is concrete back-up for 1A and all the rest of our rights. Leftists know this. This explains the mindlessness and mendacity of their confiscatory assault on our Second Amendment rights.  
  • Vote with your feet and your wallet.  Leave blue localities and let them languish in the feculence their policies have birthed, and bring your money and tax dollars to healthy places. 
  • Defund the Left. For example, refuse to support your leftist alma mater, to use a border-line pleonastic expression.      

Flood's review concludes:

Of course, Dark Agenda is no more an essay on spirituality than on political philosophy. The case it makes, however, cries out for at least a hint of the response that its author believes will meet this greatest of all challenges. If there’s no political way to overcome the darkness, only the spiritual route is left.

Yet David Horowitz leaves this tension unresolved. For him, the Christian Scriptures are not (as far as I know) a source of divinely revealed truth; Christianity is but the historically contingent arrangement that works for people who happen to love instead of hate Western civilization; things don’t go any deeper than that. Am I wrong about him?

Like all human arrangements, however, Western Civ will eventually pass away into the void out of which all things, including humans, allegedly emerged . . . unless the Christian worldview is overarchingly true. Maybe Horowitz has one more book in him in which he can address this question. But I’d prefer to be shown that something in his vast literary oeuvre already has.

Having read more Horowitz than Tony has, I believe he is right in the second paragraph lately quoted.

And I am sympathetic with the third paragraph, though not with Flood's enthusiasm for Van Til. See the entries in my Van Til and Presuppositionalism category. 

Finally, I have a deep-going analytic post on Horowitz' agnosticism as he presents it in Dark Agenda. See Five Grades of Agnosticism.  

Was Jesus a Socialist?

No way! He actually fed people.

…………………..

I came to this witticism via Karl White who got it from someone unnamed.  It is too good not to repeat and propagate.  So do your bit and spread it around.

You can't battle the Left effectively with just one weapon: the whole arsenal has to be brought to bear.  Sweet reason has its uses with some, and the hard fist of unreason with others. Mockery and derision can be effective. And throw in some contumely for good measure.

Don't forget: it's a war. If they win, we lose. They never rest, and so we must be ever-vigilant. Right now the bastards are doing their best to deploy the Chinese virus against Trump and his supporters.  Their nefarious actions are legion. One is the exploitation of the crisis to empty the prisons. They had that goal all along; now they can use the Chinese virus as an excuse.  Another is to use the crisis to close down the gun stores.  

Typically leftist: take the side of the criminal element, and violate the rights of the law-abiding. There is nothing progressive about leftists: an appropriate appellation is 'transgressive.' Open the borders; empty the prisons; violate the Constitutional rights of citizens.

Anyone who identifies as liberal, left, progressive, Democrat must be met with the (defeasible) presumption of scumbaggery: they are to be presumed morally obtuse  and intellectually self-enstupidated until they prove otherwise.  They bear the onus probandi.

But the presumption is defeasible. Allow those under scrutiny the opportunity to defeat it. Be tough, but fair.

I call this the political burden of proof.  My previous formulations of it have been too polite.

Break Contact with Political Opponents?

Should one break off contact with those whose social and political views one finds abhorrent?  

Let me mention one bad reason for not breaking off contact.  The bad reason is that by not breaking off contact one can have 'conversations' that will lead to amicable agreements and mutual understanding. This bad reason is based on the false assumption that there is still common ground on which to hold these 'conversations.'  I say we need fewer 'conversations' and more voluntary separation.  In marriage as in politics, the bitter tensions born of irreconcilable differences are relieved by divorce, not by attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable.  

Let's consider some examples.  In each of these cases it is difficult to see what common ground the parties to the dispute occupy.  Lack of common ground makes interaction pointless, time-wasting, and disruptive of peace of mind.  The less common ground, the stronger the reasons for the political equivalent of divorce, or at least mitigation of contact.

1. Suppose you hold the utterly abhorrent view that it is a justifiable use of state power to force a florist or a caterer to violate his conscience by providing services at, say, a same-sex 'marriage' ceremony.  

2. Or you hold the appalling and ridiculous view that demanding photo ID at polling places disenfranchises those would-be voters who lack such ID.

3. Or you refuse to admit a distinction between legal and illegal immigration.

4. Or you maintain the absurd thesis that global warming is the greatest threat to humanity at the present time. (Obama)

5. Or you advance the crack-brained  notion that the cases of Trayvon Martin and Emmet Till are comparable in all relevant respects.

6. Or, showing utter contempt for facts, you insist that Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri was an 'unarmed black teenager'  shot down like a dog in cold blood without justification of any sort by the racist cop, Darren Wilson.

7. Or you compare Ferguson and Baltimore as if they are relevantly similar. (Hillary Clinton)

8. Or you mendaciously elide distinctions crucial in the gun debate such as that between semi-auto and full-auto. (Dianne Feinstein)

9.  Or you systematically deploy double standards.  President Obama, for example,  refuses to use 'Islamic' in connection with the Islamic State or 'Muslim' in connection with Muslim terrorists.  But he has no problem with pinning the deeds of crusaders and inquisitors on Christians.

10. Or you mendaciously engage in self-serving anachronism, for example, comparing  current Muslim atrocities with Christian ones long in the past.

11. Or you routinely slander your opponents with such epithets as 'racist,' 'sexist,' 'xenophobic,' etc.

12.  Or you make up words whose sole purpose is to serve as semantic bludgeons and cast doubt on the sanity of your opponents.  You know full well that a phobia is an irrational fear, but you insist on labeling those who oppose homosexual practices as 'phobic' when you know that their opposition is in most cases rationally grounded and not based in fear, let alone irrational fear.

13. Or you bandy the neologism 'Islamophobia' as a semantic bludgeon when it is plain that fear of radical Islam is entirely rational. In general, you engage in linguistic mischief whenever it serves your agenda thereby showing contempt for the languages you mutilate.

14. Or you take the side of underdogs qua underdogs without giving any thought as to whether or not these underdogs are in any measure responsible for their status or their misery by their crimes.  You apparently think that weakness justifies.

15. Or you label abortion a 'reproductive right' or a 'women's health issue' thus begging the question of its moral acceptability.

16. Or you think biological males should be allowed to compete against biological females in sporting events.

And on, and on, though the entire litany of leftist lunacies. 

Why We Defend Donald Trump

Replying to a young friend who loathes the man, Malcolm Pollack explains why so many of us stand with President Trump despite his manifold and manifest faults:

I make no case that Donald Trump is any kind of a saint. He is enormously vain (as all presidents are, with the possible exception of Calvin Coolidge), he lacks dignity and gravitas, he calls people childish names, he can be vulgar (though surely no more so than LBJ, Clinton, and a host of others), he is a philanderer (though of course JFK and Clinton put him to shame in that department, with the latter likely being guilty of actual rape). He is, as you say, not one to show much in the way of humility (though of course he is a dwarf in that regard compared to his immediate predecessor, whom Mike Bloomberg — Mike Bloomberg! — called “the most arrogant man he’d ever met”).

He is, however, the duly elected president of the United States, elevated to office by a vast segment of the traditional American nation who rightly have felt despised and marginalized for a long time now by their globalist, “progressive” overlords — a scornful and condescending secular priesthood who occupy, by powerful means of enforcement, the commanding heights of media, academia, popular culture, and the enormous edifice of the unelected, administrative state. Donald Trump was seen by these “Deplorables” — and rightly so — as their last hope against a leftist juggernaut that sought to trample into dust all of the founding norms and traditions of the American nation, to throw open the borders, to distend and distort the Constitution into gelatinous goo, and to crush all resistance by a combination of judicial activism, executive fiat and suffocating social ostracism.

Trump’s voters understood that the First and Second Amendments, those great bulwarks of liberty, were under increasingly withering assault; they had to look no further than Canada, Britain, and Europe — where the people are forcibly disarmed, and criticism of government policy is now enough to land you in jail — to see what lay ahead if the eight -year catastrophe of the Obama administration were to be repeated by re-installing those despicable grifters the Clintons. They saw in Donald Trump, for all of his obvious flaws (and yes, they are just as obvious to me as they are to you), a man who genuinely loved the free and self-confident America of his youth, who saw the nation’s long story, though of course tainted by sin and error (as all national stories are), as a story of the triumph of the human spirit, guided by a set of transcendent principles rooted in the natural, God-given dignity of every human being, and given form by a Constitution unlike any ever seen in history: the product of the coming together at a unique moment in the development of mankind by men of genius (compared to whom, by the way, our current crop of “statesmen”, including both Trump and his predecessors, are intellectual gnats).

Donald Trump clearly, if only intuitively, understood the existential horror of this century-long acceleration of consolidating, totalizing statism, the effect of which is to reduce men to children, and to crush from existence the essential mediating layer of “civil society” — the great web of voluntary and independent association that forms the sinews and ligaments of healthy, organic societies — replacing it with an atomizing, vertical order in which every man and woman depends first and foremost upon the great State above, from which all blessings — and all guidance — must flow.

The conservative commentariat does not pay sufficient attention to the Left's assault on civil society. So I am pleased that Mr Pollack has reminded us of this "great web of voluntary and independent association" that stands between the naked individual and Leviathan.  

For more on civil society see my

Subsidiarity as Bulwark Against the Left's Assault on Civil Society

and 

Obama's Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society

Did Sexism Bring Elizabeth Warren Down?

That's what she thinks, but she is fooling herself. Her extremism brought her down. 'Progressive' politics is like a progressive disease: it just gets worse and worse as leftists compete to see who can go farthest Left.  But while the leaders of the Democrat Party are sick with the disease and barking mad, most rank-and-file Dems retain their grip on common sense. And so they gave Warren the boot.  This despite the great support she received from the distaff contingent.

The over-ambitious 'Cherokee'  committed suicide by political correctness. Good riddance!  The hyperactive little hustler was a fraud on the personal level who gamed the Affirmative Action system to promote herself, and her ideas were insane: 'free' health care for illegal aliens; inventing new forms of  'racism' including health-care 'racism,' environmental 'racism,' and a couple of others; choosing a trans-gendered child to advise on selection of a Secretary of Education.  The last bit of lunacy amounted to political suicide by intersectionality, as Tucker Carlson remarked. If she had exercised some restraint, she, and not the senile Biden, would be going up against Trump, and the Dems would have a shot at beating him.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren said that funds being used to construct the president’s border wall with Mexico should be redirected to help contain coronavirus, a quickly spreading epidemic with origins in China.

“I’m going to be introducing a plan tomorrow to take every dime that the president is now taking to spend on his racist wall at the southern border and divert it to the coronavirus,” the candidate said during a CNN town hall on Wednesday evening. (Rolling Stone, 27 February 2020)

Leftists have painted themselves into a corner. They think, absurdly, that borders are 'racist.' But even they realize, despite their willful self-enstupidation, that borders are needed for disease control.  The solution, however, escapes them: jettison the absurd belief that borders are 'racist.'

They can't see their way out because the race card is all they've got and because of their blind hatred for Donald Trump. What a pathetic bunch of losers!

Grumpy Old Men

Charles Hurt:

Here you have two men with 155 years of combined accumulated wisdom here on planet Earth. Together, they have served in Washington a combined 76 years. And they are squabbling like a couple of schoolchildren about irrelevant nonsense on the playground.

The Democrat Party has come to this? Vote for either of these clowns and you beclown yourself.  Sleepy Joe, on the nod, appears to be poised to get the nod. But be prepared for surprises.

Howler of the Day and a Warren Post-Mortem

"Warren gets particularly exorcised in the more recent book when talking about President Donald Trump." 

One could only hope for the exorcism of the hysterical intersectional demons in the fake Indian.

It is a good post-mortem, though, of a very capable woman whose lust for power drove her to suicide by political correctness. 

One gets the sense that Bernie Sanders doesn’t know any better. He’s not thoughtful enough to understand how much he overstates government’s ability, disciplined enough to lay out the costs of his grand proposals, or self-reflective enough to catch the irony of his own capitalistic practices. But based on her first book, it is patently clear that ElizabethWarren does understand. And that’s probably more troubling. Ignorance with self-righteousness is one thing. Knowing better and then arguing otherwise is a different sort of evil.

So what happened to Warren? My best guess—and, I think, the most gracious interpretation of her hypocritical flips—is that “the fight” became everything. And so principles, wisdom, and insight became the casualties. The ends slowly began to justify the means. Maybe losing the “bankruptcy war” to Hillary and the lobbyists embittered her. Or maybe “subsidizing the wrong people”—through the Troubled Asset Relief Program and banks that were “too big to fail”—sent her over the edge. In any case, the cause made it acceptable to strive for power.

Joe Biden

The man is stupid, senile, and utterly bereft of principles, except for the 'principle' of self-promotion. (Good Catholic that he is, he reversed himself on the Hyde Amendment!)  Kevin Williamson adds 'scoundrel' to the list of descriptors:

One of the worst features of our political life is the ugly and dishonest fights we have over Supreme Court nominations — a habit that can be laid squarely at the feet of Joe Biden, who along with Ted Kennedy, that pillar of human decency, organized one of the worst smear campaigns in modern American political history against Robert Bork, whose great crime against humanity was taking the “extremist” position that the Constitution actually says what it says rather than what anybody with power wishes it would say at any given moment, and that the way to amend the Constitution is to amend the Constitution rather than having nine wizards in black robes pull previously undiscovered constitutional mandates out of the penumbras upon which they sit all day. Don’t like the way Merrick Garland was treated? Mitch McConnell didn’t start that game — he is just better at it than his contemporary Democratic colleagues are. For lying partisan viciousness in the modern mode, Joe Biden is your man.

He is a liar, a corruptor of institutions, and a grifter of the first order.