Donald Trump cannot restore us morally or reverse our cultural decline. He is, after all, a product of it. But he can secure the political and economic preconditions for such a restoration. And that is something the Left cannot and will not do. In fact, Trump has already taken great strides in the direction of restoration by his judicial appointments. And in other areas as well. But leftists, consumed with hate and blinded by it, cannot credit the man with any accomplishment. Their unrelenting negativity may well prove to be their undoing. One can hope.
Category: Politics
Joe China and the Cherokee Maiden
China is the conservatives' Russia, and Joe Biden is the conservatives' Trump. This meme will explode full force should sleepy Joe get the nod, which is possible though unlikely.
On the nod, he won't get the nod.
My money is on the Cherokee maiden.
One has to feel sorry for her.
Desperately wanting to play the identity-political game, but lacking a politically correct identity, she faked one. But the fakery of Fauxcahontas has been exposed and this will be her undoing. This, in tandem with the lunacy of her policy proposals such as 'free' health care for illegal aliens.
So she will win the the nomination, but lose the election. The Orange Man will force the 'redskin' back to the reservation.
The Moral and the Meteorological
The typical career politician confuses the two. His moral compass is a weather vane, which is to say that he has no moral compass. Joe Biden is an excellent contemporary example. Career is everything. And so he flips and he flops, adjusting his views according to the prevailing winds. He is without principle except for the 'principle' of self-advancement. How could anyone of principle reverse himself on support for the Hyde Amendment? And a 'Catholic' no less!
It puzzles you that Trump gained traction? His not being a career politician is and remains a large part of his appeal. And this despite his manifold shortcomings.
Biden leads in the polls among Democrat voters due to name recognition. But he won't get the nomination: his senility is on display and will only get worse in the coming year. My money is on the Cherokee Maiden. She will win the nomination but not the election. Trump will send her back to the reservation with her tail between her legs.
Of Hillary and Robespierre
Perhaps the magnitude of Hillary's 2016 loss is only now becoming apparent. Clinton didn't just lose the White House, she also lost the Democratic center to the radical ornaments. The diminution of Brooks, Stevens, Kristof, and even Biden are the consequence of that defeat. The radicals who once served the useful purpose of putting fear into the other side are taking center stage. It's not surprising that the French Terror began with the purge of the moderates and the urgency of virtue. As Robespierre put it, virtuous men have no choice but to employ any means necessary:
If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the patrie.
The Thing is older than one would think. And more voracious. The intellectual Old Bolsheviks thought their illustrious records would protect them from the ruffian Stalin. Bukharin, who was eventually executed by Stalin, once said: "Koba, you used to be grateful for the support of your Bolshevik comrades." "Gratitude is a dog's disease," Stalin shot back.
It won't stop at Andy Ngo. There is no safety from It.
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Politically Correct Hatred
Ilhan Omar presents a most exasperating case because on the one hand she poses as an avatar of the successful immigrant, while on the other she neurotically whines that America has failed utterly to meet her expectations when she fled a Kenyan refugee camp to enter the United States.
Her fervent anti-Israelism is fueled by an equally despicable and loud anti-Semitism. And she rarely seems to acknowledge that a foreign country welcomed her in extremis, subsidized her upbringing and education, and, quite unlike her tribalist, racist, and anti-Semitic native Somalia, relegated matters of race, gender, class, and religion to insignificant status or indeed saw them as advantages to be rewarded in electing her to Congress.
Omar herself was so desperate to gain U.S. citizenship that she may well have concocted a fraudulent marriage to her own British residing brother. If true, she may have committed several U.S. tax and immigration felonies. And that makes her ingratitude all the more unappealing—and her present apparent exemption from legitimate federal investigative scrutiny into her possibly serial illegal conduct all the more unbelievable.
So, the larger landscape of the new age of acrimony is not a sudden loss of manners, but rather a complete progressive meltdown at the election of Donald J. Trump.
[. . .]
The Antecedents of Trump Hatred
Again, by all means his opponents can, if they so wish, ridicule, caricature, and blast Trump and hope he fails. But after trying for nearly three years to destroy the president and prematurely remove him by any means necessary before a scheduled election, please do not appeal to the better angels of our nature—while deploring the new “unpresidential” behavior of Donald J. Trump for lashing out at those who sought to reduce him to a common criminal, pervert, traitor, dunce, and Satanic figure.Such invective was always characteristic of the new progressive agenda rather than specific to Donald J. Trump. After the 2008 dismantling of John McCain into a senile lecher and reducing Mitt Romney into a tax cheat, animal tormenter, high-school hazer, elevator owner, and enabler of an equestrian wife with MS, and after George W. Bush was reduced to Nazi thug worthy of death in progressive novels, op-eds and docudramas, Donald Trump sensed that half the country had had enough and he would return slur for slur—and so may the best brawler win.
After all, in 2019, this 243rd year of our illustrious nation, most Americans are not simply going to curl up in a fetal position, apologize for the greatest nation in the history of civilization, and say, “Ah, you’re right, Representatives Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib. It is an awful country after all—and always was.”
While one may always wish that the president and his critics tone down their venom and play by silk-stocking Republican Marquis of Queensberry rules, it is hard for half the country to feel much sympathy for the Left that sowed the wind and are reaping an ever growing whirlwind.
The Trump Steamroller
Conrad Black on Trump's enemies:
They are failing to make the distinction between Trump’s policies and his mannerisms. No serious person can dispute the president’s economic successes (especially the virtual elimination of unemployment and energy imports), his revival of a viable policy of nuclear nonproliferation, taking serious measures to stop mass illegal immigration, moving decisively to address dangerous disadvantages in some trading relationships, and shaping up the Western alliance from an association of freeloading beneficiaries of an American military guaranty. He is the first businessman to be president, and he engaged in a policy form of zero-based budgeting. The underlying premise for climate policy is unproved and almost certainly largely false; he scrapped it. The notion that the U.S. performed a service for international development and world harmonization by allowing the Mexicans, Chinese, and others to pick America’s pockets and export unemployment to the United States was false. He is scrapping that. The idea, cherished by Democratic politicians and Republican employers of low-skilled workers, that masses of people could swarm into the country undocumented, be exploited in the labor market, and not be counted anywhere, but still vote (Democratic) and use the welfare and education systems is an outrage. Trump is scrapping that, too. The country is tired of spending billions more every year on education to destroy freedom of expression in the university and produce ever-less-well-educated students in the unionized state school systems. He is attacking those problems, too.
It’s Guerilla Warfare
This excellent article explains why so many intelligent and decent people support Donald J. Trump. It starts like this:
When my liberal friends and colleagues begin to explain to me why they imagine President Trump is appallingly vulgar and incompetent and venal, there is always a point in which their faces go blank. It happens when I say to them, “What about the Little Sisters of the Poor?” That stops them short. They don’t know the reference.
I could also mention Brendan Eich, Barronelle Stutzman, Amy Wax, or Bruce Gilley and get the same response. Liberals who are otherwise informed and well-educated are unfamiliar with those names. They followed the Robert Mueller investigation closely, they tally Trump’s misdeeds weekly, and they are anxious about 2020. But the episodes involving the individuals I cite don’t register with them.
Of Progressive Carnivores and Cannibals
Victor Davis Hanson. Excerpt:
But revolutionary carnivores are rarely sated. Once they run out of easy hostile targets—and they have with the collapse of the Mueller hoax and all the other impeachment melodramas—they get hungry and as cannibals start to eye their own.
We have already seen that autophagy in the initial primary debates in which all the major Democratic presidential candidates—Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Robert O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—shouted out the most outlandish agendas possible in a desperate effort to ensure that no rival could possibly pose more to their left.
Poor, condemned Joe Biden renounced almost everything he once believed in and yet still was reduced metaphorically to screaming for his life on the guillotine stage that he was a revolutionary after all! Had Biden in his first debate only yelled back at his attacker, Harris, “If you really want the return of federally mandated busing of school children, then go out and run on busing and see where it gets you!”
The Main Thing is to be Polite: Or So Rod Dreher Seems to Think
As you may have gathered, I have a high opinion of Rod Dreher. A friend and I are currently working through his The Benedict Option. But the scent of Never-Trumpery is large about him. His Trump Summons Demons begins as follows:
Tonight at a rally in North Carolina, the President of the United States criticized Rep. Ilhan Omar, which he is certainly entitled to do. But listen to the crowd: “Send her back! Send her back!” Did he try to stop them? Of course not.
Where does he think this is all going to go? This is horrifying. Republican members of Congress need to stand up right now and say that this is unacceptable behavior in a president, whipping up a mob like this.
Dreher adds:
There are things worse than a president who is radically pro-abortion, opposed to religious liberty, and favoring open borders. It’s having a president who recklessly endangers the lives of people for the sake of winding up a mob.
A perspicacious comment by one 'Seoulite':
Future scholars: these sentences exemplify the "Polite Conservative" . . . . According to the Polite Conservative, someone who actively supports the annual murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings (radically pro-abortion), the punitive imposition of radical progressivism and the trouncing of freedom of conscience in the public space (religious liberty), and the actual destruction of the nation itself (open borders); such a person is preferable to someone who insults the Polite Conservative's sense of decorum and acceptable discourse.
Above all one must be polite and courteous, even as an invited guest insults you in your own house, even as uninvited guests smash the windows and clamber in, even as the house itself burns and knives are at your children's throats, you must be polite and not wind anybody up.
Could I have said it better? I doubt it. But that this intelligent person fears to appear under his real name says something about the state we are in and the nature of our enemies.
The Political Burden of Proof: Polite Version
As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I will call the political burden of proof. The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.
Of ‘Pussy’ and ‘Pusillanimous’ and Politics
A friend of mine recently maintained with a straight face that 'pusillanimous' derives from 'pussy.' As an etymological claim that is of course preposterous. But there are two questions here that we ought to distinguish.
The first is whether 'pusillanimous' has roughly the same meaning as 'pussy' when the latter is used as it is used in American slang. I'd say it does.
The second question is whether 'pusillanimous' is etymologically derivable from 'pussy.' No. It comes from the Latin pusillus (very small) + animus (mind, soul) –> L. pusillanimis –> late Middle English pusillanimous. And that reminds me of a certain pusillanimous former president.
I asked a reader about a month before the 2016 election whether the graphic above was too tasteless to post to my high-toned blog, adding, "But then these are times in which considerations of good taste and civility are easily 'trumped.'" My reader responded with a fine statement (emphasis added):
Of course it’s tasteless, but it’s funny. We should go to battle with a song in our hearts. Never had patience for the hand-wringing by the beskirted Republicans and professional “conservatives”. How could anyone be surprised by the locker room braggadocio of a man who appeared on the Howard Stern show 600 times? Trump is a deeply flawed messenger of the right message, but politics is a practical affair. He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard in this go-around. After all it’s only the very foundation of the republic at stake. So let’s have some fun while beating the drum for him.
My reader is right. Trump is all we've got. And the very foundation of the Republic is at stake. He has a dubious character, but then so does Hillary. This may not be obvious because, while Trump broadcasts his faults, she hides hers. This is part of her being a slimy, mendacious, stealth ideologue. That is part of what led to her defeat. People saw through her flip-flopping opportunism and refusal to come clean.
Given that both are sorry specimens on the character front, it comes down to principles, policies, and programs. And now, well into President Trump's first term, it is obvious that we who rolled the dice for Trump have been vindicated in spades.
‘Expressive Individualism’ is Becoming a Buzz Word
Or rather a buzz phrase. What does it mean, and where is it from?
Where [Alasdair] MacIntyre used the term emotivism to name our moral predicament, in their classic 1985 study of American society, Habits of the Heart, the sociologist Robert Bellah and his co-writers identified two powerful strands of American thought that in some ways correspond with the managerial and therapeutic types: utilitarian individualism and expressive individualism.
[. . .]
. . . American culture is arguably even more strongly influenced by the second form of individualism, which arose in opposition to the drive toward ever greater efficiency and control. “Expressive individualism holds that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.” The archetypal expressive individualist, according to Bellah, is Walt Whitman, whose most famous work, Leaves of Grass, begins with the words, “I celebrate myself.” For Whitman, in contrast to Franklin, the goal of life is not to maximize efficiency for the sake of material acquisition but rather to luxuriate in sensual and intellectual experiences, to take pleasure in one’s bodily life and sexuality and to express oneself freely, without any concern for social conventions.
The article infra vigorously attacks Trump as the president of expressive individualism. No mention is made, however, of that expressive individualist, the sexually insatiable Bill Clinton, who gave his girlfriends copies of Leaves of Grass and who, unlike Trump, went beyond 'grabbing pussy' to actual rape, or so it has been plausibly alleged. If, as Never-Trumpers believe, character is so important, how can they turn a blind eye to the defective characters of the Clintons?
Like so many such articles, it offers no plan of action, no way forward, no recipe for national renewal. The author hates Trump and mixes in some solid criticisms of the man with some scurrilous ones.
But now let's get practical. You've heard me say more than once that politics is a practical game. It is not just talk. Trump is all we conservatives have. He alone has the courage and the ability to punch back effectively against the omni-destructive Left and impede their destruction of our republic. You say that he's an expressive individualist? Suppose I agree. So what? Hillary is not? Are we not better off now than we would have been under Hillary? Obviously we are on so many fronts: abortion, religious liberty, SCOTUS, Israel, the economy, gun rights, and on and on.
What would the Never-Trumpers have us do? Retreat from politics altogether? There is no retreat from the totalitarian Left precisely because it is totalitarian. Leftists want the whole enchilada. Never-Trumpers don't seem to grasp that politics is always about better or worse. Trump may be bad, but he is better than Hillary or any electable Dem. They go on about how he lies. Many of his 'lies' are not lies at all but self-serving exaggerations or self-aggrandizing counterfactual speculations. To paraphrase: Had it not been been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote too! A self-serving, unverifiable, braggadocious, counterfactual conditional. But because counterfactually conditional, not a lie. A lie is a deliberate misrepresentation of an actual state of affairs. One cannot lie about a merely possible state of affairs. And when the Orange Man does lie, his lies tend to be harmless unlike the egregiously destructive lies of the Clintons, Obama, and recently Nancy Pelosi who lied brazenly and destructively when she said that the invasion of illegals from the south is a "manufactured crisis."
Members of the "French resistance" will say, "What doth it profit a man to win the culture but suffer the loss of his soul by supporting Trump?" My answer: I don't endorse Trump the man and all of his sybaritic and self-aggrandizing ways; I support his beneficial policies and programs.
The central stupidity of the Never-Trumpers is that they do not grasp that what matters primarily are policies and programs and judicial appointments that will be in effect long after a given president is out of office, not the personal life and shortcomings of the person who serves a term or two.
americamagazine.org
Flip-Floppin’ Joe
The inner compass of the professional politician is a weather vane. The political winds having shifted, no one should be shocked that Joe Biden is now against what he was for, the Hyde Amendment.
Asymmetrical Polarization: Which Side Is Mainly Responsible?
Political polarization is said to be asymmetrical when one of the political poles bears more responsibility than the other for exacerbating the polarization. But given the fact of polarization, it comes as no surprise that the Left blames the Right and the Right the Left. We all seem to agree that polarization is not good, but we disagree as to who the main culprit is.
We are polarized over polarization!
As a conservative, it is blindingly evident to me that the Left bears the lion's share of the blame. Leftists have moved much farther to the Left than rightists to the Right. But leftists don't agree, and being the recalcitrant bunch that they are, one cannot reasonably hope to change their minds. But you never know, and in any case the following may help to buck up my fellow conservatives and supply them with ammo for the ongoing war.
Here are some issues on which leftists (Democrats in U. S. politics) have gone far to the Left while conservatives (Most Republicans in U.S. politics) have maintained moderate positions.
Immigration. The Republican position is moderate: curtail illegal immigration, but allow legal immigration. The Democrat position is extreme: allow wide-open immigration of any and all. Make no distinction between legal and illegal immigration. Abolish ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). The extremism goes as far as the Orwellian absurdity that one can have border security without border barriers. Oppose President Trump at every turn, even though any reasonable person can see that construction of a border wall is necessary, although not sufficient, to stem the tide of incoming illegals. And on top of it all, lie brazenly as Speaker Nancy Pelosi has done that the border crisis is a "manufactured crisis."
Voting. Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats are advocating lowering the voting age to 16. Others want to extend the franchise to felons, allowing those who cannot properly order their own lives to have a say in the proper ordering of society. Still others wish to permit illegal aliens to vote. The extremism of this is evident.
U.S. Constitution. Prominent Democrats advocate the abolition of the Electoral College and changing the number of seats on the Supreme Court.
And so it goes. Here are three others that you can work out for yourself.
Capital Punishment.
Abortion and Infanticide.
Free Speech.
Religious Liberty and David Brooks
A re-run from 29 October 2016. I lay into the insipid David Brooks.
…………..
The Op-Ed pages of The New York Times are plenty poor to be sure, but Ross Douthat and David Brooks are sometimes worth reading. But the following from Brooks (28 October 2016) is singularly boneheaded although the opening sentence is exactly right:
The very essence of conservatism is the belief that politics is a limited activity, and that the most important realms are prepolitical: conscience, faith, culture, family and community. But recently conservatism has become more the talking arm of the Republican Party. Among social conservatives, for example, faith sometimes seems to come in second behind politics, Scripture behind voting guides. Today, most white evangelicals are willing to put aside the Christian virtues of humility, charity and grace for the sake of a Trump political victory.
Come on, man. Don't be stupid. The Left is out to suppress religious liberty. This didn't start yesterday. You yourself mention conscience, but you must be aware that bakers and florists have been forced by the state to violate their consciences by catering homosexual 'marriage' ceremonies. Is that a legitimate use of state power? And if the wielders of state power can get away with that outrage, where will they stop? Plenty of other examples can be adduced, e.g., the Obama administration's assault on the Little Sisters of the Poor.
The reason evangelicals and other Christians support Trump is that they know what that destructive and deeply mendacious stealth ideologue Hillary will do when she gets power. They support Trump not because they think the Gotham sybarite lives the Christian life, but despite his not living it. They understand that ideas and policies trump character issues especially when Trump's opponent is even worse on the character plane. What's worse: compromising national security, using high public office to enrich oneself, and then endlessly lying about it all, or forcing oneself on a handful of women?
The practice of the Christian virtues and the living of the Christian life require freedom of religion. Our freedoms are under vicious assault by leftists like Hillary. This is why Trump garners the support of Christians.
The threat from the Left is very real indeed. See here and read the chilling remarks of Martin Castro of the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights. Given Castro's comments the name of the commission counts as Orwellian.
ADDENDUM (6/7/19) We who rolled the dice for Trump have been vindicated in spades. He has kept his promises. The cause of religious liberty is much better off than it was under Obama, and much much better off that it would have been under Hillary.