Category: Politics

And yet another from the pen of the prolific Victor Davis Hanson.

It is amazing how much better conservative commentary is to the stuff churned out by the febrile Left.

And cocky to boot. George Neumayr on Peter Strzok:

The cockiness of Strzok at Thursday’s hearing is a reflection of the immunity that ruling-class mandarins enjoy in liberal Washington. He was testifying from the safety of the deep state and thus knew that he could lie his head off without consequence. How else to explain his unrepentant opening statement, with its blatant anti-Trump special pleading? The statement sounded like it had been written by Rachel Maddow, resting on the lamest and hackiest of MSNBC-style talking points, that “today’s hearing is just another victory notch in Putin’s belt and another milestone in our enemies’ campaign to tear American apart.”

Hats off to Trey Gowdy & Co. for their services to the Republic.

Amazing the patience Dershowitz displays toward the know-nothing ideologue interviewing him.

I trust you all know what 'bootless' means in this context. If my trust is misplaced, 'bootless'  has not to do with footwear or the lack thereof. It means useless, ineffectual. 

Boot's column ends on a spiteful note:

That is why I join Will and other principled conservatives, both current and former Republicans, in rooting for a Democratic takeover of both houses in November. Like postwar Germany and Japan, the Republican Party must be destroyed before it can be rebuilt.

This is childish rage at not getting one's way. It is like biting off one's nose to spite one's face. 

No principled conservative could want Democrats in power, especially now when it has been made abundantly clear what they have been aiming at all along.

One conservative principle here is that no nation can exist without enforceable and enforced borders.

Either Boot rejects this principle or he does not. If he does, then he is no conservative. If he does not, then we ought to conclude that he thinks that the principle is something to talk about and write about, but not act upon.  For when a man comes along with the will to act on the principle, Boot and the Beltway Boys get their bow-ties in a knot and shrink back in horror at the man's boorishness and lack of class.

Suppose that the Republican Party is destroyed like postwar German and Japan. Who will rebuild it? Jeb! Bush?  Boot, like George Will, has lost his mental balance.  

Early in the piece, Boot characterizes the party under Trump as "white-nationalist."

What is the reasoning here? 

Perhaps it goes like this. Trump stands for the rule of law and therefore a secure border. He opposes illegal immigration. Now most of the illegal immigrants are Hispanic. Therefore Trump is a racist.  He has no Constitutionally-grounded reason to secure the border.  He just hates Hispanics and considers them all to be criminals: rapists, drug smugglers, human traffickers, etc.  Not only does he hate Hispanics; he hates all  'people of color.'

And so he is a "white-nationalist!"

The truth, however, is that Trump is an America-Firster. This has nothing to do with "white nationalism" or 'white supremacism' as I explain here. 

Finally, there is the business of the Supreme Court. The bootless Boot presumably would have preferred Hillary nominations to the high bench.

 Chris Cathcart writes,

“I won’t let the Democrats steal my party from me. I want to regain the center,” Dershowitz told WABC Radio’s “Curtis and Cosby” show, noting that he will remain a Democrat as “as long as there’s some chance the Democratic Party can return to normalcy.”

 

“I want to make sure that the radical Left, the woman who got elected in the Bronx and Queens to Congress on the Democratic ticket, that they and Sanders and others don’t represent the Democratic Party,” he continued, referring to socialist Ocasio-Cortez who pulled off a shock victory last week against incumbent Democratic Rep. Joseph Crowley.

Steve Cortes provides four reasons.

I offer a fifth: Barrett is of the female persuasion. Justice Bork was easy to bork: he was stern of visage and appeared mean to many. The borking of the sweet and amiable Barrett will make the Dems look bad and expose them for what they are: bent upon power by any means, and especially vicious toward blacks and females who will not toe the party line but dare to stray from the p.c. reservation.

"The GOP has an effective campaign ad using Democrats' own words and actions against them."  A bit longer than a minute.  

My hope is that the Dems, now a full-tilt hard-Left party, will get clobbered in the mid-terms.  If they don't, then we are on the way to civil war.

Never underestimate the value of civil order. We take it for granted, but it is very fragile, and the skills necessary for survival in a war zone are not quickly acquired.  The prospect of a 'new normal' in which every couple of weeks there is an assassination or bombing is not a cheerful one.

He who sows the wind may reap the whirlwind. (Hosea 8:7) Somebody ought to get that message to Maxine Waters, the black woman in the video.  Conservative patience with leftist tantrums can be expected eventually to run out. The backlash will not be pretty.

Among Hillary's 'deplorables' are a lot of 'hard boys,' bikers, ex-military and ex- law enforcement who are prepared to break heads should push come to shove, and shove come to shoot.  They may prove hard to control if all hell breaks loose.

So be careful, 'liberals.' You may trigger the very fascism that you falsely accuse conservatives of espousing.

For when civil order collapses the people will demand its replacement.

The wise hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

……………………………..

UPDATE: I just listened to the ad again. Was that "feckless cunts" I heard at .38? Being black or female won't save you from the wrath of the Left if you stray from the politically correct reservation.

UPDATE (2 July). Chris Cathcart writes,

Maybe you were unplugged at the time so you're now just hearing about this one.  Here's the fuller quote from Samantha Bee; somehow the furor was only over the c-word and not also what she said after that:

“Ivanka Trump, who works at the White House, chose to post the second most oblivious tweet we’ve seen this week,” Bee said. “You know, Ivanka, that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child, but let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad’s immigration practices you feckless cunt!” 

 

“He listens to you,” she continued. “Put on something tight and low-cut and tell your father to fucking stop it. Tell him it was an Obama thing and see how it goes, OK?” 

 

Never-Trumper David French writes a good column. But if he had his way Hillary would now be in office and SCOTUS would be lost to conservatives for a generation or more. (Do you really think Jeb! could have beaten Hillary? Be serious.)

But like I said, French writes a good game:

After all, for an immense number of base GOP voters, judges aren’t just an issue. They’re the issue that drives them to the polls. Republicans are all over the place on immigration policy, trade policy, and foreign policy. Divisions in the party are deep and real. Those divisions disappear when judges are on the line. We can debate all we want about Russian influence on the 2016 election (or about the effect of the Comey letter), but one thing is certain — if Evangelicals and other conservatives weren’t afraid of the impact of a progressive Supreme Court on their fundamental liberties, Donald Trump doesn’t win. A new Supreme Court pick will galvanize the entire base for months. 

And let’s not forget that this pick is landing in the middle of one of the most toxic political environments in generations. Progressives believe that Justice Gorsuch sits in a “stolen” seat. Many of them see Trump as an illegitimate president — for reasons that range from Russian interference to disgust at his popular-vote loss — and find it unbearable that he could not just win the presidency but also select the man who could swing the Supreme Court. Expect increasing rage. Expect more personal confrontations of senators and Trump officials. Expect the political environment to get even more toxic, perhaps dangerously so.

It would have been nice if French gave us some advice on how to counter that boiling rage and its vicious expressions.  (E. g., the outrageous treatment of Nielsen, Bondi, S. H. Sanders) Should we reply in kind? Should we speak softly and carry a big stick? Should we egg on the likes of the vicious and vile Maxine Waters? What is to be done? 

Victor Davis Hanson brings his classical erudition to bear upon the instructive tale of the fall of Hillary:

When Nemesis finally hit Clinton on November 8, 2016, she was stunned, unable to even extend a simple public gesture of concession on election night. From there, Nemesis took her on a downward spiral. Clinton descended from once polling as the most popular woman in the U.S. to a rather sad figure, scapegoating, weaving conspiracy theories, blame-gaming, and endlessly replaying the disaster of 2016—a sort of poor, blinded and dethroned Oedipus wandering in exile in the fashion of peripatetic former FBI Director James Comey, whose character and fate in some ways are similar to Clinton’s.

In sum, Clinton made a series of nearly inexplicable, but clearly disastrous decisions—assuming that she could set up an unlawful private server as Secretary of State, that her 2016 victory was foreordained, and that she would deny and seek to overturn rather than accept her defeat. At any time, easy and obvious choices would have spared her a great deal of humiliation and her associates and supporters disaster.

But then again, according to the classical belief in fate and necessity, Clinton may have had little choice after all—given that her innate flaws were a sort of bomb that was always ticking until blowing up at the most appropriately tragic time.

The Canadian has been serving up excellent commentary. Here is a sample.

The Democrat platform has shrunk to one plank: hate Trump and oppose him on everything, no matter what.

And the drunken Dems are walking that plank. 

Never-Trumpers feared that Trump would destroy the Republican Party. But it is the Democrats he is destroying by driving them to adopt ever more extreme positions. Matthew Continetti:

Trump's gravitational pull is such that he causes his opponents to overplay their hands. In effect, he trolls them into adopting positions so far out of the mainstream that they become self-discrediting. Take, for example, the crisis at the southern border. With the policy of family separation, Trump found himself on the wrong side of a 70/30 issue. His administration spent a lot of time explaining, which in politics means you are losing an argument. But within days the president went on offense by signing an executive order and urging Congress and the courts to regularize asylum and detention law. The Democrats? They quickly found themselves arguing for releasing anyone who crosses the border illegally with a child—not only a dumb idea, but also one that would incentivize future crossings and even child trafficking. It's unpopular to boot.