And this miserable flake had the chutzpah to steal Barry Goldwater's title, "Conscience of a Conservative"?
A paltry 100 semolians?
The good news is that Flake is history and Milque-Toast McCain will soon be as well. No, I don't want the latter dead; I want him and his obstructionism out of the Senate.
The UT philosopher Rob Koons has penned an important article, Loyalty to Trump Important in Two-Party System.
Please read it. Several cuts above the usual political column.
Liberals playing the 'mental' card is nothing new. You may recall the Johnson campaign's smearing of Barry Goldwater with "In your guts you know he's nuts." That was in 1964. So forgive me for not being impressed when sufferers from Trump Derangement Syndrome pronounce Donald Trump unfit for office on the ground of insanity.
Just how sane are anti-Trumpers? John Pepple:
. . . I believe all these people (and not just Americans, but also their counterparts throughout the Western world) are themselves insane, and what’s more, they are suicidally insane, while as far as I know, Trump is not suicidally insane. I’ve been saying this for ages, but I will say it again. These people all seem to believe that it is the height of progressiveness these days to welcome into the West people who are not a bit progressive and who already have a track record of deliberately murdering lots of progressives and even of destroying the progressive movement in at least one country (Iran back in 1979). This is like Jews inviting Nazis into Israel, or blacks supporting the KKK. It's sheer insanity.
Evan Sayet explains:
My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum. They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.” Here’s my answer:
We Right-thinking people have tried dignity. There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency. We tried statesmanship. Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain? We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney? And the results were always the same.
This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.
I don’t find anything “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper” about Barack Obama’s lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party. I don’t see anything “dignified” in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks. I don’t see anything “statesman-like” in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent. Yes, Obama was “articulate” and “polished” but in no way was he in the least bit “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper.”
Read it all. The main point is that it is a war and in a war in which the enemy employs Alinkyite tactics we must do the same. The USA as she was founded to be is teetering on the brink of destruction. We are at a crucial juncture in our history and Trump, as bad as he is, is all we have.
The acquittal in San Francisco of an illegal alien of all homicide charges throws into unusually sharp relief the difference between the destructive leftists who seek a "fundamental transformation" of the United States and the patriots who defend the country as she was founded to be. Heather MacDonald:
Advocates for illegal immigrants are unrepentant after yesterday’s shocking acquittal on all homicide charges of an illegal-alien confessed killer. The advocates are defending the sanctuary policies that had set in motion the 2015 killing in San Francisco; they have also doubled down on their opposition to any deportation of illegal aliens, criminal or otherwise. If ever there were a clarifying moment regarding what is at stake in the battle for the immigration rule of law, this is it.
Jose Ines Garcia Zarate was a poster boy not just for the folly of sanctuary policies but also for the mass low-skilled Hispanic immigration that has transformed California. A barely literate drug dealer from Mexico with a second-grade education, no English, and a penchant for criminal aliases, Garcia Zarate had been deported five times by federal immigration authorities following convictions for various crimes.
[. . .]
Donald Trump turned the Steinle case into a powerful rallying cry for immigration enforcement during his presidential run. The illegal-alien lobby, by contrast, denied that San Francisco’s sanctuary policy had anything to do with the killing. California even strengthened its status as an immigration scofflaw after the Steinle homicide. This October, Governor Jerry Brown signed SB 54, the California Values Act, which turns the entire state into an immigration-enforcement-free haven for all but the most heinous illegal-alien criminals. (Brown has been assiduously silent on the Garcia Zarate acquittal.) San Francisco imperceptibly tweaked its local sanctuary policy following the killing; today, it would again release Garcia Zarate if asked under the same conditions to hold him for ICE custody.
According to Garcia Zarate’s attorneys and other illegal-alien advocates, the only blame in this case belongs to Donald Trump and anyone who wants to enforce the immigration laws. “From day one, this case was used as a means to foment hate, to foment division and to foment a program of mass deportation,” public defender Francisco Ugarte said. Ugarte manages the immigration unit at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, where he advises criminal illegal aliens on how to avoid deportation for their crimes. “Nothing about Mr. Garcia Zarate’s ethnicity, nothing about his immigration status, nothing about the fact that he is born in Mexico had any relevance as to what happened on July 1, 2015,” Ugarte said. Actually, the case is almost exclusively about immigration policy; had this country had the ability to protect its borders and deport illegal alien criminals, Garcia Zarate would not have been sunning himself on the Embarcadero on July 1, 2015, but would have been back in Mexico.
There you have it. Which side are you on?
Will you tell me that we need to 'come together,' and 'drop the labels,' and 'find common ground'? There is no common ground here. Either you stand for national sovereignty and the rule of law, or you don't. Either you distinguish between legal and illegal immigration or you don't. Either you stand for the defunding of 'sanctuary' jurisdictions or you don't, leaving aside the denialist lie that there are no such jurisdictions!
By the way, this denialism shows just how corrupt so many on the Left are. Unable to defend the indefensible, they deny that it exists!
A correspondent takes a less-than-sanguine view of what's coming:
At this point I believe that a shooting civil war in this country is inevitable; a government that fails in its first duty to protect its citizens is no longer legitimate, and the Left will not leave except it is forced out.
On second thought, this is a sanguine view in a root sense of the word: bloody. No reasonable person could want full-on civil war and the destruction of civil order. Everyone should calmly reflect on just how horrible that would be. But if it comes to that we will know whom to blame.
I don't expect it to come to that. But I expect increasing violence. The wise hope for the best but prepare for the worst. The prudent are taking precautions and coming to realize that 'lead' is also a precious metal . . . .
UPDATE (12/3)
Hi Bill,
Just read your item on the shocking verdict in SF. I would call it "incomprehensible" – as Steve Sailer points out, the jury had a range of options that should in any rational world have resulted in a homicide finding – but it is all too comprehensible if we see this trial not as a search for truth and justice, but as a skirmish in a rapidly warming "cold civil war".
I noted this passage in your post:
"No reasonable person could want full-on civil war and the destruction of civil order. Everyone should calmly reflect on just how horrible that would be."
I couldn't agree more. There is a terrible eagerness among the younger firebrands of both Left and Right to "cry havoc", and the calm reflection you ask for is very little in evidence. War may come – and when it does we will, as you say, know whom to blame – but when it does it will be awful.
I wrote a post of my own about this almost exactly two years ago; it's here, if you'd be interested.
Best as always,
Malcolm
Tully Borland makes the case in The Federalist.
In so doing he has provoked a crap storm of controversy. See here and here. The quality of the Twitter jabs of an army of thoughtless twits justifies my talk of a crap storm.
It is depressing to realize how few people today are able calmly to follow an argument and evaluate it as opposed to heaping abuse upon its producer.
(I have noted the same thing in popular opposition to the work of David Benatar.)
Politics is almost always about choosing between the better and the worse. Both Moore and his opponent, Doug Jones, are flawed character-wise. But character is only one consideration. Equally if not more important are the policies the candidates support. Now Jones is for unrestricted abortion which, as Professor Borland points out, is tantamount to infanticide. Unrestricted abortion is a grave moral evil. So if you refuse to vote for Moore because of his (alleged) sins of 40 years ago, then you indirectly lend support to a pro-abortion candidate. I should think that the gravity of the evil of future abortions far outweighs one man's (alleged) evil sexual excesses of 40 years ago.
According to David French, "There’s no defensible argument for choosing the 'lesser of two evils' in Alabama." But I just gave one!
As Borland points out, if one had a policy of voting only for the morally perfect, one would have to abstain from politics entirely.
……………………..
UPDATE (12/1). The controversy continues. I won't link to any of it due to its low quality. Much of its rests on the assumption that an argument is good if and only if it leads to a conclusion that the consumer of the argument antecedently accepts. Otherwise it is bad and one is free to mock and malign the producer of the argument.
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.
Mirabile dictu, 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. But leftists don't agree, many of them out of sheer mendacity, a dishonest refusal to own up to their radical agenda. Hillary, for example, is one of the mendacious, as witness this quotation from her What Happened:
We're [the center-left and the left-left] are closer together than any of us are to Trump and the Republicans, who just keep getting more extreme. Bernie Sanders and I wrote the 2016 platform together, and he called it the most progressive one in history. (422)
Now that's just hilarious. Notice how the second sentence contradicts the first. Notice how she unwittingly betrays her radical agenda. The second sentence is true of course. The first is not.
What's going on here? It appears to be some sort of strange psychological projection. Not able forthrightly to admit that her agenda is extreme, she projects extremism into her political opponents who are hardly conservative, but simply less liberal that she is.
We true conservatives are moderates by any reasonable historical standard. I could easily show this with respect to a number of key issues. But it is Friday night in the holiday season, the sun is setting on another gorgeous Arizona day, and it is time to punch the clock, crack open a beer, and heat up the luscious left-overs of yesterday's repast.
So much to be thankful for. Including Hillary's defeat in 2016.
Believe it or not, I actually have Hillary Clinton's What Happened checked out of a local library and have read chunks of it. But there is no need for me to comment on the 492 page exercise in self-deception and outright lying inasmuch as Conrad Black has done a fine job of it. Here are some excerpts:
More alarming than Mrs. Clinton’s ungraciousness is her dishonesty. She all but accuses Trump of treasonable collusion with Russia, and Russian interference in the election looms even larger than misogyny and Comey’s skullduggery in her demonology of causes of the national tragedy of her defeat. But all the “evidence” she cites of Trump–Kremlin collusion is taken from the now-infamous Christopher Steele dossier. Since the publication of this book, it has come to light that the Clinton campaign paid $10 million for Steele’s unverifiable pastiche of defamatory gossip and fabrications against Trump. The entire case against Trump has, after 16 months of FBI investigation, turned up no evidence. The Clinton campaign denied, until the facts came to light, that it had any knowledge of the origins of the Steele dossier, and now says that it doesn’t matter who paid for it; and she now refers to it as “campaign information.” The bipartisan leadership of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has confirmed that this dossier is the sole basis for the continuation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
[. . .]
She has an unblemished record, she implies, and the fact that the majority of Americans don’t trust her is due to the “viciousness of the Republican smear merchants.” She says that the timely release of the Billy Bush tape of Trump’s verbal indiscretions eleven years before (about the ease for a celebrity of groping women), though it was clearly fired as an intended game-ender, came as a surprise to her, and that she was heroic in “winning” the second presidential debate two days later, given the pressure she was under. In fact, Trump, with his campaign apparently in shambles and principal figures deserting or taking their distance, was under more pressure than anyone in the history of those debates going back to Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, and he won the debate. Trump’s production, earlier in the day, of a trio of women who alleged sexual assault against her husband was, in Mrs. Clinton’s view, a tawdry and outrageous resurrection of those she memorably described in the past as “the bimbos.” Trump’s coarse locker-room reflections are apparently disqualifying, but Bill Clinton’s scandalous and possibly criminal sexual assaults on various women when he was governor and president do not alter the Norman Rockwell marriage of Bill and Hillary.
The author is a relentless partisan: Republicans are under-educated pessimists, “the deplorables,” as she called them last year. Reagan “sapped the spirit of the country,” though he restored the country’s confidence. (He also led the greatest economic boom in modern U.S. history and won the Cold War, but she doesn’t mention that.) Dwight Eisenhower isn’t mentioned at all, apart from having been Adlai Stevenson’s opponent, and Richard Nixon was a criminal, never mind that Nixon ended school segregation and conscription, extracted the country from the Democrats’ war in Vietnam while preserving a non-Communist government in Saigon, opened relations with China and the Mideast peace process, signed the greatest arms-control agreement in history with the USSR, founded the Environmental Protection Agency, reduced the crime rate, and stopped the endless rioting in American cities.
Since the publication of this book, former party chairman Donna Brazile has written that Mrs. Clinton rigged a number of primaries in her struggle with Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination, and may have violated the Federal Election Campaign Act. Mrs. Clinton dismisses Whitewater (which led, circuitously, to the impeachment of her husband), Travelgate, the Benghazi tragedy (where the American ambassador to Libya was murdered by terrorists and she and Obama pretended that it was mob anger provoked by an anti-Islamic video produced by a private American citizen), and the email controversy that “amounted to precisely nothing” (I think not). She does not mention her speech of apology to the world’s Muslims, a toe-curling embarrassment to the entire Western world, nor her inability to utter or write the words “Islamic terrorism or extremism,” nor the very disconcerting pay-to-play activities of the Clinton Foundation, including the payment or pledge of $145 million and a $500,000 speech fee for Bill Clinton at a time when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s agreement was required to approve a sale of uranium assets in the U.S. to Russian interests.
Democratic senators whom she praises in comradeship have turned on the Clintons: Elizabeth Warren accuses her of cheating Bernie Sanders, and Kirsten Gillibrand says that Bill Clinton, because of his peccadilloes, should have resigned. They may be unjust, but this is what the Clintons’ allies now think of them. Her righteousness is moth-eaten and threadbare.
Here I must register a pedantic objection. A peccadillo is a little sin; but rape is not a little sin. (Juanita Broderick alleges that Bill Clinton raped her.) Nor are perjury and obstruction of justice, the crimes that he was alleged to have committed when he was impeached. And yes, he was impeached, although he was not removed from office.
Mrs. Clinton believes she is a good and sincere Christian, though she makes it clear that joining a church and being a communicant in it should be with the purpose of turning that church into an agency for leftward political action, what she calls “progressive reform.” By this, we are left in no doubt, she means rounding up all those who are beneath the average in prosperity or acceptability in mainstream-majority society, or if not, at least highly dissatisfied with the lot of those who are, and mobilizing them as a democratic majority to impose transfers of wealth and status from those who have earned or inherited it to the less fortunate or successful. This is a constant process of evaluating where the electoral majorities are, pitching to them as victims in the name of a benign state, and representing to those who pay for these transfers that it is their Christian and social duty and that they should rejoice in their opportunity to better the quality and stability of American life and society.
In Mrs. Clinton’s America, spiritual inspiration exists to pursue redistributive materialism, all “progress” apart from a little doughty self-help is the result of state intervention, the state has a practically unlimited right and duty to correct meritocratic as well as inherited or exploitive socioeconomic imbalances, and the U.S. Democratic party must be a secular church militant where those who oppose abortions (about half the American public) are, along with many other large groups, unwelcome. All politics is a constant process of “reform,” in which, miraculously, the majority gain at the expense of the more accomplished (as well as more fortunate) minority. This isn’t really Christianity or democracy; it easily slips into rank acquisition of votes with the money of part of the electorate in a cynical and corrupt manner, and Mrs. Clinton convicts herself of such attitudes with this astonishing display of rage, affected humility, idealism, and myth-making. It is a sobering and a disturbing read.
What does it say about the Democrat Party that it would support a scumbag like Franken for the U. S. Senate?
Franken's Porn-O-Rama is no Satire
More here (Newsweek), here (Atlantic), and here (WashPo). No, I won't link to the 'Puffington Host.'
I heard Representative Jackie Speier (D-California) say on Face the Nation this morning that former U. S. president William Jefferson Clinton "faced impeachment."
Not so. He was impeached. What he faced, but did not suffer, was removal from office.
Impeachment is not the same as removal from office. Impeachment is analogous to indictment in regular court proceedings. The House of Representatives votes to impeach, and then the Senate conducts the trial. Clinton was acquitted of the charges brought against him, perjury and obstruction of justice.
You would expect a member of Congress to know that. But then she's a Dem . . . or maybe she just misspoke.
The trouble with the Democrat Party is that so many of its leading 'lights' are dimwits, Nancy Pelosi heading the list. What gives this airhead such staying power? Answer: a preternatural ability to raise money.
Here:
In the past few days a number of notable liberals have decided to take allegations of sexual assault against former president Bill Clinton seriously. Let’s just say that discarding the Clintons when they’re no longer politically useful to retroactively grab the higher moral ground isn’t exactly an act of heroism. But if we’re going to re-litigate history, let’s get it right.
A repost from 5 November 2016, just three days before the historic Trump victory that still has lefties fuming and flailing. And I did have to eat my words. We sane conservatives who voted for Trump have been vindicated in spades and the quisling, never-trumping, pseudo-cons are sliding deeper into irrelevance with every passing day, bow ties and all.
……………………
In January, in Trump's Traction and Conservative Inaction, I wrote:
. . . there is no way Trump can beat Hillary. He has alienated too many groups, women and Hispanics to name two. Add to that the fact that large numbers of conservatives will stay home, and Hillary is in like Flynn. Mark my words.
A bold asseveration somewhat justified by what had transpired up to that point. Things look differently now. I may have to eat my words. And I hope I do. I also wrote:
Let's hope that Trump does not get the Republican nomination. But if he gets it, you must vote for him. For the alternative is far worse. Politics is a practical business. It is not about maintaining your ideological purity, but about getting something accomplished in murky and complex circumstances. It is always about the lesser or least of evils. Trump would be bad, but Hillary worse.
That's right except that I no longer use the misleading phrase 'lesser of evils.' It seduces people into asking, 'Why vote for either if both are evil?' when in the vast majority of political contests like these none of the contenders is evil in a way that would justify voting for neither.
Not 'lesser of evils' but 'better and worse.' Trump is better than Hillary policy-wise even if not much better character-wise.
The state is not about to wither away. She shall abide, to oppress, but also to guide and provide. It obviously matters who has his hands on the levers of power. It matters who sets the tone and influences the culture in Washington and beyond.
Some are tempted to withdraw and have nothing to do with politics. That would make sense if one could expect politics to reciprocate by having nothing to do with one. A highly unreasonable expectation, especially when the Dems are in power. Never forget that the Left is totalitarian to the core and will lie brazenly to achieve its ends. A good example is the pack of brazen lies put forth by Obama and Co. to ram through ObamaCare, the unaffordable Affordable Care Act.
Hillary too lies brazenly as should be evident to all by now when it is helpful unto her personal ambition and the leftist agenda (in that order).
You know what you have to do come Tuesday.
…………………………..
In hindsight, I was wrong to hope that Trump not get the nomination. For now I see that none of the others could have beaten Hillary. Surely the pathetic Jeb! Bush could not have.
Memo to self: should you really be using 'surely' in affirmation of a counterfactual conditional?
A good explanation, but not particularly Marxist.
Disgusting but true: Bush 41 (George H. W. Bush) voted for Hillary and his son Bush 43 (George W. Bush) for none of the above. Call them Cozy Little Club firsters. These 'conservatives' seem to think that conserving their cozy cocoon trumps tackling real problems. What these bow-tie boys value are their privileges and perquisites and their exclusive little soirees in wood-paneled Beltway clubs.
Among Trump's many accomplishments, the three most significant so far are that he put paid to the Bush dynasty, brought about the fall of the corrupt House of Clinton, and nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court to succeed Antonin Scalia.
And that is just the start of the list. Illegal immigration is way down; the economy is way up; religious liberty has been defended . . . .
Trump is a rude and bracing blast of fresh air in American politics. He is not a lawyer in a profession lousy with lawyers. He is not a career politician. He doesn't need the job. No one owns him. He is ready, willing, and able to fight. He doesn't give a rat's ass about being politically correct. He presents a new and healthy direction for the country: enlightened nationalism.
For the record, I did not support his nomination. But when he got the nod, I came around, like every sane conservative.
"You didn't build that!"
We should never allow ourselves to forget all the stupid things Obama said, Obama, a man hailed as brilliant by that arbiter of intellect, the illustrious Chris Mathews. Does the latter still get a thrill up his leg when he thinks of the man? Or maybe the thrill is gone.
Rejoice I say unto you, rejoice that Obama in a pant suit, "Felonia von Pant Suit" (Kurt Schlichter) was handed her walking papers by Donald J. Trump.
My title is the first instance of my using the expression 'Crooked Hillary.' I now feel fully justified in using it.
I now hand off to Donna Brazile, Inside Hillary Clinton's Secret Takeover of the DNC.
I am having a hard time resisting another slug at the NeverTrumpers. But resist temptation I will. I just deleted a couple of sentences of invective laced with obscenity. It is hard to watch the destruction of our great Republic and not get especially angry at the bow-tied do-nothings. Parlano molto, ma fanno poco.
I preach self-control, so I'd better set a good example.
