Democrats know how to circle the wagons, stand together, and refrain from attacking their own. Republicans seem to prefer the circular firing squad. And the Libertarians? Theirs is the self-indulgent circle jerk of those who will never have power.
Category: Politics
Two More Solid Conservative Trump Admin Accomplishments
With all the fake news and journalistic malpractice, there is real news that is going unreported and under-reported. Below, a couple of under-reported recent items that will gladden conservatives while eliciting howls of rage from the nattering knuckleheads of the Left.
A correspondent of mine thinks that Trump has done only one conservative thing: nominated and presided over the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Not so. He has done a number of conservative things. For example, his courageous affirmation of the rule of law anent illegal immigration has reduced it by some 60-70%. And that tough talk cost nothing. Good deal, eh? I am put in mind of Grandmaster Nimzowitsch: "The threat is often stronger than the execution." As for the execution of the Great Wall of Trump, give it time. The obstructionist Dems need to be subdued first.
The two items mentioned below are only the latest of the Orange Man's conservative accomplishments.
Last Thursday, President Trump announced the formation of a bipartisan commission to investigate voter irregularities and fraud as well as charges of voter suppression in America.
WaPo:
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt decided to replace half of the members on one of its key scientific review boards, while Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is “reviewing the charter and charge” of more than 200 advisory boards, committees and other entities both within and outside his department.
For my views on voter ID see here.
Here is a little irony for you. There is voter fraud, and 'the dead' are prime offenders. And everybody except for a handful of troglodytes has photo ID. But crapweasel Dems deny these obvious truths. And yet they call us denialists for merely being skeptical about the claim that anthropogenic global warming is such a threat to humanity as to trump [I love it!] all others and to demand a radical re-organization of the nation's economy.
Why Positive ID at the Polling Places?
Angelo Codevilla, The Cold Civil War:
Today, states and cities ruled by the Left are seizing disproportionate influence in national politics by counting the votes of non-citizens. California issued drivers’ licenses—de facto voter registration—to a million illegals. Countless localities, such as New York City, Detroit, and Florida’s Broward County, do similar things. A few million votes here and there add up to a wall protecting today’s ruling class as it imposes itself on the rest of the country. Because this fraud so threatens the body politic’s integrity, a federal law requiring positive proof of citizenship for voting in federal elections is a sine qua non of continued national cohesion.
Why Hillary Lost
Brilliant analysis by Victor Davis Hanson. A rasty tasty morsel (O felix erratum!):
Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash is underappreciated for its effect on the campaign. Through painstaking research, it tied together all the strands of Clinton nefariousness: the Clinton Foundation as an excuse to hire political flunkies and provide free jet travel; the quid pro quo State Department nods to those who hired Bill Clinton to speak; and corruption under Hillary Clinton, from cellphone concessions in Haiti to North American uranium sales to Russian interests.
Add to the Clinton sleaze Hillary’s unsecured server and communications of classified material, the creepy New York and Washington careerists who turned up in the Podesta archives, and the political rigging that warped the conduct of the Democratic National Committee.
The result was that Hillary could no longer play the role of the “good” Clinton who “put up” with her husband’s “good ole boy” sleaze. Her new image was that of an equal partner in crime — or perhaps even a godmother who used the capo Bill as muscle. In comparison, Trump steaks, Trump University, Trump taxes, and Trump ties were old-fashioned American hucksterism, but with one important difference: Trump’s excesses were a private person’s; Clinton’s were those of a public servant.
Should a special prosecutor be appointed? By all means! To investigate Hillary.
Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc?
"Donald Trump is the first president in history whose campaign has come under F. B. I.-initiated investigation for collusion with a hostile foreign power. And the person heading that investigation, the F. B. I. director, has been fired." (Timothy Egan, NYT Op-Ed, 11 May 2017)
It might help if you read Rosenstein's Comey memorandum and related documents here. But if you are a lefty, it probably won't.
Will the Second Civil War Turn Violent?
It may well if the authorities do not cease their abdication.
When Politics Becomes Like Philosophy
In philosophy everything is up for grabs. Our politics are becoming like this. There is less and less on which we agree. We can't even agree that nations need enforceable and enforced borders!
Widespread and deep-going lack of consensus in philosophy casts serious doubt on the cognitivity of the discipline, but is otherwise not that big of a deal as long as the controversies of the cognoscenti are confined to the ivory towers. Academic controversies rarely spill into the streets. No one literally gets up in arms over the correct analysis of counterfactual conditionals.
But widespread and deep-going lack of consensus among the citizens of a country can lead to civil war. The USA is now in a state of cold civil war; if it heats up it won't be pretty.
The denigrators of philosophy typically dismiss it as so much hot air. What they don't realize is that many if not most of the hot-button issues that exercise them are philosophical at bottom. To see what I mean, consider a few issues that divide Left and Right:
- For the Left, man is basically good; for the Right, he is not. The answer you give presupposes an answer to question number four on Kant's list: What can I know? What ought I do? What may I hope for? What is man?
- For the Left, (material) equality trumps liberty; for the Right it is the other way around. This is obviously a central question in political philosophy.
- For the Left, the differences between the sexes are socially constructed and therefore malleable; for the Right, socially constructed gender roles are secondary to biological and perhaps even metaphysical differences between males and females that cannot be socially engineered.
- For the Left, abortion is a woman's reproductive right; for the Right, the human fetus, at least in the later stages of its development, is a biological individual with its own right to life.
- For the Left, the purpose of art is to "challenge the status quo and bourgeois sensibilities"; for the Right, "to produce works of beauty and profundity to elevate the individual and society." (I quote from Dennis Prager.) Questions about the nature and purpose of art belong in aesthetics.
These are very deep philosophical disagreements. Time was, when most of us didn't disagree about them or even raise them as serious questions. But now these philosophical disputes are political disputes. In this sense our politics have become like philosophy.
Interesting times up ahead!
Related articles
Our Three-Party System
The Democrats, the Republicans, and Trump.
Mirabile Dictu: Something Intelligent and Fair on Trump from NYT’s Op-Ed Pages
Here.
Word of the Day: ‘Delope’
Delope (French for "throwing away") is the practice of throwing away one's first fire in a pistol duel, in an attempt to abort the conflict.
Some days I half-seriously think that dueling ought to be brought back. Some liberal-left scumbag slanders you, you challenge him to a duel, and then there is one less liberal-left scumbag in the world. That would be a fine 'upshot,' no?
(Interesting side-question: should it be one fewer liberal-left scumbag? But 'one less' sounds fine to my highly sensitive ear.)
Schopenhauer undermines the philosophical foundations of dueling in the section on honor in the fourth chapter of his The Wisdom of Life, entitled "Position, or A Man's Place in the Estimation of Others." Schopenhauer is among the most penetrating of the commentators on the human predicament. No one can consider himself educated who has not read him. He writes beautifully, drawing on vast erudition.
Where did I find 'delope'? In a piece by Roger Kimball entitled Trump Critics Exude Desperate Political Nihilism. It ends thusly:
In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein warned that “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it.” There is a kindred sort of madness about the anti-Trump stalwarts. They are held captive by a picture. Reality had to be a certain way. Trump had to be a certain way: a sort of repository of everything small, and mean, and malevolent.
His unforgivable tort was to act normally, conventionally. Sure there were the tweets—they were something the Left could love to hate—but in a larger sense his behavior has been. . . presidential. Issuing executive orders, nominating judges and justices, encouraging legislation to further the agenda he had outlined on the hustings, generally doing things to keep the promises he had made. Trump’s opponents keep telling us how “angry” his supporters are. But their hysterical behavior reminds me of nothing so much as the famous duel between Settembrini, the suave humanist, and Naphta, the Jesuit radical, in Thomas Mann’s great novel The Magic Mountain. When Settembrini delopes, Naphta screams “You coward” and shoots himself in the head. I sometimes think some of our more extreme anti-Trump crusaders are only a few adjectives away from that unfortunate eventuality.
Memo to Hillary
Shut up and take a hike!
Nullification Crisis
How long can we last? Not long without some serious political cleansing of our institutions of the leftist scum that years of conservative inaction have allowed to accumulate.
Myron Magnet at City Journal:
Wait: let me get this straight. It’s legally binding for two underlings in the civil rights divisions of the Departments of Education and Justice to send out a “Dear Colleague” letter declaring that, as these bureaucrats interpret Title IX of Congress’s Education Amendments of 1972, colleges and universities can’t get any federal funding if they don’t make special accommodations for transgendered students, however defined; but it is not legal for the president of the United States, pursuant to the Constitution’s injunction that he ensure that the laws “be faithfully executed,” to deny some federal funding to cities that declare themselves “sanctuaries” from federal immigration laws, and that accordingly forbid their officials from cooperating with federal authorities in implementing them, as Congress has demanded?
Chucky Schumer’s First 117 Days
Who is to Trump what Goldwater was to Reagan?
Answer here.
Two Weeks of Great Clarity
Dennis Prager. Excerpts:
1) When America leads, the world is better. [. . .]
2) The terrible presidency of Barack Obama is beginning to be acknowledged.
Following President Trump's order to attack Syria about 63 hours after the Syrian regime seemingly used chemical weapons, even many in the mainstream media couldn't help but contrast his prompt response with Obama's nonresponse to Assad's use of chemical weapons in 2013. [. . .]
Likewise, Obama's do-nothing policies vis-a-vis North Korea are being contrasted with Trump's warnings to leader Kim Jung Un about further testing of intercontinental ballistic missiles and pressure on China's leaders to rein in the North Korean regime.
These contrasts are important for a number of reasons, not the least of which being there is now hope that Obama's star will dim as time goes on.
This will come as somewhat of a surprise to those on the left, but many of us who are not on the left believe that Obama did more damage to America than any previous president — economically, militarily and socially.
Regarding the social damage, as the first black president in American history, he could have been an unprecedented force for racial healing but instead left America more racially divided than any modern president. In his repeated citing of Ferguson, for example, he helped spread the lie that a racist white Missouri police officer had killed an innocent black teenager without reason (other than racial bias).
He deceived the American people (the "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor" assertion and more) in order to pass Obamacare, one of the largest government-expanding programs in American history. He used presidential power in an unprecedentedly authoritarian manner. He showed far more understanding of the Iranian theocracy than of the Israeli democracy. His Internal Revenue Service and Department of Justice were politicized in ways reminiscent of corrupt Third World regimes. And he left America fighting a (thus far nonviolent) second Civil War.
3) The interminably repeated left-wing lie that Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are in cahoots has exploded. [. . .]
4) Another charge made over and over by the left — the mainstream media, academia and the Democratic Party — that the Trump election had unleashed an unprecedented amount of anti-Semitism was proven to be yet another left-wing hysteria based on a left-wing lie. [. . .]
Nicholas Kristof on the Origin of Trump Derangement Syndrome
In the piss-poor pages of the Rag of Record's op-ed section, for today's date, I found this: ". . .Trump's craziness is proving infectious, making Democrats crazy with rage that actually impedes a progressive agenda."
It is true that the Dems are crazy with rage and that this impedes their agenda. But of course such impedance is a good thing, not to mention the pleasures of Schadenfreude as we watch our opponents melt down.
But Kristof is wrong about the origin of TDS. It does not derive from the Orange Man's alleged craziness, but oozes up from the mephitic recesses of leftists' psyche.
Their bien-pensant bigotry, smug assurance of moral superiority, and Hillarian sense of entitlement received a stinging rebuke on November 8th, and they still haven't gotten over it.
If you are wondering why I didn't link to Kristoff's piece, it is because the NYT webpages are now set up to disallow copying and pasting. No copy and paste? Then no hyperlink. Yes, I know there is a copy-and-paste work-around, but I'm not about to jump through those hoops.