Category: Politics

Vindictive Obama Sticks it to the Nation Once More on the Way Out the Door

Krauthammer:

Commuting the sentence of Chelsea Manning, one of the great traitors of our time, is finger-in-the-eye willfulness. Obama took 28 years off the sentence of a soldier who stole and then released through WikiLeaks almost half a million military reports, plus another quarter-million State Department documents.

The cables were embarrassing; the military secrets were almost certainly deadly. They jeopardized the lives not just of American soldiers on two active fronts — Iraq and Afghanistan — but of locals who were, at great peril, secretly aiding and abetting us. After Manning’s documents release, the Taliban “went on a killing spree” (according to intelligence sources quoted by Fox News) of those who fit the description of individuals working with the United States.

See also Mark Tooley, Bradley Manning, Alger Hiss, and Dean Acheson.

Related articles
David Horowitz versus Slavoj Zizek
Is Paris a 'No Go' Zone?
A Complaint from an Irish Reader

Less Than One Day to Go . . .

What a wonderful legacy! Some people have a negative net worth. Can one speak of a negative legacy? In these waning hours of his (mis)administration, let us reflect on the foolish and destructive things Obama has said and done the better to savor the change and hope that tomorrow will usher in. Remember Arizona Senate Bill 1070 from 2010 and the lawsuit former Attorney General Eric Holder brought against the State of Arizona? Here are my posts from that time in case you want to refresh your memory over that outrage. Image credit: Lisa Benson.

Obama Disaster

Related articles
Can a Return to Federalism Save Us?
Obama the Liar Update
The Left's Biggest Lie?

Why Did Trump Get the Religious Vote?

After all, no one would confuse Trump with a religious man.  Robert Tracinski's explanation strikes me as correct:

The strength of the religious vote for Trump initially mystified me, until I remembered the ferocity of the Left’s assault on religious believers in the past few years—the way they were hounded and vilified for continuing to hold traditional beliefs about marriage that were suddenly deemed backward and unacceptable (at least since 2012, when President Obama stopped pretending to share them). What else do you think drove all those religious voters to support a dissolute heathen?

Ironically, a pragmatic, Jacksonian populist worldling such as Donald J. Trump will probably do more for religion and religious liberty in the long run than a pious leftist such as Jimmy Carter.  

Mr. Carter famously confessed the lust in his heart in an interview in — wait for it — Playboy magazine.  We should all do likewise, though in private, not in Playboy. While it is presumptuous to attempt to peer into another's soul, I would bet that Mr. Trump is not much bothered by the lust in his heart, and I don't expect to hear any public confessions from his direction.

But what profiteth it to confess one's lust when one supports the destructive Dems, the abortion party, a party the members of which are so morally obtuse that they cannot even see the issue of the morality of abortion, dismissing it as a health issue or an issue of women's reproductive rights?  

Related articles

Another Double Standard
How About a Six-Month Suspension Without Pay for Barack Obama?
Truth Decay
Explaining the Obama Admin's Refusal to Identify the Threat as Islamic
SCOTUS and Benedict

 

Schall on Obama

I am surprised at how hard-hitting this is.  But the punches land right on target.  

From the first time I saw Mr. Obama, his First Inaugural, I said to myself, “This is a classical tyrant” and wrote an article to that effect. Now, a classical “tyrant” is not some brutal beast. Rather, he is popular, suave, smooth-talking, and ruled only by his own musings. He arises in a democracy when its citizenry have largely lost touch with natural being.

Mr. Obama’s notion of America was that into which he wanted to change it. The America of the Founders or the tradition did not much interest him. Indeed, this America was what had to be changed to make the world safe for the America that he was out to re-found, one that looked pretty much like himself. And, to give him credit, he succeeded in many ways. His Muslim and community organizing backgrounds were both traditions that had almost nothing to do with what we once understood to be Western civilization, with its unique American gloss.

[. . .]

I will pass over his religious views. His is a popular leftism that identifies religion as politics. Catholics were slow to recognize the efforts Mr. Obama made to identify religion and positive law. No leeway was left. Religion could not stand in the way of social “progress.” Who could have imagined even a decade ago that the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion traditions would be under fire for holding back the social engineering that Mr. Obama and his friends foisted on the country’s embassies, laws, military, healthcare, medicine, schools, environment, and even in the food we can’t eat.

But is there nothing good that this still relatively young man accomplished? The comedian Jack Benny was once famously confronted by a robber who insistently demanded, “Your money, or your life!” To which Benny replied, “I’m thinking! I’m thinking!” Mr. Obama has made it necessary for us to recall a whole order of being that was relentlessly overturned step by logical step. Do I think that this countrywide recollection is taking place? “I’m thinking! I’m thinking!”

Related articles
Je Suis Charlie?
A Dog Named 'Muhammad'
Noam Chomsky Talks Trump, Free Speech, and the Virtues of Resistance
On Seinfeld
America Was

Political Oikophobia and Trump Derangement Syndrome

Oikophobia is an irrational fear of household items, surroundings, and the like.  Political oikophobia is an irrational aversion to one's own country, culture, traditions, and countrymen.  I suggest we call the opposite political oikophilia, an irrational love of one's own country, culture, traditions, and countrymen.  This distinction 'cuts perpendicular' to the xenophobia-xenophilia distinction. Thus,

Political oikophobia: irrational aversion to one's own country, etc.
Political oikophilia: irrational love of one's own country, etc.
Xenophobia: an irrational fear of foreigners and the foreign.
Xenophilia: an irrational love of foeigners and the foreign.

Clearly, one can be an oikophobe without being a xenophile, and an oikophile without being a xenophobe.

Trump Derangment Syndrome takes the form of political oikophobia in many.  Glenn Reynolds supplies examples. Here is one:

Ned Resnikoff, a “senior editor” at the  liberal website ThinkProgress, wrote on Facebook that he’d called a plumber to fix a clogged drain. The plumber showed up, did the job and left, but Resnikoff was left shaken, though with a functioning drain. Wrote Resnikoff, “He was a perfectly nice guy and a consummate professional. But he was also a middle-aged white man with a Southern accent who seemed unperturbed by this week’s news.”

This created fear: “While I had him in the apartment, I couldn’t stop thinking about whether he had voted for Trump, whether he knew my last name is Jewish, and how that knowledge might change the interaction we were having inside my own home.”

When it was all over, Resnikoff reported that he was “rattled” at the thought that a Trump supporter might have been in his home. “I couldn’t shake the sense of potential danger.”

Here is a second example:

In fact, another piece on reacting to the election, by Tim Kreider in The Week, is titled "I love America. It's Americans I hate." Writes Kreider, “The public is a swarm of hostile morons, I told her. You don't need to make them understand you; you just need to defeat them, or wait for them die. . . .  A few of us are talking, after a couple drinks, about buying guns; if it comes to a fascist state or civil war, we figure, we don't want the red states to be the only ones armed.”

“A vote for Trump,” Kreider continues, “is kind of like a murder.”  Though his piece concludes on a (slightly) more hopeful note, the point is clear:  Americans, at least Trump-voting Americans, are “pathetically dumb and gullible, uncritical consumers of any disinformation that confirms their biases.”

And a third:

And in a notorious Yale Law Journal article, feminist law professor Wendy Brown wrote about an experience in which, after a wilderness hike, she returned to her car to find it wouldn’t start. A man in an NRA hat spent a couple of hours helping her get it going, but rather than display appreciation for this act of unselfishness, Brown wrote that she was lucky she had friends along, as a guy like that was probably a rapist.

Clearly, these three people are topically deranged: they lose their mental balance and the boat of brain capsizes into irrationality when the topic of Trump obtrudes.  This is not to say that they cannot negotiate the world sensibly in other ways: they are not globally deranged.  Nor is it to say that everyone with objections to Trump the man or Trump's policies and appointments is deranged topically or globally.

The phrase 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' refers to a real phenomenon and is justified by this fact.

Yet Another Accomplishment of the President-Elect

Add this to the ever-lengthening list:

Lockheed Martin Corp.’s chief told President-elect Donald Trump it’s close to a deal with the Pentagon to lower costs “significantly’’ for the next production lot of its F-35 fighter jet and will boost hiring at the Texas factory where the advanced aircraft is made.

People have been complaining about defense contractors' bilking of the government for decades.  Should a screw cost $37? What's it made out of, gold? A coffee maker $7,622?  A toilet seat $640?  (See here.)

Finally, some action.  But for action you need a man of action. A man who can't be bought.  Not another lawyer turned career politician. Not another member of the cozy political class who goes along to get along.  Someone with the wherewithal to be independent, a maverick politician, if you will.

You lefties ought to like that Trump is sticking it to yuge corporations and saving American jobs.  So to you nattering nabobs of negativism I say: give the man a chance, a year or two.  If he goes fascist we'll take of him.  

Otherwise: STFU.

Could I Pass an Ideological Turing Test?

Could I present liberal-left ideas in such a way that the reader could not tell that I was not a liberal?  Let me take a stab at this with respect to a few 'hot' topics.  This won't be easy.  I will have to present liberal-left ideas as plausible while avoiding all mention of their flaws.  And all of this without sarcasm, parody, or irony.  Each of these subheadings could be expanded into a separate essay.  And of course there are many more subheadings that could be added.  

Abortion.  We liberals believe that a women's right to choose to terminate a pregnancy is a very important right that must be upheld.  We are not pro abortion but pro choice, believing that decisions concerning a woman's reproductive health are ultimately her decisions, in consultation with physicians and family members and clergy, but are not the business of lawmakers and politicians.  Every woman has a right to do what she wants with her body and its contents.  While we respect those who oppose abortion on religious grounds, these grounds are of a merely private nature and cannot be made the basis of public policy.  Religious people do not have the right to impose their views on the rest of us using the coercive power of the state.

Voting Rights.  We liberals can take pride in the role our predecessors played in the struggle for universal suffrage.  Let us not forget that until the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution on 18 August 1920, women were not allowed to vote.  We liberals seek to preserve and deepen the progress that has been made.  For this reason we oppose  voter identification laws that have the effect of disenfranchising American citizens by disproportionately burdening  young voters, people of color, the elderly , low-income families, and people with disabilities.

Gun Control.  We live in a society awash in gun violence.  While we respect the Second Amendment and  the rights of hunters and sport shooters, we also believe in reasonable regulations  such as a ban on all assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

Marriage. We liberals believe in equality and oppose discrimination in all its forms, whether on the basis of race, national origin, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.  For this reason we support marriage equality and same-sex marriage.  Opposition to same-sex marriage is discriminatory.  As we become more enlightened and shed ancient superstitions, we extend the realm of freedom and equality to include more and more of the hitherto persecuted and marginalized.  The recognition of same-sex marriage is but one more step toward a truly inclusive and egalitarian society.

Taxation and Wealth Redistribution.  We liberals want justice for all.  Now justice is fairness, and fairness requires equality.  We therefore maintain that a legitimate function of government is wealth redistribution to reduce economic inequality. 

Size and Scope of Government.  As liberals we believe in robust and energetic government.  Government has a major role to play in the promotion of the common good.  It is not the people's adversary, but their benefactor.  The government is not a power opposed to us; the government is us.  It should provide for the welfare of all of us.  Its legitimate functions cannot be restricted to the protection of life, liberty, and property (Locke) or to the securing of the negative rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (Jefferson).  Nor can it be restricted to the securing of these and a few others: people have positive rights and it is a legitimate function of government to ensure that people received the goods and services to which they have a positive right.

Health and Human Services.  A decent society takes care of its members and provides for their welfare.  The provision of welfare cannot be left to such institutions of civil society as private charities.  It is a legitimate state function.  People have positive rights to food, water, shelter, clothing, and health services.  These rights generate in those capable of satisfying them the duty to provide the things in question.  It is therefore a legitimate function of government to make sure that people get what they need. 

Capital Punishment.  We liberals are enlightened and progressive people.  Now as humankind has progressed morally, there has been a corresponding progress in penology.  The cruel and unusual punishments of the past have been outlawed.  The outlawing of capital punishment is but one more step in the direction of progress and humanity and indeed the final step in  implementing the Eight Amendment's proscription of "cruel and unusual punishments."  There is no moral justification for capital punishment when life in prison without the possibility of parole is available.

The Role of Religion.  As liberals, we are tolerant.  We respect the First Amendment right of religious people to a "free exercise" of their various religions.  But religious beliefs and practices and symbols and documents are private matters that ought to be kept out of the public square.  When a justice of the peace, for example, posts a copy of the Ten Commandments, the provenience of which is the Old Testament, in his chambers or in his court, he violates the separation of church and state.

Immigration.  We are a nation of immigrants.  As liberals we embrace immigration: it enriches us and contributes to diversity.  We therefore oppose the nativist and xenophobic immigration policies of conservatives while also condemning the hypocrisy of  those who oppose immigration when their own ancestors came here from elsewhere.

Election Hacking?

Today's Arizona Republic sported a headline containing the phrase 'election hacking.'

How about a distinction? It is one thing to hack into DNC servers and John Podesta's e-mail. It is another thing to hack into a voting machine.  So I ask: what is the justification for talk of election hacking?

Let's assume that, contra Julian Assange's asseveration to the contrary, the Russians did the hacking into the DNC servers. Let's also assume that Vladimir Putin was aware of this and approved of it.  What might his motive have been?  The going 'wisdom' before November 8th was that Hillary was a shoo-in.  That was the opinion of all the top commentators. It is therefore reasonable to assume that Putin's motive was to get some dirt on Hillary to use against her when she became president.  

So it is far from obvious that the Russkis were trying to influence the U. S. election, let alone tilt it in Trump's favor.  Why would they want Trump in office, an alpha male they could reasonably expect to put someone like 'Mad Dog' Mattis in charge of the Department of Defense?

And then there is the utter hypocrisy of the Dems and some Republicans who are suddenly horrified at our lack of cyber-security  when they didn't seem much exercised over far, far worse such breaches over the last eight years.  

Let's see this 'election hacking' nonsense for what it is.  It is nothing but a shabby attempt by sore losers to delegitimize and obstruct the incoming president.

UPDATE (1/7). Here:

Also, some blame for the hack must be laid at the feet of the DNC and Democratic officials such as Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta for their wanton disregard for securing their own email system.

 

NOTE TO MR. PODESTA: Using “P@ssw0rd” for your password is not really a password. It is more like a “welcome” sign.

Yet, somehow, it was President-elect Donald Trump who seemed to be on trial during Thursday’s Senate hearings.

[. . .]

Chief among the intel honchos is bald and bespectacled Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. This most highly trusted top spook can be trusted to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth — except when he is lying.

Most famously, The Clapper was asked during a 2013 hearing by Sen. Ron Wyden: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

“No, sir,” The Clapper responded, only to be exposed as a complete liar within months.

What Explains Trump Derangement Syndrome?

Glenn Reynolds points to status anxiety:

Our privileged, college-educated left — what Joel Kotkin calls the gentry liberals — feels that its preeminent position in American society is under threat. And people care a lot about status.

What’s more, the people who seem to be lashing out the most are, in fact, just those gentry liberals: academics, entertainers, pundits, low-level tech types, and so on. As journalism professor Mark Grabowski reported, another academic texted him on election night: "Oh my God! We will be the ones ostracized if he wins."

Maybe we shouldn’t “ostracize” people based on whether their candidate wins, but in a way this professor was right:  A Trump victory is a blow to the status of the people who thought Hillary Clinton was their candidate — one that they feel even more deeply because gentry liberals, having been raised on the principle that the personal is political, seem to take politics pretty personally.

Another example that’s been circulating on the Internet comes from YouTube sex-talker Laci Green. When the election was still uncertain, she tweeted: “Regardless of the outcome, we are clearly a *deeply* divided and broken country. So much work ahead to mend, heal, and restore the U in USA.” Just a few hours later, when it became clear that Hillary had lost, she changed her tune: “We are now under total Republican rule. Textbook fascism. F____ you, white America. F___ you, you racist, misogynist pieces of s___. G'night.”

Reynolds' is part of the explanation.  Another part is that Hillarians and lefties generally are, most of them, secularists.  Religion and its promises are for them purest buncombe.  This is it, baby, and this is all she wrote.  This is as real as it gets.  And yet they are not content to be smiley-faced nihilists with their little pleasure for the day and their little pleasure for the night, to paraphrase Nietzsche's Last Man riff.  They want Deep Meaning that transcends the petty particulars of quotidian life. So they seek it in the Political. Not being able to worship something worship-worthy, they succumb to the Idolatry of the Political. They don't realize that the Meaning they seek cannot be found where they seek it.

It is their inordinate and idolatrous commitment to the Political that explains, in part, why lefties 'lose it' when their candidates lose.

TDS really is an amazing syndrome.  There is no counterpart of  it on the Right.   

Pragmatic and Ideological Political Parties

A good distinction. The Dems used to be pragmatic, but now are ideological.  David Carlin makes the distinction and then sketches the ideology of the contemporary Democrat Party:

(1) They [the intellectual leaders of the party] preach a metaphysics: There is no God, at least no God like the God of the Bible; no Supreme Being who created the universe and governs it. And if they sometimes say that they are agnostics, not atheists, their agnosticism is virtually identical with atheism; the two differ in name only.

(2) They preach a theory of knowledge: There is no knowledge other than sense-based knowledge, the kind of empirical knowledge upon which natural science is based. (They pride themselves on their respect for science even though very few of them are actual scientists or philosophers or historians of science.) Thus there is no such thing as Divine Revelation. And there is no such thing as trans-empirical intuitive knowledge – for example, intuitive knowledge of the existence of God, of the immortality of the soul, of the fundamental laws of morality.

Comment: The Dems promote scientism, the epistemology of metaphysical naturalism.  The latter, roughly, is the thesis that reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents.  Scientism is the philosophical (not scientific!) doctrine that all genuine knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge.  It is a philosophical doctrine that entails the noncognitive status of all philosophy including itself!  

Typically, the proponents of scientism don't see the problems with it; their ideological commitment is dogmatic and uncritical.  A particularly offensive example is provided by Senator Barbara Boxer in this brief YouTube video in which she derides philosophy and a philosopher who dares to dissent from the party line on fossil fuels.

(3) They preach a theory of morality, a morality of maximum personal liberty. We should be free to do as we like, and we should tolerate a like freedom in others. Of course certain practical limits must be placed on this freedom if we are to avoid a war of all against all: we should not be free to inflict direct and tangible harm on non-consenting others.

(4) Sexual freedom: While there are many other kinds of freedom, sexual freedom is, so to speak, the keystone of the arch. If sexual intolerance is permitted, many other kinds of intolerance will follow.

Comment: The tendency is to give free rein to concupiscence in all of its forms, without of course admitting that this is what one is doing.  Concupiscence?  What's that?  Do you think that our deep natural concupiscence, excited and maintained by the blandishments of a sex-saturated society,  might help explain why the many strong arguments against abortion are simply dismissed unexamined by the 'pro choice' crowd? The existence of a moral issue is not admitted.  It is just assumed that the right to an abortion is a woman's reproductive right.

(5) Anti-Christianity: The most influential opponent of the above beliefs and values is Christianity, more especially old-fashioned Catholic and Protestant Christianity. Therefore old-fashioned Christianity must be marginalized, must be driven into a social corner where it can do little or no harm.

Comment: But at the same time, Islam is touted as the religion of peace, and its dangers denied.

(6) Omnicompetent government. There is no problem, not even the problem of controlling the terrestrial climate for the next 10,000 years, that cannot be solved, at least in the long run, by the action of the U.S. federal government. Do we have problems of poverty or crime or education or health or drug addiction or global warming? There must be solution that Washington can find for it – a law, an agency, a spending program, a global treaty, etc.

Carlin's article is here.