Today, Bernie Sanders unveiled his plan for the Green New Deal, a $16.3 trillion monster. You can read about it here in the New York Times. The number – 16.3 trillion – is so huge that we lose sight of its magnitude. To break it down, if the dollars were miles, it would be a little less than three-quarters of the distance to Alpha Centauri, an entirely separate planetary system “far far away”. The size of the number means that the bill can’t be paid by anyone. The projected payback will extend beyond generations “far far away”. It’s essentially an invitation to join the Stone Age for anyone and everyone in generations from now to those “far far away”.
That dingbat congresswoman from the Bronx would like to stampede us into the Stone Age with hysterical cries that we have only 10 years before the Götterdämmerung if we do nothing. For her, better the Stone Age than extinction. Apparently, Bernie also favors the choice of the Stone Age. For me, the difference is marginal. The Stone Age was best captured in Thomas Hobbes’s famous dictum: life is “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short”.
Making flints in the Stone Age.
But is the U.S. in the catbird seat to stave off disaster anyway? Remember, our government’s decisions to economically harm us only harms … us! China and the rest of the developing world have a keen interest in indoor plumbing and air conditioning. They’ll burn down their jungles and the fossil fuels in a long list of Saudi Arabias to get out from living in the dirt. So, unless Bernie appoints himself to be the Maoist General Secretary of the World and embarks on a Genghis Khan-style conquest of the planet to enforce the resultant poverty, he’ll just end up destroying us. The rest of the world will continue to pollute, albeit at a faster clip.
BEIJING, CHINA – DECEMBER 20: Citizens walk in smog on December 20, 2016 in Jinan, Shandong Province of China. Air quality index (AQI) readings exceeded 400 and some schools have suspended classes in Jinan. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)Burning coal in China to generate electricity.
A few numbers might help Bernie, his fellow ideological asylum inmates, and the Squad in understanding the extent of the craziness. The U.S. is about a quarter of the world’s economy. China comes in second at 15%. The numbers are nearly reversed in global CO2 emissions: China at 30%, the U.S. at 15%. So – I’ll go slow for the woke crowd – we produce 25% of the world’s product at only 15% of emissions, and China knocks out 15% of the world’s product at 30% of emissions. What’s that mean? I’ll go slow once again for all those with degrees but show no sign of better judgment: It means that China is dirtier, much dirtier at a rate twice ours. The lesson, therefore, is to smash the cleaner nation’s economy only to clear the way for the dirty one. Bernie must have skipped Math class in high school.
The hope is that China will be inspired by our example to voluntarily follow suit. What example? It’s the example of how to level a first world country into the third world. I suspect that they’d like to avoid the experience as if it was a leper colony.
California prides itself in being a ground breaker. They have adopted the greenie snake oil through a variety of measures over the past couple of decades. As of 2017/18, though, the state accounts for only 1.1% of global CO2 discharges. Even if they knock it down to zero – probably by running the rest of the economy out of the state – their slot will be more than replaced by India as it ramps up.
What’s the upshot of all the greenie caterwauling? Say goodbye to the future for your kids, their kids, and their kids’ kids. Maybe they might feel better if they know that they were making a sacrifice for the good of … no one. Not!
John Burton, outgoing chair of the California Democratic Party, leads a “F*** Trump” chant at their 2017 convention.
Some have often stated to the point of cliché that California presages the social and political future. The claim is abused but has some applicability to the benefit of opposing ends of the ideological spectrum.
In the 60’s to the 80’s it served the interests of conservatives. Reagan was governor, then president, and California became a willing partner in the Sagebrush Rebellion’s challenge to the collectivists in the DC administrative state. Prop 13 heralded a nationwide tax revolt. Today, it’s the left who benefits from the state’s 36 million person heft. They have a super-majority stranglehold on the state.
The place is a veritable political Disneyland for the furthest tip of the “progressive” left wing of the Democratic Party. Among other things, it’s a state with it’s own immigration policy – i.e., open borders. The Constitution be damned. Now with SB 1, California will declare that it’s the Obama presidency forever within the confines of the state’s borders. The Electoral College be damned.
SB 1 cyrogenically freezes in place the regulations of Obama’s people as of January 19, 2017, the day before Trump took the oath. The bill would in effect veto the Trump administration’s deregulation efforts on, and in, every inch of soil in the new PRC, the People’s Republic of California. This sounds to me like secession … till the next election that they win.
The effect on property owners and farmers would make worse an already bad situation. The bill specifically targets changes in endangered species regulation. Protections for a non-native fish – get that, non-native – the Delta Smelt, in the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta, will continue to be draconically enforced to the detriment of west-side Central Valley agriculturalists. The land out there is dry as a bone and fallow. The towns are drying up as water spills out through the Golden Gate. You can read about it here in an op-ed by John Harris, owner of Harris Ranch.
The Delta Smelt. (Illustration: Bob Bukin)
A puff piece from the sponsoring commissar can be found here.
Watch for other blue-dot havens to follow suit. Instead of a Sagebrush Rebellion, it’ll be secessionitis in the chic soirees of Brentwood/Malibu/Hollywood and Greenwich Viilage/Manhattan till a socialist or socialist-lite places his or her hand on the inaugural Bible and begins our slide into national incontinence. They won’t be happy till they get their chance to emasculate the country. And emasculate they will.
An el diablo is blowing out of Sacramento. The thing has long been associated with firestorms. To borrow with a twist the Las Vegas line, what happens in California rarely stays in California.
Outbursts of murderous mayhem in addition to an undercurrent of political incivility – the exhibitionism of barbaric rudeness and physical assault – have become common and sometimes shrugged off as simply folks being a little too exuberant. Much of it emanates from our cities and universities (the two are often synonymous). It sounds like the seething cauldron of pre-revolutionary Russia as described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his novel “August 1914”. We have a city and university problem like Russia of a century ago.
We have Antifa, the Resistance, and a Democratic Party in the grip of the worst bombast coming from the other two – frequently the three groups are synonymous. Similarly, Russia had radical student activism in the cities and campuses. Rudeness, outbursts of pandemonium, and violence were incessant.
Antifa in Portland, Or.
The tie that binds our and their activists through time and space is leftist ideology. The leftist belief system has three basic planks: (1) the overthrow of tradition, (2) collectivism, and (3) an unquestioning faith in pure equality, equality in everything and in almost every way. Our lefty activists have much in common with those running around in Russian towns, cities, and campuses of a century ago.
Take a look at collectivism, with socialism being the political expression of it. Collectivism was popular among Russia’s young at the time as it is today among our young. Look at socialism’s positives in our 18-26 age cohort. Collectivism treats people as a generality. To the collectivist, people are a group, not individuals. To ensure the well-being of all, they say, everyone should control nearly everything. “Everyone” means the state. Personal possessions are at the behest of the group.
A mass meeting with a Bolshevik agitator in the Putilov Works in Petrograd in 1917.A demonstration against the Provisional Government, in Petrograd in July, 1917.
Sound familiar? Sounds like Barney Frank’s famous quote, “Government is simply a word for the things we decide to do together”? Sounds like free [you name it], the schemes of confiscatory taxation, the Green New Deal’s massive overthrow of our constitutional order, and expansive government powers to advance the alleged interests of any fad-of-the-moment victims’ group, as expounded in the talking points of Democratic politicians?
It doesn’t stop there. Tradition is the harbinger of all evil to the leftist. Family, faith, and old principles of civil order are to be eliminated or refashioned to fit the vision. The metric to govern the social engineering is “equality”, equality in nearly all things. If disparities exist, it is assumed to be the result of a systemic or hidden [you name the evil].
Herein lies the totalitarian temptation. Equality of outcome doesn’t come naturally. People vary so much in so many different ways as to make its attainment impossible … if left alone. For a leftist, you can’t leave it alone. Equality will have to be forced. Thus, the Leviathan must be huge and intrusive.
We seem to be repeating Russia’s path of the last couple of decades of the 19th century to the penultimate explosion of 1917. The centers of upheaval in Russia were the towns, cities, and college campuses as they are today in our country. And they were as horribly misguided and destructive as they will be in our own time if given the power. I hope cooler heads prevail.
Famine victim at an Ukrainian orphanage, 1920’s.
I’m a fan of the aphorism frequently attributed to Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes”. So true. So true.
“Beto” O’Rourke at the scene of the El Paso shooting.
The two murderous rampages over the weekend are more than evil deeds. They have become, like most everything else, fuel to feed the unrelenting push to, in a modification of Eric Voegelin’s immortal phrase, immanentize progressivism’s eschaton – to bring to life the left’s dream of the better world. It’s like all that happens in the world is forever on the event horizon, ready to fall into the left’s interstellar black hole. Evil deeds can’t just exist to be fought against; they must be recruited for a partisan political agenda. The events’ magnitude and sorrow, therefore, is cheapened by a horde of demagogues.
El Paso after the August 3 shooting.Dayton after the August 4 shooting.
The airwaves are saturated with demagoguery. Fingers are pointing at Trump for super-charged rhetoric. Speaking of super-charged rhetoric, have you attended a Pelosi or Schumer presser, heard the bombast from AOC+3, seen “Beto” before a mike, or been verbally accosted by the rest of the herd running to seize the Democratic Party’s brass ring? If Trump is to blame for El Paso, then Bernie is to blame for the 2017 shooting of Republican congressmen; or the Sierra Club and Paul Ehrlich are responsible for the Unibomber. Anyone can play this game. And it is a game: something far removed from mature thinking.
The Unibomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, after his arrest, 1996.The 2017 shooter, James T. Hodgkinson, a Bernie Sanders activist.
A favorite of the mob is, you guessed it, “gun control”. Large numbers – 300 million guns in private ownership for instance – are contorted to serve the desired end, which is to make gun ownership as difficult as it is in Maduro’s Venezuela. Their list of banalities includes “universal background checks”, bans on “military guns”, and various forms of gun confiscation. What any of this has to do with straightening out the crooked timber of humanity escapes me. What any of it has to do with addressing the causes of these incidents also escapes causal reasoning. They do, however, serve a political end while advancing certain political careers. In my book, it’s shameful.
The federal government’s powers could be expanded in the manner of Australia and New Zealand and initiate gun confiscation, but still completely miss the point. And the point is the mental isolation of some of today’s young men, typically in the 20-25 age cohort. Could our modern society be a breeding ground for alienated youth? Parental absenteeism in the pursuit of careerism and material wants, or as a consequence of marital breakup and casual amours, have disturbing developmental effects on children. In addition, the buffer of other civil institutions such as neighborhood associations and church aren’t what they used to be. These factors are the ignored elephants in the room as the media chases the demagogues and their rantings. The fact is, a very few of these young people – and some older adults – would be dangerous whether an AR-15, machete, or spoon is available.
Trump-hatred overwhelms all. Could we just stop the hokum and take an adult look at how we are raising the next generation? It could be that all we have to do is draw back the state in order to allow room for civil society to breathe. Yes, and that’s no doubt a tall order in today’s atmosphere of smothering hyperbole.
Kyle Smith’s review of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood compared Tarantino’s film with Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America. Tarantino adopted Leone’s technique of a singular story thread set in a panoramic and historical scene. If some future filmmaker wanted to channel Watergate’s All the President’s Men and Leone, the current unraveling of the Russia-collusion-Mueller-Comey-et al saga would provide excellent grist for the mill.
The Setting
All the elements are present. The grand backdrop is present-day DC with 364,000 federal government workers, many at the top of the federal pyramid scheming and plotting for partisan and personal advantage, and a mass of hanger-ons populating K Street and other nodes in the metropolitan area. The administrator water cooler talk must be impregnated with the expectations born of a peculiar universe’s lifestyle and norms that are divorced from the real world’s preoccupation with producing the necessities and wants of life. It’s a world unto its own, all put on steroids by the 44th president’s ideological penchant for big government as a cure-all. It is great for those seeking highly remunerative and secure employment in a highly unproductive sector, coupled with fantastic opportunities for the city’s real estate agents.
Enter stage left, Donald Trump (protagonist or antagonist depending on one’s point of view): crass, boorish, sometimes vulgar, and a champion of the pitchfork brigade. He wasn’t supposed to win. And when he did, the curtain was thrown open as in the The Wizard of Oz.
Woodrow Wilson’s government of “experts” is exposed as a charade. I can only speculate about the extent of the conniving, scheming, and plotting for personal and partisan advantage as a normal facet of life particularly in the administrative suites of the nation’s capital. Regardless, the now-bogus collusion story ripped the smiley face off the Leviathan.
Act One: Pride Before the Fall
Like many scandals, this one has at least two acts or phases: the first one peddled by the left-oriented and self-styled cultural “betters” in the media, academia, and the Democratic Party in our cosmopolitan centers, and the later, more sinister one as the initial story began to unravel.
Phase one seemed implausible from the get-go for anyone with a scintilla of adult skepticism, but it was overwhelmed by volume, both in quantity and decibel levels in our left-dominated media channels. That story is now familiar. A litany of banalities consumed the airwaves: “Russia attacked our democracy”; “Trump is a Putin stooge”; “The Russians elected Trump”; “Trump conspired with the Russians”; etc., etc., etc. You’ve heard the carnival barking.
The party of more government and big government – the Democratic Party – needs government power, and they failed to get it. Their loss necessitates an explanation, and it can’t be that their vision of the better world isn’t popular enough. The default excuse is malevolence by some unseen and nefarious forces attached to the winner. It just so happens that an expedient was readily available from their own skulduggery in the 2016 campaign. Democrat trolling for dirt – often called “oppo research” – led to the Hillary campaign > Fusion GPS > Christopher Steele > the Steele dossier > FBI/DNI/CIA spying on Trump > leaks to a salivating press. The stage is set for its continuation after Trump’s shocking victory.
A common reaction after shock is rage. Sure, Trump’s bombastic rhetoric acted as an accelerant, but that matters little. George W bent over backwards in a contortionist’s pretzel to accommodate and still earned the rant, “Bush lied and people died”, alongside efforts at his impeachment. Rage is a powerful motivator to do some really bad things, even using falsehoods to repeal an election. Remember, power is far more important to a progressive than to those more conservative since it is needed to overwhelm parents’ concerns about such things as their little daughters sharing a bathroom with boys who believe – or simply make the claim – that they can think themselves into being girls.
The ploy required a predicate. It was found in the jingle, “Russia attacked our democracy.” We don’t have a democracy; we have a constitutional republic … but I digress. How did Putin attack our so-called democracy and purportedly steal the election from her highness? A few trolling farms and $100,000 in Facebook ads, half of which were pro-Hillary and half were after the election?
In fact, the presiding judge in the trial of one of the defendants (Concord Management and Consulting LLC) indicted by Mueller chastised Jeannie Rhee, a former Obama Deputy Attorney General and part of Mueller’s team, and Mueller (and by extension Atty. Gen. Barr) for prejudicing a potential jury by reaching conclusions in the publicly released Mueller report not supported in the indictment, thereby raising doubts about the strength of the evidence linking the firm to the Russian government. Could the mantra “Russia stole the election” be a bait-and-switch maneuver with the mantra being loudly proclaimed by a partisan mob in the media and Congress as the Mueller gang switches to the thin gruel of a far lesser claim in court? Are we, the public, being scammed?
Jeannie Rhee, former Deputy Attorney General under Obama and Special Counsel prosecutor under Mueller.
How could 1/100th ($50,000) of a 30-second Super Bowl ad bend a 63 million-vote election spread over 274, 252 precincts and 113,754 polling paces? Hillary alone was awash in $700 million. Trump fell $300 million short. The charge is preposterous given the minuscule effort, and ignores the history of this kind of thing. Almost every Israeli election results in American campaign operatives tramping over to Tel Aviv to help Labor or Likud. One of Obama’s chief campaign advisers, Jeremy Bird, showed up in the country in 2015 to try to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu. We’ve left our fingerprints in other countries as well. The PRC helped bankroll Bill Clinton’s reelection. Soviet disinformation money seeded street protests in America and Europe throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, a godsend to Teddy Kennedy’s efforts to frustrate Reagan. Soviet efforts didn’t stop there. The Venona disclosures in 1995 and the brief opening of Soviet Communist Party archives in 1991 showed evidence of Soviet espionage and the presence of agents of influence occupying powerful positions under FDR and Truman. And today’s Democrats and their fellow travelers are carping about a few bots and Facebook ads?
Venona Project. Meredith Gardner, at far left, working with cryptanalysts, mid-1940’s.
The predicate is a farce. It’s in the DNA of international relations for nations to influence strategically important countries. In another time it was called statecraft. We would be well-served if we remembered the concept when observing the vicious mullahs in Tehran.
Oh, they squeal that the Russsians “hacked our democracy” when they were alleged to have purloined Hillary’s and the DNC’s emails and began to disseminate them through Wikileaks. Wikileaks is most certainly a pipeline for Russian (and any other nation’s) chicanery. After all, they came out of the same anti-western and anti-US breeding ground that gave us CISPES (advanced the interests of the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua), the nuclear freeze movement (supported by Soviet disinformation measures), Code Pink, today’s Antifa, and the perpetual peace-at-literally-any-price crowd. The mission statement of being the guardians of government transparency is a facade for useful idiots. They’ll take information from any source so long as it further their end, which is the embarrassment of only western governments.
What’s missing from the hacked-our-democracy charge is any semblance of context. Of course, in our intensely techie world, cyber crime is as big a thing as mail fraud was in the days before Intel. No doubt, the bumbling Hillary made it easy by concocting her own digital communication system in her basement, bathroom, closet, or what have you. She would be an easy mark for any government with nearly unlimited resources (since all governments skim off as much as they want from their citizens’ private economic activity) to play this game. The 2015 Chinese (PRC) hacking of the federal OPM data base, getting personal information on 20 million persons in the process, is illustrative.
Any system is vulnerable, including Hillary’s garage setup, the DNC, RNC, and anyone else thought to be important. The Iranians remember Stuxnet in 2010, the joint US-Israeli worm to crash the regime’s nuclear program computers. Whether through phishing or incredibly easy passwords in the case of the DNC, cyber warfare is part of statecraft. Make the best safeguards as possible, but it will remain a staple of modern life.
Was it as vice-president Cheney called it, “an act of war”? Hardly. The behavior is so common that we would be in a constant state of war with almost any nation with access to a keyboard. Cheney’s declaration is ludicrous.
But is it even relevant to Hillary’s 2016 loss? Both candidates were held in low esteem going into the election. Hillary’s negatives were 24 points higher than her positives and Trump’s were even worse (41 points). It wasn’t hacked emails that dragged Hillary down. Hillary has left a well-known slimy trail from Arkansas to DC. She’s a known quantity, and it smells. As for Trump, he was stinking up the works with his boorish rhetoric, past sexual escapades, and Access Hollywood. Could it be that a easily dislikeable candidate, 8 years of Obama malaise, a horrible campaign strategy, poor campaign management, and Trump being a fresh face had more to do with the result than Wikileaks and $100,000 in Facebook ads?
However, giving the story heft was our FBI in DC, something euphemistically called the “intel community”, and who knows how many big cheeses in the Obama administration. More than putting a thumb on the scale, they were sitting on it.
First, Comey’s gang “exonerated” Hillary after her clear violations of 18 U.S. Code § 798 et al. Furthermore, and amazingly, Comey and his courtiers somehow reached the conclusion that bleach-bitting her hard drives and servers and smashing devices to smithereens didn’t qualify as obstruction of justice. And to think that Trump had to fight through hell for two and a half over the now-dubious charges of conspiring with Russia and interfering (obstruction) with Mueller’s inquisition into a non-crime.
Go figure. Now that’s the stuff of movies.
As Comey was clearing Hillary, he was conducting a surveillance operation against the Trump campaign since at least summer 2016. A piece of Democrat oppo research – the Steele Dossier – was funneled to the FBI, Obama’s Justice and State Departments, and Obama’s intel chiefs, Clapper and Brennan. The Democrat oppo research was filled with vile falsehoods but was peddled to FISA courts to entrap people connected to Trump, no matter how loose their affiliation. Ironically, the Dossier would turn out to be the only proven instance of collusion: the cooperative arrangement between the Russians, Steele, and the Hillary campaign/DNC.
With sycophants in the media, leaks would keep the pot boiling in an attempt to delegitimize Trump’s victory up to the point when drips and drabs of FBI/Obama mischievousness start to dribble into view, and the release of Mueller’s incoherent report in April of 2019 raised new concerns about the fable.
Anyway, the 2018 midterms gave the House to the Democrats and off into impeachment land we go.
By the time of the release of Mueller’s unintelligible tome, enough was known of the gross misbehavior of Obama’s people and his holdovers in the executive branch. The rogues gallery includes Strok, Page, McCabe, Comey, the Ohrs, Clapper, Brennan, maybe Lynch, and anybody else in the Obama claque now looking to lawyer-up. Include the minor interstellar bodies who are in the orbit of Obama’s intel glob like Halper and Misfud. Also, friendly foreign intel services were more than happy to participate in the scam.
The plot thickens. With one house of our bicameral legislature in hunger pangs for impeachment, getting Trump becomes more than partisan mudslinging. It becomes institutional, partisan mudslinging on the federal dime. Subpoenas fly and the Bolsheviks took over committee chairs. Who’d have thunk it?
Jerry Nadler, chrmn. House Judiciary Comm., and Adam Schiff, chrmn. of the House Intelligence Comm.
Impeachment was juiced up. The Democrats’ electoral success in 2018, though, could possibly end up breeding their own fall. In Sophocles’s tragedy, Ajax, Ajax proudly asserts that he doesn’t need Zeus’s help. Oedipus in Oedipus Rex boastfully claims the genius to solve a murder mystery. It didn’t end well. From the Book of Proverbs, 16:18: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Warnings abounded, but the Dems insisted on pushing the issue.
The April release of the much-anticipated Mueller Report made matters murkier. Trump collusion was put to bed but he was “not exonerated” (?) of obstruction, something Hilary did blatantly. Now that’s an extremely odd concept in a prosecutor’s brief, “not exonerated”. It’s such a loose concept that anybody not charged can be labeled “not exonerated”. That’s not how our system works. Innocence is presumed, not “not exonerated”. Well, it’s enough of a kernel for Democrats blinded with rage for losing in 2016.
Then Mueller reluctantly testified after the Dems threatened him with subpoenas. Mueller’s testimony proved to be the emperor with no clothes. Bumbling, stumbling, incoherent, and ignorant of his own report made the show an embarrassment for both him and the Dems.
The spectacle raises questions about who was running the show in the Office of Special Counsel. Was Mueller merely the man running interference for the likes of Andrew Weissman and Jeannie Rhee, both leftovers from Obama’s DOJ?
The Special Counsel and his team.
Mueller’s awkward performance and his lack of familiarity with the report that bears his name would seem to indicate that the partisan inmates were running the partisan asylum. 13 of the 17 prosecutors working under Mueller were registered Democrats – and prominent Democrat apparatchiks in DC – with the remaining four unknown or unaffiliated.
Mark July 24, 2019 on your calendar, the day of Mueller’s testimony. It’s the day for all-things-Russia to exit stage left. Another angle to the story, frothing beneath the surface, is about to spill over the top.
The curtain comes down on Act One.
Act Two: The Fall
The script for Act II has not been written. Yet, key elements are present for a second generation Watergate.
The full story of the lefty nexus of the mainstream media, the Obama holdovers in the executive branch, and the Democratic Party has yet to be written. This place has the potential for a real conspiracy. Attorney General Barr, US Attorney Durham, US Attorney Huber, and IG Horowitz will have something to say in due course, though the general outlines are already present. The investigation of the investigators has just begun, the start of Act Two.
Yes, the rogue’s gallery mentioned earlier should lawyer-up. It’s a great time to be a criminal defense lawyer in DC.
Here’s a possible scenario. The story begins with the effort to remove Trump from the political scene. Comey’s in the middle of it. Comey and his claque in the FBI were eager to use the fraudulent dossier to undermine the Trump campaign and presidency as early as summer 2016, after which they would end up with 4 FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. The applications for the warrants to begin the effort were deceptions to the FISA judges. The operation (“Crossfire Hurricane”) continued well into 2017.
The media played along to perpetuate the story. They acted like a megaphone for wild and lurid claims for gross partisan advantage. It was a cooperative venture among a triad of actors: (1) big name/legacy media, (2) the DNC/Hillary campaign, and (3) an executive branch that acted like its namesake, a community organizer – which is nothing but a rabble-rousing community activist.
But surprise, surprise: Trump won. And ….. Stay tuned for the rest of the story.
Democratic Party presidential contenders debate, 7/30/19.
The morning after last night’s Democratic Party debate I was reading Jay Nordlinger’s story (National Review, 7/29/19) about the Russian dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now in exile in Britain. It brought to mind an inextinguishable need in the enthusiasts of socialism, whether openly declared or as quiet fellow travelers (much of the Democratic presidential field), to constantly point to a non-existent, never-realized form of it. It’s a phantom only possible in the mind’s eye of the true believer and nowhere else. Bernie exhibits it in great bounty, and so does an increasing portion of the party’s activist base, the party’s stable of presidential candidates, and its giddy zealots in Congress (the dimwit Squad for instance). In addition to Stalin’s Socialist Realism in art, we must add Socialist Longing – the longing for a future and purer socialism that somehow will get it right – to the doctrines of the Church of Socialism.
Bernie sounds like he was mentally put into a cryogenic state during his glory days of the 1970’s and 80’s. Mentally, he’s still honeymooning in the Soviet Union. Khodorkovsky mentioned the everywhere-stated party slogan: “The Party solemnly promises that this generation of the Soviet people will live under Communism.” Bernie is stuck there as well. For Bernie, the promise is always in the future, or in a northern European country that, in reality, shed much of its experiment in socialism. Bernie’s socialism is the Sweden of 1970, for example, not the Sweden of today.
Does he know that Sweden isn’t far behind the US in Heritage’s economic freedom rankings? (The US position was bolstered by the recent tax cut law.) Still, Sweden has no minimum wage law, abolished its inheritance tax in 2004, and let go of much of its state-owned enterprises. It’s vaunted public healthcare system is remarkably decentralized, a far cry from Bernie’s sovietized Medicare for All. Bernie’s idea of socialism is the failed version, and can’t point to a functioning one this side of North Korea and Cuba.
Bernie wants to impose something that Sweden ran from. Does he know it? Don’t know, but the longing continues for a decrepit idea in the hope that it will be magically transformed into a success. Bernie is the chief exponent of a made-in-America cargo cult.
Church in Boston, Massachusetts @mattbannister via Twenty20
I’m constantly reminded of the general wrong-track numbers in opinion polls even when economic conditions have been improving. Why does there seem to be a nagging sense that things aren’t going well? Two books make a mighty attempt at an answer: “Dignity” by Chris Arnade (a self-described socialist) and “Alienated America” by Tim Carney (commentary editor of the Washington Examiner). Both books elucidate the deep social ills that accompanied the absolute deterioration of civil society in areas frequently referred to as “left behind”. The problem is far, far more than economic. The accompanying review of the books presents the case.
Why the rise of Trump and a resuscitated loony left with a home in the Democratic Party? I’ve heard some Trump supporters call for a government takeover of health care, adopting the nonsense language of turning an economic good or service, governed by scarcity, into a “right”. The loony left is the loony left, always has been, and has an off-the-shelf answer for all that plagues us: big, centralized government; it’s the Progressive way. The two elements have a nexus.
The roots of the current fascination with big, omnipresent government – or looking for saviors in large personalities on the public stage – may be found in the decline of something vital for personal well-being according to Arnade and Carney. Some call it civil society. Others, like Carney, refer to “social capital”. Both recognize the critical role of church, an institution beleaguered by the rising tide of secularization, another by-product of Progressivism. In so doing, the props of connection and support in the vast array of personal social networks have collapsed, leaving behind alienated folks in the vast stretches of the poorer sections of flyover country and young people facing declining opportunities. In our time, the default answer is a savior (Trump, Bernie, the nitwit Squad), vapid sloganeering (“Make America Great Again”, “Structural Racism”, “Make the rich pay their fair share”, “Equal [fill in the blank]”, “There are no illegal immigrants”, and so on), and the elevation of government as a super daddy and mommy. Church and family are replaced by commissars.
I support many of Trump’s initiatives, but he, like Bernie and the nitwit Squad, come to think of it, might be a sign of the times.
A group of migrants gather at the Chaparral border crossing in Tijuana, Mexico, Sunday, Nov. 25, 2018, as they try to pressure their way into the U.S. Rodrigo Abd/AP
The citizenship question should be on the ballot, and please don’t psychoanalyze repressed racism as is the wont of the pseudo-Freudians in the Democratic presidential field. It’s simply a matter of pure reason. However, there’s more to the story according to John Yoo (UC Berkeley law professor) and James Phillips (Stanford law professor). They see a silver lining in the Supreme Court’s decision (Dept. of Commerce v. New York) blocking the inclusion of the citizenship question for those concerned about rule by unelected administrative apparatchiks (“Roberts Thwarted Trump, but the Census Ruling Has a Second Purpose”, The Atlantic, see here).
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Associate Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan listen during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 30, 2018. REUTERS/Win McNamee/Pool/File Photo – RC183E07BA00
First, pure reason dictates the presence of the question. The Democrats’ lollapalooza of giveaways includes the extension of benefits to citizens of other nations in residence here, legal and illegal. How could you determine the fiscal impact of the lunacy if you can’t count the beneficiaries? Mayor Pete (Buttigieg) pulls 11 million out of the hat for the undocumented alone. MIT says its more like 22 million. A range of double means that we don’t know. Though, who would you trust for scientific rigor, Mayor Pete or MIT?
Mayor Pete
An additional reason cries for the inclusion of the query. I suspect that the foreign-born make up a huge slice of the population. If you want a data base on the nature of the current population for policy reasons – which is one of the reasons for having a census – to exclude a descriptor that stares at you as you drive through almost any hamlet, town, or city in California (and Chicago, New York City, etc., etc.) would limit the census to only being a tool to inflate Democrat representation in Congress. Get real, ferret out the non-citizens and their status.
Secondly, Yoo and Phillips see a positive in the Court’s majority opinion for those with qualms about omnicompetent administrative governance, particularly the promiscuous delegation of Congressional authority to the president and his administrative minions. Since Wilson and FDR, it has been the dream of “progressives” to supplant popular sovereignty with the rule of “experts”, never mind that the rule of experts can resemble the rule of Boss Tweed (“collusion” anyone?). The decision could be interpreted as a slap at “Chevron deference” (courts deferring to administrative judgment) and power-hungry power centers like the EPA.
If we still are prevented from knowing much about the people who are flooding into our country, at least we might be comforted by the realization that the EPA can’t kick us out of our house.
Read the Yoo and Phillips article.
RogerG
Postscript: On Friday, 7/12/2019, Pres. Trump issued an executive order to use other data bases to determine residency status of the population for the 2020 census. Expect more lawsuits in attempts to obscure the actual number.
On Jan. 30, 2017, CNN’s Jake Tapper was critical of White House spokesman Sean Spicer’s words in describing Trump’s executive order restricting some Muslim immigrants.
We are not well-served by our telegenic punditry class on cable TV nor our increasingly demagogic hucksters running for high office in order to gain power to tell us what to do. Particularly irksome is the collection of verbiage to avoid using “illegal immigrant” to refer to those who crossed our borders in violation of our laws. The rhetorical gymnastics are astounding, and misleading.
A favorite euphemism is the phrase “the undocumented”, meaning those “without papers”. Yes, in a superficial sense, these words work. Even “illegal immigrant” works, but all have an important ingredient missing. What’s absent is any indication that the objects of the phraseology are citizens. Yes, they are “citizens”, but not of here. These people are the citizens of other countries. They are not stateless people.
Central American migrants attempt to rush the border fence between Tijuana and San Diego and are dispersed with tear gas by the Border Patrol, 2018.
Putting it all together: “the undocumented” are citizens of other countries who willingly broke our laws to reside in our nation. The fact that they are the citizens of other countries puts the issue of what to do with them in an entirely new light.
So, extending universal health insurance coverage as some have proposed, subsidized by American citizens, to citizens of Guatemala (or any country for that matter) in our country in violation of our laws is an invitation for them to get here by any means available and partake of our fantastic medical professionals and facilities. American citizens get the honor of paying for the healthcare of Guatemala citizens. If the point is to rub away the distinction between foreign citizens and American ones, the idea accomplishes the feat in a quick stroke.
Patients wait to be seen in the emergency room of an LA hospital, 2012.
Trump’s citizenship question might have to be reworded. He’ll have to replace “United States” in front of “citizen” with “world” since U.S. citizens, functioning as taxpayers, become the world’s taxpayers for the world’s needy. Thus, “Are you a world citizen?”
I present the point not as mere sarcasm. If your concern is the treatment of a bleeding Guatemala citizen in our country in violation of our laws, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986 takes care of it. The hucksters, though, are brandishing cradle-to-grave healthcare for … Guatemala citizens, or any country’s citizens who happen to get here by any means available. American citizenship be damned.
Ludicrousness continues in the call for non-citizens to vote in local elections. Imagine the spectacle of city council elections turning into UN affairs. Citizens of Guatemala – or Honduras, El Salvador, Russia, etc. – if they account for a majority in a district due to the laxed enforcement of our immigration laws, get to tell US citizens what to do. So, nonmembers – national membership is the essence of citizenship – govern members. How does that make sense?
From now on, please clean up the language. All people are born in some country and therefore citizens of it – with but a few arcane exceptions. The anomalies are probably focused on the jet-set rich who can afford to be above it all. For the rest of us, citizenship goes with our presence on the earth. Let’s talk like we understand the fact.
CNN’s Jake Tapper interviewing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, June 27, 2019.
Remember the cry from Republicans that “character counts” during the Clinton impeachment battle? Now, nary a word of condemnation from them about Trump’s present public and past private (and not so private) behavior. Don’t worry, the Dems are a mountain of hypocrisies too. Remember Barbara Jordan (D, Tx.) and her U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform of 1994-1996? Her restrictionist views on immigration once found a home in the Democratic Party. If alive today, not only would she never make the stage in either of the recent Dem debates, she would be wiping spittle off her face after a visit to a local DC restaurant.
Don’t expect either party to offer a duplicity-free environment. Maybe it has to do with life constantly throwing monkey wrenches into our preconceived notions. What we once condemned – or loved – turns around and bites us in our posterior.
Barbara Jordan (D, Tx.)
Jordan said the following about immigration policy: “… it is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest.” Further, she wrote, “For immigration to continue to serve our national interest, it must be lawful. There are people who argue that some illegal aliens contribute to our community because they may work, pay taxes, send their children to our schools, and in all respects except one, obey the law. Let me be clear: that is not enough.” From there on, she continues to sound more and more like Trump.
The hood ornament for open borders is our giddy sophomore class president, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY). Lately, she strode into the land of Nazi-shaming about our immigrant holding centers, calling them “concentration camps”. It’s true that when a person resorts to making anything a clone of the Nazis, you’re close to admitting the sterility of your point. Game over, Alexandria.
What does she do when confronted with her banality? She dodges. In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, she was questioned, “… there were also ‘concentration camps’ under Obama and under Bill Clinton…. did you call them concentration camps at the time when Obama was president?”
Her awkward response was, “Well, at the time, I was working in a restaurant.” She tried to recover by additionally saying, “… I absolutely was outspoken against Obama’s immigration policies and the detention of families then.” He didn’t ask her about her past opposition. He queried her about equating our detention centers under Obama to what is colloquially understood to mean Auschwitz. She rhetorically zigzags like an Allied troop ship in a u-boat killing zone.
Quibbling is another favorite tactic when caught tasting your feet. She attempts to bring up a more benign and arcane definition of “concentration camp”. The over-caffeinated Ocasio-Cortez exhibits all the signs of a zealot caught being a zealot.
Baffoonishness is now a qualification for the political limelight.
Read the story of the Tapper/Cortez interview here.
