Trump – Page 12 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

April 12, 2022April 14, 2022

What Gives? Don’t We Have Anybody to Defend Free Markets?

See the source image — Tucker Carlson (l) and Bernie Sanders

Yes, we have defenders of the proven economic creed of free markets. It’s just that it’s not evident among the high-profile windbags who inhabit today’s soapboxes, left and right. Go down the list from Trump to Bernie, Tucker Carlson to Rachel Maddow, France’s Marie Le Pen to French socialists, etc. All of them built fame and fortune on bashing free markets. For them, it stinks!

We should recall that old style conservatism in Europe meant a defense of feudalism, aristocratic prerogatives, and throne and altar. The old Right came by their distrust of the then-voguish ideas of free markets of David Hume and Adam Smith honestly. Choices in life were made to fit the prevailing order for these defenders of the status quo. It worked for a time. In Britain, the Parliament had its rotten boroughs (districts dominated by powerful gentry), an omni-powerful House of Lords (till the 17th century), the preeminence of the established Church and hostility to religious upstarts, its guilds to regulate labor, and taxes and legal privileges to favor local and national producers (Corn Laws, etc.). This web of government and custom restricted personal career choices and the basic staples of life. Competition and free mobility of labor and product were anathema. As such, putrid feudalism earned its reputation.

Corn Laws 1815 — A critical illustration of the British corn laws from the 19th century.

The conservatism of Reagan was originally the platform of the 18th century British Whigs, the other party vying for public support. Liberal meant Adam Smith and free markets, not the pablum of today’s faculty lounges.

In contrast, the old Tory attitude was reflected in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, whether in the books or Peter Jackson’s film adaptation. Saruman’s and Sauron’s industrialized machine of war and subsequent despoilation of nature are the principal means to seize the ring and envelop Middle Earth in the Dark Shadow.

Catholic social teachings (Tolkien was a Catholic) abides criticisms of free marketeers. Protestantism wasn’t far behind. Concerns for the plight of the poor and condemnations of crass materialism, a la Dickens, while understandable, provided cover for government intervention. Religion wasn’t even necessary. In fact, for many critics of a free economy, the religion was left behind but the hostility remained. The modern Left was born. Marx showed how, and some Christians noticing the symmetry between their readings of the Gospel and the scribblings of this atheist revolutionary gave to us the Social Gospel movement. Marxist instigators in the raiment of the clergy became a fixture around the world.

Take Bernie Sanders, socialist and paragon of the modern Left. His faith commitment slinks into a word salad. One has to wonder if his belief is of a kind that requires nothing of him, the lazy man’s faith. He explains,

“I am not actively involved with organized religion. I think everyone believes in God in their own ways. To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.”

Previously, in response to Jimmy Kimmel, he was even vaguer: “I am what I am. And what I believe in, and what my spirituality is about, is that we’re all in this together.” Whew, hiding your beliefs so as not to be repellant to the still-sizable Christian chunk of the electorate leads to a ramble through mind-numbing Bernie circumlocutions. But it works for him to advance “Workers of the world unite!” – “we’re all tied together.”

If you think that the Bernie of the Left can’t come around to meet someone on the Right, well, I give you Tucker Carlson. Carlson’s rants against billionaires could have easily emanated from AOC’s Twitter feed, or Bernie’s stump speeches . . . and maybe did. Not to say that the corporate suits’ propagation of the vile identity politics and race essentialism isn’t deserving of condemnation, but that’s not the only cause of Tucker’s bloviating. His is AOC’s gripe: the rich exploit the worker. Watch him from 2018 castigate the rich, play lefty class warfare, and embrace Bernie, while tossing into the spiel a few throw away lines for his right-leaning (me included) Fox News audience (below).

And then we have Trump. MAGA has become a cliché, a banality meant to push the view of a floundering America in need of Making America Great Again, meaning Trump. The “Again” part is a nostalgia for the 1950’s; however, it isn’t as simple as that. The 1950’s weren’t a time without troubles: massive pockets of poverty, Jim Crow, dead lakes, filthy air, filthy streets, filthy water, and society-wide health problems.

That’s not all for MAGA. For Trumpkins, the sight of too many Toyotas on the road is proof of the death of American manufacturing. The MAGA mantra is manufacturing good, fewer manufacturing workers bad. But chants only have a superficial truth to them. The decline in factory workers is real but not overall manufacturing. Technological innovation made each worker more productive and freed up others to seek fortunes in other lines of employment, as it did at the dawn of the industrial revolution when people left the farm for jobs in the cities and subsequently created a dearth of rural workers which spurred innovation on the farm. An economic need is filled by invention in much the same manner as nature’s disposition to fill a vacuum.

Contra Trump, 2016, the year of Trump’s ascendancy, set an all-time high for American manufacturing. And manufacturing’s prospects look bright if our government gets out of the way. Off-shoring may have lost its luster as more American firms see that life in kleptocracies and totalitarian nightmares isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. In addition, off-shoring is a two-way street for foreign companies. Taiwan Semiconductor, the world’s largest chip producer, sees the Taiwan Strait as not much of a shield from an increasingly bellicose Xi and his People’s Liberation Army and Navy. They’re opening up shop in Arizona. Those Toyotas are increasingly coming off American assembly lines – the Tundra from a Texas one. Do I need to list all the other foreign nameplates?

But our government won’t stay out of the way, even for my friends on the Right. Trump has tariff-love and an unstated affection for a form of central planning called industrial policy. Enthusiasts of the so-called populist right have allied with Sanders to stiff our biggest companies with the cost of any employee on the dole. Unbeknownst to the goofs is the fact that the labor market is righting itself as companies compete for workers and come to realize that the costs of a constant churn in the payroll is deleterious to business health. The chest-pounding of Trump, Carlson, and congressional lackeys is a sideshow to more fundamental economic trends. True to form, though, that won’t stop them from taking credit for any good news.

The Right under the rubric “populists” has rediscovered its vintage inner-feudalist with their frozen-in-amber economics, but nothing at this moment can compare to the state-aggrandizement of the Left’s greenie zealotry. Here’s where the two sides part company.

Our nation could be crippled in a haze of the Left’s greenie visions. A Green New Deal (GND) in a totality or in pieces would turn off-shoring into one-way street out for anyone with a bottom line. The critical mass for the suicide pill has been building for decades. Relentless pounding in the schools and media has prepared the generational ground for greenie flights of fancy from boomers to millennials to gen z‘ers. Gavin Newsom’s “California Way” – the combination of high taxes, regulatory minefields, and gauntlet of greenie infatuations touching nearly all activity – once brought to the Beltway, will only imitate the state’s outbound migration crisis of business and the middle class on a national scale.

So, Tucker, Trump, and their sycophants will accomplish little with their tariffs, subsidies, and tax bribes if firms are forced to face a firing squad of the EPA, SEC, IRS, DOJ, and state counterparts back home. If you want more on-shoring and less off-shoring, then put Leviathan on a leash. Fact is, we’ve got a free-range Leviathan. A hellhole of Jacobins awaits them. Instead of Make America Great Again (MAGA), try Make America Competitive Again (MACA).

Congressional Republicans began the process with the tax reform of 2017 and their vetoes of Obama-era regulations by means of the Congressional Review Act. The whole country will take a leap backwards if the clumsy populist Right, intent on castigating “neocons”, joins hands with the clumsy populist Left.

Hoping for prosperity by bashing job-creators is an endorsement of masochism as an organizational principle. Slavery, besides being immoral, is the height of economic masochism: the belief that owning and beating people is sufficient to make them produce. Don’t expect the turning of the men and women of commerce into bondsmen of the state by regulation, prosecution, and taxation to be any more fruitful. Sen. Liz Warren and the Bernie bros will need a new Fugitive Slave Act to go with their wealth tax and coercive ecotopia to stop capital flight.

It comes down to the clown-theory of pain as pleasure in the junk-thought precincts of economic policy. It didn’t work for the American South and won’t work for the Right’s pining for the 1950’s or the Left’s eco-nuttery. The foolishness of economic masochism is a lesson that needs to be relearned by the Right and abandoned by the Left.

See the source image

RogerG

February 1, 2022February 1, 2022

Trump’s Disgraceful Attacks on Pence

May be an image of 3 people and people standing — Former President Donald Trump gestures during a rally in Conroe, Texas, January 29, 2022. (photo: Go Nakamura/Reuters)

To say that we are a divided country down to our most fundamental beliefs is an understatement. Blue bubbles exist in a sea of red – the crimson color referring to people more well-grounded in our civilization’s norms of common sense. As the Left becomes more provocative, some on the right have responded in kind, almost to the point of laying themselves open to demagogues. For me, the repulsiveness of the Left is not an excuse to hitch my “wagon” to a narcissistic and hubristic “horse”, giving a special meaning to a horse’s a**.

Trump’s comments at a January 29 rally in Texas brings me to this point. He’s still peddling the line that he’s a victim of a cabal depriving him of an election that he constantly professes to have won. He goes as far to say that Vice President Pence had the power to throw out the electors of selected states to give the election back to him. He yelped, “Unfortunately, he [Pence] didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!” That’s poppycock.

Why poppycock? There’s nothing in law or legal scholarship to support such a claim. Law professor and Trump lawyer John Eastman tried to establish the assertion but on later clarification said that he raised the theory for internal discussions only and called the idea “crazy” and not “viable”.

When it comes down to it, the silliness lies in a logical fallacy and affront to long-established principles of law that are written down in the Federal Rules of Evidence. Eastman’s theory (for “internal discussions” only) is based on proposals to reform the aged Electoral Count Act of 1887. Suggestions by some of Trump’s critics in the Congressional debate to clarify the vice president’s role in the law are assumed by Trump to be evidence that Pence had the power. It’s a real head-scratcher. As legal counsel, you couldn’t get this line of argument past a judge in a trial. If you persisted, you might be spending a night or two in the hoosegow.

And this is the thin reed that Trump uses to lambast Pence. This doesn’t mean that we should ever again conduct elections like we did in 2020. The panic of COVID was used to conduct a host of dubious election ploys: shot-gunning ballots through the mail, legalizing previously illegal practices like ballot harvesting, fungible ballot verification procedures, the repeal of the precinct system in anywhere-voting, unsupervised drop boxes, voting deadlines that varied with the conscience of a judge, etc. But that’s how some states decided to conduct their elections, something that’ll be hard to overturn in a federal court.

Shame on states for allowing this to happen. Shame on the hubristic and narcissistic Trump for peddling lies to his followers. Shame on his followers for allowing themselves to be manipulated so Trump can avoid the moniker of “loser”. The country deserves better.

May be a cartoon of text that says 'RAWIRS NVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY 2016 CREATORS COM BUT WE'RE NOT FLYING. WE'RE FALLING! OF COURSE YOU'RE FALLING for ME. I'M AMAZING!! WV9 AWAA @Ramireztoons www.investors.com/cartoons'

RogerG

*Thanks to the work of Andrew C. McCarthy and Philip Klein in National Review Online.

October 22, 2021October 22, 2021

Whose Side Is This Guy On?

Trump in a statement released yesterday urged Republicans to not vote in the next couple of elections if his accusations of 2020 election fraud aren’t acted upon to his likes. Here’s his released statement:

“If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented), Republicans will not be voting in ’22 and ’24. It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do.”

I’m beginning to wonder if Trump is a Democrat Trojan horse. So should you.

If you doubt where this is heading, look no further than the Jan. 5 Georgia Senate races. Putting his personal political fortunes and feelings ahead of the nation, in the runup to the vote, he pulled the same shenanigans. The result: he depressed the Republican vote and two neo-Marxists entered the U.S. Senate giving us a 50/50 Senate, VP Kamala being the tie-breaking vote, and the country on the cusp of replacing the stars and stripes with the hammer and sickle. No kidding. (Analysis of those races can be found here.)

He was silent on the subject of election fraud . . . till he lost! Some states instituted pandemic election procedures before the 2020 election, and where were Trump’s lawyers? Nowhere. After the election, some states reformed these procedures, Georgia and Texas being the most notable. Others are working on it. And the guy is still torpedoing Republican efforts to pull us back from the brink, trying to repeat the Jan. 5 fiasco on a national scale.

Trump could rescue the donkey party – America’s Socialist Party – from oblivion starting in Virginia and into 2022 and 2024. He’s the best weapon that the Democrats have. We might have to look forward to a bankrupted nation ruled by a Supreme Soviet for the foreseeable future. Thank you, Donald J. Trump.

Unless our dyed-in-the-wool Trump voter starts to behave more like a responsible citizen than a member of a cult, prepare for USA, RIP.

RogerG

September 19, 2021September 19, 2021

Progressivism Is the Problem

James Madison, Federalist 51:
“In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.”

One of the banal buzzwords in common usage about our Constitutional government is “coequal”, as in coequal branches. It’s drummed into the head of the kiddies and is trotted out ad nauseum by the over-exposed telegenic punditry. Part of the problem lies in other banalities like “checks and balances”, with emphasis on “balances”, that reinforces the mischaracterization of our government.

Think about it. In its simplest and correct form, our republic is composed of an executive to carry out the laws, a court system to adjudicate disputes according to the law, and a legislature to legislate, make the law. Look at it. The first two act on the law that is made elsewhere, in Congress. Constitutionally, they can do little unless there is a law made by . . . Congress. Sorry, that ain’t “coequal”. If the infantry is the queen of battle, the Congress is meant to be the queen of governance in a republic.

So, what has happened to Congress, it being the weak sister in the triumvirate? Nothing, except what Woodrow Wilson and FDR did to it. You might say that they ran at full speed with Hamilton’s “energy in the executive” (Federalist 70) toward progressivism’s dream of the big state, leaving the 535 squabbling inhabitants of the Capitol Building in the dust. What started with the Wilson/FDR imperial presidency, who then badgered Congress into effectively dispensing with a sensible reading of the Commerce Clause, made its way into an imperial judiciary who regularly legislates from the bench. Congress quickly became the footstool to a hyper-president and a non-entity to our uber-judges.

There’s more to the story. The “more” concerns the progressivism that’s in the head of all self-proclaimed liberals from the last couple of decades of the 19th century to the present. Deep in their cranium is IMPATIENCE to accomplish great and heroic deeds. They’re frustrated with the divided powers and checks and would like nothing better than to dispense with the whole racket by interpreting it out of existence, which they’ve done with the complicity of the Courts.

In that, they’ve got a lot in common with the communists. Communists are impatient socialists, and not at all receptive to the cautious instincts of their Fabian/Menshevik brethren. No need to wait for electoral success when a gun will do the trick right now.

As an aside, maybe this explains the socialist Bernie Sanders’s attraction to the Democratic Party, to caucus with them and seek their party’s presidential nomination. At an intuitive level, the Democratic Party’s progressivism and international socialism are kindred spirits. They are drawn like moths to the light bulb of the big state to accomplish great and good things. The quicker, the better.

One of the chief results of this turn of affairs is a Congress that can’t even pass a budget, their principal power of the purse. The presidency thrives in the Congressional chaos. The national government ends up running on continuing resolutions to avoid the stink of obvious Congressional impotence. These mega-bills carry forward the huge junkyard of federal spending, with a plus-up for inflation and some additional items heaped on the pile. Junk becomes a forever-thing. Also, buried in the all the junk are the many loopholes exploited by presidents.

The Courts are in their own progressive universe, not having to worry about legislative impediments to the agenda or impeachment, owing to Congress’s barrenness. Yet, reform of the Courts did happen despite Congress’s infirmity. It took some doing in the Senate and abnormal clear-sightedness by the normally bombastic Trump but the majority of black-robed potentates became a majority of Constitutionalists.

The same Trump who was instrumental in helping to herd the Courts back into their proper Constitutional sphere also exhibited many of the same power reflexes of his progressive forbearers. By fiat, for example, he shifted Pentagon money for bases to money for his wall. Not that we don’t need a wall. For heaven’s sake, we need something to manage the human tidal wave who’ve discovered the American minimum wage to be professional income in their homelands without air-conditioning.

Honduran migrants take part in a caravan heading to the US, on the road linking Ciudad Hidalgo and Tapachula, Chiapas state, Mexico, on October 21, 2018. (Photo by Pedro Pardo / AFP)

One’s view of potentates in the Oval Office spins on whether they’re your potentate or someone else’s. Caught up in the right’s frenzy for Trump, some conservative pundits became Trump pundits. To be clear, the terms “conservative” and “Trump” aren’t synonymous. Catching the “populist” wind in their sails, they turned on a dime on issues such as the Iraq War, free trade, and big-state entitlements for their audience-constituents. They became big-state activists like many Democrat caucus members. It’s just a big state for your side.

Thus, in lock-step defense of Trump, they expounded on how well “Trump ran the country” or how well “Trump ran the economy”. Right there, they fall into the progressive trap. A real conservative, not a Trumpkin, would cringe at such language. The president doesn’t run the country or economy. He’s elected to only run the executive branch. In our country, the people run the country and economy (a free market), not a histrionic huckster from Queens or a doddering fool beholden to the revolutionaries in his party.

We’d be well-served if that message made its way to the people. But, alas, that popular brain is taught to venerate Saint Woodrow and Archangel Franklin. We can’t get past the progressive hokum to appreciate the blessings of debate, dialogue, and compromise in a fractured society like ours, something a Congress is meant to channel. It can be slow and messy, but at least we’ll have our rights, religion, and property instead of losing them to “energy in the executive” or “energy in the judge’s chambers”.

To put it bluntly, progressivism is anti-democratic, anti-republic, and anti-Constitution. Progressives want to take the Elastic Clause and make every place that they control as elastic in power as possible. After all, it’s the ends that matter to them, not the means. Why worry about those bickering mouths at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue? It saves time and effort to simply saddle up the black robes and chief executive to build the new world. Get ‘er done is the operative principle.

None of this is explained to the kiddies or adults. Don’t expect it from the schools. We reason from unexamined progressive assumptions to . . . whatever dominates Twitter and our other screens. It’s easy to be tossed hither and yon if you’re not grounded in the basics of our Constitutional order.

Progressivism set the table for this distortion of our consensual mode of governance. Heck, for the progs, it doesn’t even have to be consensual. An all-powerful EPA, ATF, IRS, FEC, SEC, FTC, etc., works fine for them.

RogerG

September 11, 2021September 11, 2021

9/11/2021, An Eviscerated America

Eviscerate: verb; to deprive something of its essential content.

Well, here we are, 9/11 twenty years later. The event is a two-decade saga bookended by an aerial assault killing nearly 3,000 people and an ignominious August 2021 retreat from Afghanistan. 9/11 is more than just that horrible day at the start of the new millennium. The saga as it played out came to signify something far more disturbing. We are no longer a nation capable of great, heroic deeds. We are eviscerated of moral fortitude. There’s nothing left in the tank of courage in the face of pain and adversity. Yes, we might never forget the day, but we also don’t really care enough to deal with a messy world with thousands of killers running around in it. They, the killers, have the fortitude; we don’t seem to have much of it. How did we get to this point?

Of course, not all of us are so enfeebled. It’s just that it’s easier today to cobble together an electoral majority to cut and run. The 2020 election gave us two bugout enthusiasts at the top of the ballot.

What has drained us of that moral fortitude? Simply put, our brains have been crafted to not handle it. On the one hand, for most of us, the world beyond a person is the one presented by Hollywood. Honestly, people don’t read, really read and contemplate; movies, audio-visual is the talk of the town. In an earlier era of cinema, war is capture the flag. In addition, today, the prevalent story line is one of oppression. Combine the two and you have a debilitating impatience. And why defend a cruel nation with a cruel people anyway? After a few decades of nearly non-stop self-flagellation, who would want to come to its defense?

Hollywood, a main culprit in the slide, hasn’t been kind to adult reasoning. American cinema reached its apogee in the runup to World War II and its aftermath. WWII on the big screen and tv was implanted in a generation’s mind to such an extent that all subsequent wars were unfavorably compared to it. But what do you do in a world where your enemies have no uniforms and no borders and capital city to invade and seize? Religious, militant, and ideological movements aren’t defined by the attributes of a nation-state. Capture the flag seems hardly appropriate when a walk through a South Chicago neighborhood on a Saturday night is the more accurate metaphor.

On the international stage, organized murderous rage is more than a crime. It’s a national security threat, as we should well know. It’s an international crime wave demanding attention. Think of it as law enforcement without a Fifth Amendment and the Miranda warnings. Intelligence gathering, training up cadres in the neighborhoods, raids, and support for allies over the long haul shadow hunting down the mafia in drawn-out domestic law enforcement crusades. It’s a dirty business. We don’t have the stomach for it because we lack the persistence. Fighting organized international terrorism lacks the visual glory of victorious columns entering Germany.

Our entertainment industry certainly created false expectations about war, but it also worked to define us as a people in the most horrible way possible. As Christianity has receded, a racialist Marxism filled the vacuum. America as the oppressor of the “other” became settled doctrine throughout the culture. What started as the ramblings of Herbert Marcuse, C. Wright Mills, and others of the 1950’s, and continued into the 1960’s in the Port Huron Statement of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), eventually funneled its way into the faculty lounge. Tweed and tenure replaced long hair and jeans. The line of descent extended into all branches of the cultural commanding heights: business, education, entertainment, publishing, the press, fashion. The beautiful people had a neat set of fashionable views to foist on their fans; Big Sports, Big Soft Drinks, Big Airlines had a rationale for boycotting Georgia.

And the Democratic Party became the institutional focal point for the revolution. It’s one thing to organize conclaves to plan protests; it’s quite another to have the full force of one of the two great political parties to push the radical dogmas. The Biden campaign became the avatar for the neo-Marxist program. Once in power, radicalism became policy.

It permeates everywhere in DC. The normal bastions of American exceptionalism like the military showed signs of the corruption. Can anyone forget the comments of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, before Congress in June? He sounded like the academic half-wit Ibram X. Kendi or AOC when he confessed a desire to “understand white rage”. There can be nothing as dispiriting to the ranks as being called a mass of racists by their principal commander.

No, he can’t squirm out of it by saying that he was referring to the academic study of CRT. His comment assumed the factual presence of “white rage”, not the study of its hypothetical existence. Besides, it’s part of the heated political rhetoric of the radical left that has a home in the media and donkey party. Milley proved that he is a sellout to the radical program, and he may be proof of the radicalization in the command structure and the deep penetration of the radicalism in the Pentagon’s training academies. The crushing of national morale goes alongside the crushing of morale in the ranks of the people responsible for keeping the nation safe.

All of this has taken place in the span of the twenty years since 9/11. The bugout from Afghanistan was disgraceful. It’s hard to tell what Trump would have done if he had been the 2020 victor, despite the unconvincing after-the-fact denials by him and his apologists. There are too many Trump statements from his 2016 campaign, presidency, and the pre-August period to deny that Trump was anything but a loud devotee of withdrawal.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (C-L) meets with Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (C-R) in the Qatari capital Doha on November 21, 2020, (Photo by Patrick Semansky / POOL / AFP)

It’s hypothetical that he would have done it better. If anything, Trump and his people are proving the validity of Kennedy’s famous cliché after the Bay of Pigs disaster: “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” And nothing else.

The American people boxed themselves into a corner. Or more correctly, they allowed themselves to be boxed into the corner. A steady drumbeat to get out for over 5 years will have an effect on opinion polls.

But if you think about it, if it’s correct to assume that Trump would have done it better, it’s equally hypothetical to conclude that he would have left America in a better strategic position even if he won in 2020. A withdrawal is a withdrawal, and there’s nothing in the public record to indicate that he would have left a residual force. Everything coming out of his mouth and Twitter feed was a declaration to get everyone out. If anything, we hypothetically might have avoided the chaos at Kabul airport, but we still would have abandoned the country to the Taliban. Absent the steel of American logistics and air support, Afghan forces likely would have recapitulated their collapse under the guise of Trump. Afghanistan reverts back to 9/10, the Taliban and their movement’s deeply interconnected cousins – al-Qaeda and ISIS – rule the land, and America lost an important chess piece in the big game of national security.

So, here we are on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. The Taliban and their nest of jihadist allies are in charge. In a recent broadcast on Afghanistan’s national RTA television station, the Taliban celebrated our defeat with a honorific of the 9/11 attacks as “the result of the United States’ policy of aggression against the Muslim world.” They celebrate the “martyrs”. For us, we go into mourning for our dead, as all those who fought, bled, and died in that God-forsaken place must come to grips with personal sacrifices that were diminished by power-hungry politicos who have sold the country on the non-sequitur of retreat-as-victory.

We ran and all we have to show for it is mourning at memorials, the memory of a disgraceful exit, and graves and scars for our wonderful veterans. And the world after the retreat is a far more dangerous place for America and Americans.

RogerG

September 1, 2021September 1, 2021

Is Democracy a Ship of Fools?

Biden and his announced cabinet, January 2021.

It’s August 31, September 1 in Afghanistan, and we’re gone, lock, stock and barrel. Biden, Trump, and the primetime lineup of Fox News got what they wanted.

The “Ship of Fools” allegory is from Plato’s “The Republic” in which a ship is run by a dysfunctional crew. Democracy can magnify the “fools” presence among the personnel. But so do the other forms of governance: the “fools” can be a subservient peasant class and their overseers born into privilege, or a group of belligerent oafs, fired up by half-witted utopian visions, and gaining power through the barrel of a gun. Such has been the lot of mankind. We should know this oft-repeated story well.

Look at what democracy gave us in November 2020. A majority rejected the man-of-many-mean-tweets and narcissistic demagogue (a tautology?), and chose a doddering old fool, obsequious to the ruling radical left of his party. The result is the ruination that the radical left has always given the people who sadly have to live under their edicts. Prime example: the Afgan bugout.

I turn to H.L. Mencken for sarcastic aphorisms on democracy. Here’s some for your edification (courtesy of Mark J. Perry of AEI). Enjoy.

H. L. Mencken. (Henry L. Mencken.), a writer for the Baltimore Sun from 1905 to 1948. (Baltimore Sun Staff File Photo by Robert F. Kniesche). (Baltimore Examiner and Washington Examiner OUT ORG XMIT: BAL0909101149453148)

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Democracy, too, is a religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. (my personal favorite)
If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
All government, of course, is against liberty.

That about sums it up. Elections are just as able to hand command of the rudder to fools as any other method.

RogerG

August 28, 2021August 29, 2021

We Shouldn’t Lie to Ourselves

Zalmay Khalilzad (l), US negotiator at the Doha conference, with the Taliban representative signing the Doha Agreement, Feb. 29, 2020.

A suicide bomber killed 13 American soldiers, wounding 18, while defending the perimeter around HKI airport in Kabul on Thursday 8/26. The bloodbath included 95 Afghans killed and more than 100 wounded among the teeming thousands feverishly trying to get out of a now Taliban-ruled country. It’s heart-wrenching but the bloodbath both illuminates and obscures the key reason for our presence in Afghanistan. We were in Afghanistan to kill and obstruct people who have a nasty habit of mass-murdering moms, dads, and children as they go shopping, and to work and school. Somehow, we forgot it.

The terror bombing at HKI Airport in Kabul, August 26, 2021.

It’s easy to become wearisome of something when you’ve forgotten its original purpose, or have been raised on fantasies over the course of three administrations of it being a Denmark in the Hindu-Kush. The mission has been muddied and politicians, the people we elected D to R, have been the most ardent purveyors of the slinging. Conversely, and more prominent over the most recent few years, a steady drumbeat of “forever wars”, left to right, continually pummeled the nation and so overwhelmed it that the 2020 November election became a contest between two withdrawal-enthusiasts.

In the end, Biden gave us a deadly debacle, a forever-stain on the country, and coincidentally, if you think about it, a stain on the politically opportunistic cliché of “forever wars” popularized by Trump. Would Trump have led us into a similar drubbing had he won in 2020? It’s hard to say, but his after-the-fact big talk that “we wouldn’t have done that” isn’t reassuring in light of the public record.

I can’t speak for the left, but we on the right shouldn’t lie, least of all to ourselves. History will not be kind.

The February 2020 Doha Agreement that Trump and his people describe as “conditions-based” was only ink on paper to the Taliban (taqiyya: lying and deception are justified in dealing with infidels). The “conditions” – break from al-Qaeda, cease attacks, and bargain with the Afghan government – were in the Agreement’s hidden annexes. The Taliban didn’t think enough of the promises to publicly admit to them. The Taliban didn’t get around to starting negotiations with the Afghan government till September 2020, and then only half-heartedly. As for the break with al-Qaeda, a Defense IG report in August 2020 confirmed that the break hadn’t taken place. So much for the much-vaunted calibration of US actions to conditions on the ground. The withdrawal of US troops continued apace in 2020.

The most damaging aspects of the agreement to American interests were openly declared, such as the withdrawal date of May 1, 2021 for all US forces. I repeat “all”. Foreshadowing what Biden did – albeit horribly – the Trump/Taliban agreement reads,

“The United States is committed to withdraw from Afghanistan all military forces of the United States, its allies, and Coalition partners, including all non-diplomatic civilian personnel, private security contractors, trainers, advisors, and supporting services personnel within fourteen (14) months following announcement of this agreement [i.e., by May 1, 2021].”

This may come as a surprise to the Trump brigade but Trump didn’t possess a crystal ball from throughout 2020 to before Biden’s deadly fiasco this August. Trump was singing a different tune before the current hot potato. Going back to the period of his ardent efforts in 2020 to reach agreement with the Taliban, the group and its terrorist allies continued their attacks before the ink was dry – in fact, before they even found the pens and long after. A Defense Department IG report covering January to March 2020 stated, “Taliban violence continued at high levels, even during a negotiated weeklong reduction in violence that led to the agreement’s signing . . . . The Taliban escalated violence further after signing the agreement.”

The boast that we hadn’t lost a single soldier since the ceremony rings hollow since the thugs didn’t want to upset the skedaddle then underway and instead turned their guns on the Afghans. And they continued to do so throughout 2020. In spite of the violence, Trump persisted in reducing troop levels from 13,000 to 2,500 by the end of his term in January 2021. Trump is now a tough talker but “conditions” in real time didn’t dissuade him from negotiating with the officially-designated terror group and fulfilling their desire of getting us out. On that, the terror group and Trump agreed.

What of those released prisoners at Bagram when Biden abandoned the base? It was an abomination . . . like Trump’s agreement strong-armed the Afghan government to turn loose 5,000 in 2020. How many of those returned to the fight to maim and kill more Afghans, and maybe later to show up as suicide bombers of American soldiers and Afghans ringing the lonely and isolated outpost of an airport in the middle of Kabul in August 2021?

No wonder Afghan president Ghani split with bags of cash. Cowardly? Yes, but I understand his logic. Why should he stick his neck out if two successive administrations were set on abandoning his country? American resolve had evaporated under the barrage of two presidents bent on getting out. The Doha Agreement was strictly a pact between the US and the officially-designated terror group. The Afghans were left on their own to bargain with the wolves. The aforementioned Trump-approved jailbreak of 5,000 and the cutout of the Afghan government from the negotiations was heartily opposed by Ghani in 2020. He could see where this was heading back when the orange man was loudly lambasting “forever wars” and American policy began to reflect the smear.

Do you think that Trump let up on the rhetorical heat after leaving office? Not a chance. In April, Biden set a deadline of September 11 for the pull out. Three days later, Trump berated Biden for not doing it sooner by saying, “. . . we can and should get out earlier . . . .” Further writing, “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do. I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible.”

The big question posing as the elephant in the room is the one about the wisdom of a pullout to begin with. Right now, and excusably so, our eyes are glued to the unfolding debacle at Kabul airport. It’s contemptible and sufficient grounds for a presidential resignation. Dramatic as that is, we should not let it cause us to ignore what we are leaving behind. Do we really want another terrorism-compatible vacuum as existed on 9/10?

An easy out for Trump and Biden is to blame the Afghan leaders and soldiers. Both have smeared the Afghans. Neither mentions Biden’s withdrawal of the support that kept the Afghan air and ground forces in the field of battle. The subsequent collapse of the Afghan military is too easy a plum for Trump not to use to excuse his own skedaddle infatuations. It’s a convenient alibi for Biden for obvious reasons. Anyway, tarring the victim country makes it easy to not have to think about what we’re leaving behind, a Taliban/al-Qaeda/ISIS playground.

Children trained in the use of AK-47’s at an al-Qaeda at a camp in Afghanistan.

Which brings me back to remembering our original reason for invading the country: remove the Taliban, keep them out of power, and kill terrorists. The nature of the danger of terrorism means that it’ll be a threat into the foreseeable future. It’s like crime. You reduce it, not eliminate it, which means that you maintain precinct stations in high crime areas. If you tire of the war on terror, then you should be in favor of defund the police.

Trump and Biden, in the end, are unknowingly pushing for the international equivalent of Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, LA, and any Democrat-run big city in America. All I can say is this: keep a wary eye on the skies, water supply, and any place with a large gathering of people. Thank you, Biden and Trump.

RogerG

August 25, 2021August 25, 2021

The Trump Anchor

While thinking about the return of Trump – he’s already conducting campaign rallies – I ran into Peter Robinson’s essay of vignettes on the political, social, and economic morass that is California. Robinson was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and is currently the Murdoch Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution. No RHINO this guy.

His story of the predicament of Mike Garcia (R) in California’s 25th Congressional District is illuminating.

Rep. Mike Garcia (R) of California’s 25th congressional district.

Garcia is the son of Mexican immigrants, an Annapolis grad, flew two dozen missions in the Iraq War, and is overflowing in charisma and oratory skills. The 25th is tailored for Republicans to be legitimately competitive (D 38%, R 32%, NPP 25%). It like much of the state has been trending increasingly Democrat but is an easier get than most of the other districts on the coastal plain. The district centers on Simi Valley, the home of the Reagan Library for good reason. Yet, a Democrat, Katie Hill, took the seat in 2018 but had to resign in scandal in 2019. In a special election, Garcia took the seat back for Republicans, and barely won reelection in 2020 by 333 votes out of 339,000 cast. Why so tough, after all, in a competitive district with a great candidate?

As I’ve said repeatedly, I voted for Trump twice and would do it a third time if he is the 2024 nominee. The Democrats are too wretched. But campaigns like economics are decided in the margin, that space where voters or consumers could go either way, or simply leave a line on the ballot unmarked. Looking at the 2020 result, I can only conclude that Garcia was running with the Trump anchor chained to his ankle in a Republican-competitive district that Biden won by 10%. Trump is wildly popular among the rabid 24% of the electorate, but he’s highly toxic to a good chunk of the rest, especially in California. For any candidate like Hillary, Biden, or Trump, how many of the getables are willing to engage in hold-the-nose? For Garcia, thank the Almighty that enough were willing to ticket-split.

Holding the nose is an epidemic when the choices were Hillary, Biden, or Trump. Just looking at Trump, his ribald, brutal verbal ticks appeal to crowds not offended in bars and locker rooms. His approach is as Gutfeld would say, “direct”. But depth of understanding is shallow to such as extent that he ran the executive branch in a naively “direct” manner in, for instance, personal overtures to the world’s pariahs like Kim Jong-un. If you agree with Trump that foreigners are screwing us, Trump scraps the Trans-Pacific Partnership whose purpose was to create the commercial foundation for an alignment of Asian and Pacific countries against a resurgent and hegemonic Red China. Don’t like the “forever wars”? He’ll negotiate a pull out. Direct and understandable, yes. Effective in the long run . . . ?

He began his most recent rally in Alabama with Patton’s speech at the beginning of the movie “Patton”. How ironic. Scott’s Patton regales the crowd with Americans “staying out of the war as a bunch of horse dung”; “Americans love the sting of battle”; and “. . . making the other poor bastard die for his country”. It was lost on the rally-goers that Patton’s call to arms and martial virtue doesn’t comport with Trump’s pull-out fixation – essentially a negotiated runaway – and his drumbeat against “forever wars”.

Bar-room bouncers having to deal with roadhouse fights aren’t likely to deal with nuance, and the bouncer Trump wouldn’t practice it anyway. As president and politician on the stomp, he plays checkers as the CCP is immersed in chess.

Playing checkers gave us the Doha Agreement. Biden doesn’t play checkers since he doesn’t understand the colors of the pieces. Translating, Trump was getting to the king line on the checkerboard with his Doha pact; Biden is in the sand box; and the CCP is in the chess room with the rest of the geeks.

Pompeo and Taliban leaders in Doha, early 2020.

Trump got his withdrawal agreement which would have produced the loss of an operating base on China’s western flank and key on-the-ground assets in a strategic location to counter Islamofascism, protect our allies (read Israel and the Gulf Arabs), and kill those who have killed so many of us. To borrow from Patton, long distance, over-the-horizon diligence is “horse dung”. Once you’re out, you’re out, and you’re not going back in . . . unless we lose another 3,000 in the American heartland.

Biden achieved Trump’s endgame with a whole lot of chaos while destroying US credibility for a generation or more. Trump would have done a better withdrawal but still manufacture a vacuum in Afghanistan. All the rhetoric about “forever wars”, lack of fighting willingness of the Afghan forces, and Afghan government corruption is beside the point if the Islamo-crazies flock to the feudal Hindu-Kush, as they did before under the watchful eyes of the Taliban, to have the tranquility to coordinate mass-casualty events among the Kaffir (an insulting term used by some Muslims for non-Muslims).

That’s what is so amazing about Trump’s use of the Patton speech. Patton was calling men to arms. Trump was calling the nation to get out. Biden couldn’t get either right and gave us a cluster-f@#*. Get prepared for a perpetually heightened terror threat level to go with the non-stop COVID hysteria. Can a civilization withstand such a water-boarding? I guess that we’ll see.

RogerG

August 24, 2021August 24, 2021

Lara Logan Gets It Right in “Sacrificing Afghanistan”, aired Sunday, 8/22/21

Lara Logan interviews Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh in “Sacrificing Afghanistan” on Fox News.

Below is guest Lara Logan on Fox Business from Friday, 8/19/21.

This is my review of the current scene in light of her insights:

Yes, we are horribly, horribly governed, and have been for quite some time. 2016 brought in the orange man and his wretched rhetoric of “forever wars”, while getting some things right. I’ll give him that. But the guy wanted out, trying to peremptorily get out of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan as if by doing so, we’ll cure the opioid epidemic in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. 2020 brought us a mentally incontinent and doddering fool, beholden to the powerful and growing neo-Marxist wing of the Democratic Party. The only real difference on Afghanistan between the two administrations is the difference between a smoother and impulsive bugout. The big, big question, heartily avoided, is the one over the wisdom of a pull out in the first place, no matter how conducted.

To be clear, I don’t get my cues on issues from celebrities on Fox News or talk radio. Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham chanting a common line matter not a twit to me when it sounds like so much nonsense.

And nonsense is everywhere in today’s political cauldron. The reason is obvious: our political discussion is dominated by cultists. Chirping hackneyed lines like “forever wars” or “respect of the world community”, they bring catastrophes in tow. We are experiencing it now, and will in the future in grotesque episodes when scenes from Kabul fade from the news cycle.

Cultists are famous for denying reality in the service of an imaginary one. For instance, the Democratic Party’s neo-Marxist cult has embarked on a great smear job of the country: it’s systemically racist. It’s easy to bug out of Afghanistan if you believe the country is evil, love and reciprocity lie in the heart of fanatical jihadists, and the revolution at home is far more important. At root, that’s how we get to the abandonment of Bagram Air Base and our Afghan allies in the middle of the night and the chaos begins to pour down on Kabul and the rest of the country.

The Trump cult has its own dispiriting lunacies. Cultists wanted a personality, not policies, and got one in the bravado and bombast of the man from Mara Lago. As long as he remained in your face, he was loved by a zealous following to the ends of the earth. So, the loaded jargon of “forever wars” filtered from his microphone to the broadcast studio and became a mysteriously accepted doctrine.

His appointees, having to translate his rhetorical burps into policy, engineered the Doha Agreement (Feb. 2020). Now, they’re trying to clean the fingerprints from the established policy in paper by hitting the airwaves to say, “We were tough”. Tough about what? Agreeing to get out, which was the great prize for the jihadists while fully disheartening to our Afghan allies? The scenes of Pompeo hobnobbing with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, speak volumes. It, like Biden’s horrendously precipitous skedaddle, shouldn’t ever be forgotten.

Combine Logan’s program with Levin’s on Sunday night and we get a fuller picture of the debacle. Levin interviewed Colonel Richard Kemp, commander of British forces in Afghanistan. He insists that there’s enough blame to lap on everyone involved, including the Europeans. Kemp justly reserves special contempt for Biden: Biden’s behavior is deserving of a court martial. But he also rebuts the rubbish coming out of the mouths of telegenic anchors and hosts from one end of the spectrum to the next. He has great respect for the Afghans, for many fought bravely until air and logistical support vanished in the abrupt surrender of Bagram upon, amazingly, the insistence of the Taliban according to Logan

Discussion between Mark Levin (l) and Colonel Richard Kemp on Levin’s show.

Kemp’s dire warnings about the future clearly draw into question the more fundamental insistence of pulling out to begin with. The damage to America’s reputation will reverberate on America’s global allies as they seek cover under less hospitable umbrellas. Now, chew on that for awhile.

RogerG

August 21, 2021August 29, 2021

A Butt-Protection Exercise

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meeting with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, now the Taliban’s de facto political leader, in Doha, Qatar, in September 2020. (Photo: U.S. Department of State/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Now that Afghanistan is collapsing into what it was before – a terrorist Disneyland – the administration responsible for the bugout is in hiding like the thousands of Americans stuck in Kabul, and the people from the previous one are all over the airwaves in a butt-protection exercise. The question before the house isn’t only the wisdom of Biden’s wholesale surrender and run for the hills. It’s also about all that led to the bugout, including the sanity of any kind of pullout, smooth or otherwise. Everyone from Trump’s hawking of the rhetoric of “never-ending wars” in 2015-20 to Biden and his abrupt skedaddle should be in the dock for cross-examination. Admittedly, Biden and his people should be under the most scrutiny, but save some for Trump.

Look, I voted for Trump twice because the Democrats are too despicable, and in the hope that his worst bombast could be mitigated to get the big things right. He did right on borders, taxes, judges, energy, and ending the careers of al-Baghdadi and Soleimani. But troubling signs were in the air. The infantile abuse heaped on John McCain in 2015 (“I like people that weren’t captured.”), who was tortured in the Hanoi Hilton as Trump was busy filling out deferments, was absolutely repugnant, and a sign of things to come.

John McCain spent 5 and a half years in Hoa Lo Prison, the “Hanoi Hilton”. Here he is with a broken arm being examined by a prison medic.

As it turned out, the “never-ending wars” lingo wasn’t empty political rhetoric for the man from Mara Lago. He wanted to bug out of Syria and turn over the north to Erdoğan’s Turkey so they could rebuild the Ottoman Empire, only to be dissuaded by people with a better grasp on reality. He was chomping at the bit to jump ship on Afghanistan, only to be held back by the adults in the room once again. The guy seemed to be hell-bent on rebuilding an 18th-century fortress America, a time when it took a month after the Battle of New Orleans (fought Jan. 8, 1815) to deliver notice of the signing of the Peace of Ghent ending the war (signed Dec. 24, 1814). Pan-Am and underwater cables ended the era of defense starting at the edge of the continental shelf. Not so in Trump’s stunted mind.

Au contraire, Tucker Carlson, “oceans matter” . . . only in the 18th century. In an age of satellites, fiber-optics, vibrant international trade and travel, and when a missile only requires a booster, oceans only carry a warning not to swim alone across one. Heck, oceans haven’t even inhibited the flood of migrants from the rest of the continents at a time when our southern border is an open sieve.

Butt-protection is the order of the day when a Biblical calamity is taking shape in the land that time forgot. Biden and his people only further soil themselves every time they come out of hiding. Trump and his people show up in friendly venues to hawk the line, “It wasn’t us. We would have conducted a better bugout”.

For instance, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made an appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show Friday, 8/20. I listened to the whole thing. It was pure butt-protection.

He made assurances that Trump threatened the Taliban if they broke the Doha Agreement (signed Feb. 2020), which might have worked since no American soldier had been killed since early 2020. That just means that the hooligans were biding their time waiting for the American skedaddle. It’s what all scheming thugs do when the good guys agree to abandon the field on date certain. They wait for the date certain, plan and stockpile arms in the meantime, and then pounce. Doha wasn’t about leaving behind a country absent the terrorist Disneyland. It was about getting us out, period. It was the announcement that we were reverting back to 9/10.

The throw away line of leaving behind a residual force upon leaving office wasn’t particularly reassuring. Remember, the deadline concerned getting everyone out – granted, with our equipment and civilians in tow. The Taliban should be good with that. They’ll be free to hobnob around in parts of the country under their control, maybe the whole country, with their Al-Qaeda friends after date certain to terrorize girls, boys, women who wear makeup, and eventually get around to killing the bountiful infidels beyond their borders.

Pompeo in the interview made many utterances on the untrustworthiness of the Taliban so much so that threats of slaughtering the villages of Taliban leaders if they broke the agreement were thought necessary. Question: If they were that dishonest, why were you negotiating with them in the first place? Answer: Trump wanted us out. Doha was recklessness on paper.

In that, John Bolton, Nikki Haley, and H.R. McMaster agree. It was recklessness on paper. In an age before the mean tweets and the hawking of isolationism, these people were considered wise on the right. Then came the pop jargon of “neo-con” as a pejorative by Mick Jagger, Donald J. Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham. If you’re wondering, here’s a sample from Jagger’s “Sweet Neo-Con”:

“You call yourself a Christian, I call you a hypocrite/ You call yourself a patriot. Well, I think your [sic] are full of sh*t!… How come you’re so wrong, my sweet neo-con.”

I wonder if Carlson and Ingraham downloaded the tune with excitable, trembling fingers.

All the stipulations in the Doha Agreement are meaningless if the gangsters can’t be trusted and are simply waiting to pounce. Conditions like the Taliban reaching agreement with the Afghan government and promises to prevent ISIS and Al-Qaeda from taking root in the country would be worthless. Remember, today’s catastrophe hadn’t happened yet and Trump clearly wanted out at the time. Today’s after-the-fact assurances by Trump, Pompeo, et al, of toughness ring hollow. It sounds like so much of a butt-protection exercise.

Others warned Trump at the time of Doha. UN ambassador Nikki Haley resigned during the negotiations saying, “Negotiating with the Taliban is like dealing with the devil.” Lisa Curtis, former national Security adviser who sat alongside our envoy Zalmay Khalilzad during the negotiations said, “The Doha agreement was a very weak agreement, and the U.S. should have gained more concessions from the Taliban.” During negotiations, Trump frequently called for troop pullouts. That’s right, get your deadly foe to agree by disarming yourself. That won’t end well.

Bolton and McMaster are scathing in their indictment of Trump, and rightly so. McMaster: “Our secretary of state [Mike Pompeo] signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban. This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves.” Bolton: “Had Trump been re-elected, he’d be doing the same thing. On this question of withdrawal from Afghanistan, Trump and Biden are like Tweedledee and Tweedledum.”

Drop the lefty jargon of neo-con-as-pejorative. It gets us nowhere because political rhetoric is no substitute for sound policy. A real America First strategy realizes that some of our enemies don’t wear uniforms and are hell-bent on killing us, all of us. The killers don’t reside here, but can, plan and coordinate mass-casualty operations in safe redoubts in countries that we abandoned, are well-stocked with weapons that we abandoned to them, and now no one is safe. We’re back to 9/10. Thank you, Biden . . . and Trump.

RogerG