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How to Ruin a First Lady’s Reputation

Barack and Michelle Obama superimposed over their plush Martha’s Vineyard estate.

First ladies normally leave office with high approvals because they aren’t sullied by the messiness of politics and are normally remembered for their high-minded crusades. Think of Nancy Reagan (just say no), Laura Bush (literacy), the pre-activist Michelle Obama (child nutrition), and Melania Trump (child well-being). When they choose to get into the muck, however, you realize that they were willing participants in a four-year choreographed charade – or 8 years in Michelle’s case. Michelle Obama, very rich and secure, residing in her $11.75 million Martha’s Vineyard 7,000 square foot estate, lectures us on our incipient racism and her opponents’ vileness. It’s beyond despicable; it’s ignominious and disgusting. She’s proof that elections can bring out the worst in us. It is doing it do her.

The discreditable side of Michelle Obama has been volubly evident this election. Her latest podcast monologue (see below) is chock full of partisan rhetoric, the kind of bombast that can be easily dismissed by anyone with a brain.

She blithely blasts Trump for no COVID plan. No one has a “plan” till they know the nature of the problem. By her measure, neither did her beloved husband during the Ebola, SARS, swine flu (H1N1) and Zika outbreaks. Biden advisor at the time, Ron Klain, recalled about H1N1,

“It is purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history. It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It just had to do with luck.”

Not surprisingly, Michelle didn’t say a word about her husband’s neglect of the mandated stockpiles of PPE and medical supplies such as ventilators.

Plans don’t take shape till you know the disposition of the enemy. The liberation of Europe in 1944 couldn’t begin until we had some idea of where the Germans were and their capabilities. COVID-19 was special, very special. It’s identification, transmissibility, spread, symptoms, and lethality were unknown in January to … everybody! Once we began to know the enemy, travel bans, quarantines, lockdowns, expansion of medical facilities, therapeutics, and a Manhattan Project for a vaccine were pushed into place. Her podcast harangue was an empty rant without benefit of any suggestions for how she, or Biden, would do it differently. If you buy her balderdash, then, please, for your own sake, stay away from real estate offices. Michelle, you should know better.

Then she goes into a rant about Trump’s mask-wearing tendencies. Apparently, she wants universal mask-wearing at all times, even during moments when the science shows it to be ridiculous. Transmissibility of the virus outdoors has not been established even at this late date. The fear-mongering about the loss of “countless lives” is pure political hot air from science illiterates who are eager to employ generalities to pursue a naked partisan aim.

A real scientific mind, which Michelle shows no indication of having, would recognize the uneven impact on the population. Mitigations need to be targeted on the vulnerable, and, as it turns out, few of us are. Anyone healthy who is infected will have a case of the flu. We know that now; understandably we didn’t in the beginning. Michelle is stuck in January. She shows no sign of recognition of the destroyed lives in emotional depression, delayed medical procedures, job loss, bankrupted fortunes, retarding a child’s mental development, etc., from her favorite mitigations.

A mature adult acknowledges every day that life is a balancing of risk, even down to the decision to get up in the morning. Michelle’s authoritarianism is a recipe for civilizational collapse in a destructive crusade for zero-risk. Michelle, you should know better.

The rant continues in her attack on Trump for “sowing division and hatred” against black and brown people. Her entire line of attack is shattered by the reality on the ground. Residents and shop owners in our urban centers know who’s torching and assaulting people in their neighborhoods. Hint: it isn’t solely “people of color”. Michelle is right if her purpose is to deflect blame for the destruction from black and brown people. As it turns out, it’s white people from her socioeconomic strata who are instigating the mayhem. And, Michelle, mayhem it is. You are gaslighting, not Trump, by asking people to ignore their lyin’ eyes as they watch the Antifa and BLM-inspired pandemonium. Au contraire, you, Michelle, and your Democratic Party allies are complicit in “sowing division and hatred” by manufacturing hypothetical grievances under an unprovable abstraction, systemic racism. It’s a disgraceful attempt to invent racism when you can’t prove it, but you need it as a foil in furtherance of a power grab. Michelle, you should know better.

Michelle, no one, Trump included, has called for the arrest of protesters. That’s straw man demagoguery. The demand for law and order concerns the looting, vandalism, assaults, killings, and the setting of businesses ablaze.

Riot-damaged Kenosha, Wisc., 2020.

The many protests around the country are irrelevant to the shooting of cops, the spittle-laced fulminations in their face, the wanton infliction of injury, the homicidal acts of arson at federal buildings, etc., etc. It matters not if the ratio of protest to violence is 10 to 1. Simple protests don’t draw the attention of federal authorities. The 10 riots among the 100 protests is an immediate concern for the victims caught up in the havoc. And when you and your political allies quietly sanction the violence through misdirection, you’re an accomplice. As a mother, Michelle, you should understand this. Michelle, you should know better.

Michelle Obama’s behavior during this election season is a primer on how to destroy a first lady’s reputation.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

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A Convenient Depression

The word “callous” comes from the Latin “callum”, hardened skin. The idea of a nice pair of Nikes was unknown for most of human existence. A lifetime of barefoot travel means hardened skin and “callouses” on the feet. See the connection? So, can a lifetime of committed political zealotry lead to an emotionally hardened personality, one with a furtive substratum of acceptance of wrecked lives to achieve long-sought ends? “To chop down a forest splinters will fly” was famously invoked by Lenin to signal his desire to build a socialist utopia on a corduroy road of corpses. I’m wondering that somewhere deep down in the psyche of your average Left/Democrat officeholder lies a little Lenin.

Maybe the thought shouldn’t be so surprising given their affection for Lenin’s ends, just without the holocaust … or, then again, I might be too optimistic. There’s no doubt that avowed socialists are piloting the Biden campaign bus in more ways than one. Assisting them along the way are a cadre of public executives at the state and local levels. I can’t think of a better way for them to reach their socio-political nirvana and upend a detested incumbent cruising to reelection than to create the stench of failure around him by fabricating an economic depression and lawlessness in the streets. Instilling a sense of fear and dread in the public works wonders for those seeking power over the body of Donald Trump.

I’m loathed to think that people could be so cruel, but there they sit in their little local soviets. They create their own banners to hide the reality, like Cuomo’s “New York on Pause”. California’s Newsom was the first to jump at closing down 14.6% of the US economy. The others followed suit. Soon 44 million Americans were out of work. Thousands of small businesses were shuttered as “nonessential” while the big boys – supermarkets, big-box stores, etc. – were allowed to reinforce their near-monopoly because they were labeled “essential”. Economic feudalism engineered by government dictat.

The media picks up on the drumbeat. Indeed, they are the drumbeat. The incessant dark message of doom about a virus whose ill-effects were egregiously overstated and whose lethality was highly targeted on a narrow segment of the elderly was churned into an apocalypse … and an excuse for statewide and local totalitarianism.

No wonder that in a recent Axios-Ipsos Coronavirus Index poll 51% of parents were stricken with fear about sending their kids back to school in the fall. Forget about any conception of risk, about any conception that risk is chronologically uneven, that risk follows their kids the moment that they leave the house at any time. Applied consistently, helicopter parents should morph into gulag superintendents.

Soon, a sixth-grader becomes a fourth-grader after “distance learning” under the tutelage of distracted and overwhelmed adults and the ever-present allure of the nearby Xbox. Some parents are wealthy enough to keep the learning spigot flowing with hired help. Economic feudalism will be followed by education feudalism.

Then we have the same culprits in many cases – already experienced at the nullification of federal immigration law – thumbing their noses at the White House by allowing their streets and downtowns to be turned into playgrounds of violent anarchy. Remember Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s “We could have a summer of love!” in CHAZ? In-between the arrests of unmasked joggers in Central Park and the painting of Marxist Black Lives Matter graffiti on New York City’s avenues, Mayor Bill de Blasio slashes the police force, mutes his constitutional role as guardian of public safety, and pronounces justifications for mayhem. The scene is repeated throughout the country in any deep blue bastion.

The economic misery and violence are quietly sanctioned, or at least seems to be. These lefty poobahs don’t seem to be in much of a hurry to quell the disorder, or bring the kids back to school, or get the adults back to work. Oh, I forgot, it’s the virus and “race justice”, they say.

And, by the way, if it ain’t “race justice”, it’s “science”. They have tried to corner the market on “science”. Yes, “science” is helpful in decision making, but these politicos have choices to make. That’s why we elect people: to make choices. Recognizing relevant scientific information, though, isn’t a green light to the Disneyland of Bernie/AOC’s dreams. “Science” can give you the nature of the virus but it can’t tell you the choice to make among competing risks. Socialists like those who run the Democratic Party always think that “science” is their personal handmaiden and, funny, always ends up with them being ensconced in the catbird seat of some all-powerful commissariat. Hogwash! “Science” and despotism aren’t peas in the same pod.

In the end, if polls are any indication, the Lefties have proven successful in creating the stench of failure around Trump, even though, remarkably, they are wholly responsible for the anguish. Which brings to mind the state of education in America. What else could explain the easily-achieved bamboozlement of the American public? The Democrats discovered that enough blue state governors and mayors exist to put American society into a tailspin. Are they calloused enough to do it? Are they cunning enough? I don’t know, but I’m suspicious given the wide lane of misinformation and ignorance open to them.

RogerG

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Hostage-Taking

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) joins fellow Democrats from the House and Senate, June 8, 2020.

In 1904, Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli, a Moroccan tribal leader, took hostage Ion Perdicaris and his grandson, Cromwell Varley. President Theodore Roosevelt quickly dispatched warships to Morocco. Secretary of State John Hay put the case very succinctly when he declared, “This government wants Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead.”

US newspaper cartoon on the Perdicaris Affair.

The incident is enticingly analogous, though not perfect, to our current situation. Today, the Perdicaris role could be filled by the American people and Democrat eminences are playing Raisuli. I’m waiting for the American voter to take up the mantle of TR.

In reality, could anyone be so calloused as to hold an entire people hostage in the service of a cold and calculated power grab? I am loath to think so. On the one hand, my fellow citizens with a “D” after their name can be just as good-hearted and well-meaning as those on the opposite side of the aisle. On the other, never has their public statements and policy ideas been more sinister: the caress of socialist revolution in the form of wealth confiscation (the “eat the rich” mentality of “D” politicians); the spread of central planning into more areas of life (Medicare for All, Green New Deal, cementing the monopoly of the government schools, et al); the enthusiasm for totalitarian lockdowns and controls on public and private behavior in response to the virus; the coddling of the Marxist Black Lives Matter and Antifa; and the willingness to unleash criminals on their citizens (no bail laws, refusals to prosecute, the withdrawals of police from riot zones, the slashing of law enforcement budgets).

29-year-old Anthony Robinson of East New York, Brooklyn is seen walking with his 6-year-old daughter in the Bronx Sunday, June 5. The little girl is watching as a car pulls up beside them and her father is fatally shot in the chest.

The contemporary Democratic Party appears to be very ambitious. Could a person be excused for entertaining the idea that the party of Mayor Jenny Durkan (Seattle and CHOP) and AOC has a more utilitarian purpose in mind: namely, the Party desires the creation of as much pandemonium as possible to make Trump impotent and win in November 2020? If so, a nationwide emotional and economic depression would suit their purposes quite nicely.

The most heavy-handed clampdowns and inexcusable sanctions of wanton violence occur in deep blue jurisdictions. Trump has offered help and cajoled governors, mayors, and school superintendents to protect our heritage, end the anarchy, and get the kids back into the classroom. They not only rebuff the assistance; the secessionists – for that is what they are – revel in it. They have resurrected the Party’s historic love of states’ rights, something to warm the heart of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” George Wallace … if it was still beating today. Could they be holding the livelihoods of millions, the safety of multitudes in our cities, and the education of our children hostage to their demand for a Biden presidency?

Do you think for a moment that this government-fabricated misery would continue much past November 3 and a Biden victory? Don’t surprised of its magical disappearance if the American people turn over the reins of power to a person of diminished mental capacity and his coterie of socialists and cultural revolutionaries. Consider it ransom paid.

Biden with the “thought-leaders” – the socialists AOC and Sanders – of today’s Democratic Party.

What other conclusion is possible given the promiscuous smear of the Founders, the mayhem on the streets, and the arbitrary shuttering of the schools? It’s so egregious that a person could be forgiven for concluding that some ulterior, insidious purpose is being served – like political extortion. Could anyone be so stupid as to “abolish/defund the police”, unless something more cunning is afoot?

Our time is rife with wacky conspiracy theories. The nuttiness of the alt-right’s QAnon and the left’s Zinn/Black Lives Matter/the Squad/Anifa/college snowflake roils the minds of folks as far afield as Trump to DC’s Russia-collusion hawkers to the Dem grandstanders mouthing the vaguery of “systemic racism”. I wish not to be in their company.

Yet, the thought of manufactured mayhem for political ends is not unknown (excuse the double negative). The Jacobins and Lenin were up to their ear lobes in it.

Mass killing of more than 200 prisoners in the Châtelet on September 3, 1792.
Bolsheviks condemn and execute a dissident worker.

Sherlock Homes admonished, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” For me, there are two possibilities for the Dems’ leveraging of ruination: cunning or stupidity. The Dems might be cunning as they play chess to the Republicans’ checkers. Or they are just plain stupid in mistakenly believing that the shutdown of life and assaults on police departments will lead to a summer of love. I am reluctant to believe that somebody could be so brutally calculating. Since there is no cure for stupidity and the symptoms are so widely apparent, my money is on stupid. Still, hostage-taking is a favorite on today’s racecard.

RogerG

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A Faux Fourth

Remember that scene in “Singin’ in the Rain”? You know, the one of the switch-a-roo when the audience learns that Lina Lamont’s (Jean Hagen) singing is a fraud because the curtain is drawn to expose Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) as the real voice.

Lina was faux singing in much the same manner as we experienced a faux Fourth in PBS’s A Capitol Fourth. It was a desultory performance of retread performances strung together with satellite social-distancing recitals and no audience anywhere. When it came to the fireworks spectacular at the end, it was spectacular but proved as empty as Lina’s voice because the Mall was a ghost town. A celebration needs a crowd, period.

PBS’s A Capitol Fourth 2020 hosted by Vanessa Williams and John Stamos.

Similarly, is this what is meant by the “new normal” for our schools: an hour in front of a computer monitor with the occasional writing prompt and textbook assignments? Some schools may open but your kids will enter a classroom of everyone masked, kept far apart, and wearing gloves, as in a sci-fi horror movie. If so, parents pull your kids out of these schools and away from the silly distance-learning, and run as fast as you can with the kids in tow to more reasonable locales. The tactic is to real learning what child abuse is to proper parenting.

This year’s July Fourth was also Jekyll and Hyde affair. I went from the insipid PBS production on the tube (Hyde) to outside and the vibrant popping and the wonderful flares of explosions and light from skyrockets (Jekyll) all around me. Just knowing that people were gathering with friends and loved ones to ignite the display added so much more to the electricity of the moment. John Adams had it right when he wrote to his wife, Abigail, on July 3, 1776, “It [the Fourth] ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Exactly.

The choice of songs in this year’s PBS edition were suspect, especially in light of the ongoing anarchy in city streets. The producers seemed to be keen on a theme of social healing. The show opened with the song, “Put a Little Love in Your Heart”. Nothing wrong with that, but rioters, looters, and vandals don’t need love; they need to be arrested. The angry marchers in our Democrat-run cities and states were exploiting George Floyd’s body to advance a series of lies in pursuit of an overturning of America. A socialist revolution is an afront to the America that we love. The cries of “systemic racism” are as easily disproven as “defund/abolish the police” could be shown to be deadly. Our times don’t call for a “healing” but demand a complete refutation of the movement’s falsehoods. Our times don’t call for “healing” but demand the re-imposition of decency through arrests, convictions, and incarceration.

People loot Hot Topic at The Pike in Downtown Long Beach, Sunday, May 31, 2020. (Photo by Brandon RIchardson)
Protestors demonstrate outside of a burning fast food restaurant, Friday, May 29, 2020, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

This mangling of our July Fourth was brought to us by policy proscriptions corrupted by politics. The longer that we make our public spaces ghost towns and mar our faces with masks and treat each other like lepers, the more we destroy economic life. The more livelihoods are smashed, the more resentments grow toward the man in the White House. And that’s the ultimate goal: remove Trump, takeover the federal government and impose high taxes, feverishly pursue a quixotic crusade against a shadowy “systemic racism”, foist the totalitarian Green New Deal on us, and straitjacket us in a quicksand of red tape, thanks to a growing army of the administrative state. The Democrats will succeed in producing the results of a lockdown without a virus, to the detriment for the vast majority of Americans – but not for them since they’ll be the new Soviet nomenklatura.

Heck, the Democrats even want to disarm us by turning the Second Amendment into dead letter as they try to “defund” or “abolish” the police. Neither our livelihoods, our persons, or our children’s future will be safe. Every time somebody’s bad actions goes viral, out comes the angry marchers, looters, rioters, and vandals and up goes the torching of businesses, beatings, killings, and another wave of erasures of the symbols of our national heritage. You can do nothing but run for the hills – and maybe not even that if they succeed in criminalizing the oil industry.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer at a news conference after several dams breached in Midland on Wednesday, May 20, 2020. (photo: Rebecca Cook / Reuters)

Why else the resuscitation of the Democrat’s enthusiasm for secession, if not as part of the full court press to get Trump? Since Trump’s inauguration, blue-state governors, county commissioners, school boards, and mayors have done all in their power to nullify federal immigration law in their zones of authority. Public health isn’t immune to their designs. While Trump is consigned to the role of helpmate, the blue-state neo-Napoleons in governor’s mansions strap the lives of their residents. They keep a boot heel on the neck of the people’s comings and goings. They gamble that a depressed people will turn against the man in the oval office.

And when it comes to mayhem in their streets, blue-state suzerains turn a blind eye as Trump is made to look bewildered. Pardon me for suspecting that they harbor designs to make Trump appear impotent.

PBS’s A Capitol Fourth symbolized the worst of our times in both form and content. The program’s musical content, in some instances, was the wrong message for the wrong time. And its form was an implicit sanction for the continued suppression of American social and economic life. I turned to the antidote of a DVD of James Cagney’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy”.

RogerG

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Panic in the Age of Trump

Walmart, Sandpoint, Id., paper goods isle on Sunday, 5/15/2020.

The photo (above) is of the paper goods isle of Walmart, Sandpoint, Id., on Sunday, 3/15/2020. A  young mother with a couple of kids in tow had 2 30-roll bricks of toilet paper in her cart, the only tp that I saw in the entire store.  Is this what modern-America panic looks like?

Shoppers at BJ’s Wholesale Club market at the Palisades Center mall in West Nyack, N.Y., March 14, 2020. (Mike Segar/Reuters)

On that same day, we rolled into a gas-‘n-stop for fuel and corn nuts.  A fellow customer waiting in line mentioned a wild rumor on social media that Trump is considering the closing of the interstates.  Panic, once again, in the age of Trump?

Our eyes and ears are saturated with “pandemic” and doctors on tv with warnings galore. Social interaction has become a dirty word.  It’s “coronavirus this” and “coronavirus that” everywhere we look.  Is America starting to resemble in thought and deed the America of the 1938 radio broadcast “War of the Worlds” by Orson Welles?

Are we, modern sophisticates, really so “above that”?  I doubt it in the age of Trump.  Trumpophobes see all external stimuli with real or imagined evil intent as emanating from Trump.  “Trump’s Katrina” is bandied about in the same manner as “abortion” and “control of her body” comes off the lips of Madonna.

Maybe what’s at work is something I call “vortex thinking”.  Most everything of consequence today goes down two vortices: Trump and climate change.  The Polar Vortex of a few years back, with its bone-chilling temps, was blamed on … global warming.  A tornado that passes through your backyard is pinned on … global warming.  Etc., etc.  Regarding Trump, anything that’s bad in your life is due to … Trump.  Everything that’s bad to anyone at any given time is placed at the feet of Trump.

George Will – no fan of Trump by any means – calls the phenomena “Caesaropapism”.  Our presidents are now accorded demigod status.  They are expected to control the tides in the manner of Persian king Xerxes flogging the Hellespont for destroying his pontoon bridge in the advance of his invasion of Greece in 480 BC.

Xerxes’s soldiers flogging the Hellespont.

Depending on the group of boosters, a president is saintly or evil incarnate. He or she is expected to be a master marionette controlling the actions of 330 million individuals.  Does “sophistication” now mean thinking like a 5-year-old?  Apparently so.

Right now, we are experiencing the first natural disaster to be pinned on the next-Republican-president-in-line.  Bush 41 was pasted with the rather mild recession of 1991-1992. Bush 43 had his hurricane.  Trump’s is COVID-19.

What separates a hurricane and a virus from an economic downturn is the fact that recessions are, indeed, man-caused.  They may occur due to a constellation of actions that were taken earlier in a president’s term, or, more likely, they erupt from the gestation of factors unleashed long before he took the oath.  Ditto for the good economic times.  For instance, back in 2008-9, the bills came due after many years of easy money and political pressures to extend mortgages to financially insecure people.  Obama rode it to the presidency.  Ironically, his wing of the Dem Party had a big role in setting up the dominoes.

Now we have the coronavirus.  Yeah, it’s unique … like all the previous strains were unique.  Sure, take all the practical mitigations available but remember, this thing, like the earlier ones, will have to run its course.  We have one thing going for us: we aren’t the Athens of 480 BC, or Constantinople of 541-542, or Europe of the mid-14th century.

The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel, 1562, is a famous painting that relates to the Black Death of the 1340’s.

Please, get some perspective … and stop hoarding the toilet paper!

RogerG

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McCabe’s Non-prosecution and DC

Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe testifies before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in Washington, U.S., June 7, 2017. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)

If what your enemies say about you can amount to a claim of credibility, then Andrew C. McCarthy passes the test. He’s been lambasted by the Dem-Left as a hack and Trumpkins as a partisan of the “deep state”.  They are both wrong.  As a seasoned US attorney, he tries to objectively see the subject from many angles.  When looking at the McCabe case, his analysis may not be dispositive but it lacks the hyperbole often found on MSNBC and the Trump-o-philes on Fox News. In McCarthys’ rendering, as I discern it, the McCabe case stinks of DC.

Andrew C. McCarthy

The DOJ’s decision not to pursue prosecution of McCabe has 3 factors swirling about.  First, it’s hard to convict when star witnesses for the prosecution (like Lisa Page) are twisting testimony to the advantage of the defense.

Second, Trump smears the criminal justice process with his Tweet-rants.  It’s hard to convict when all involved are continually exposed to announcements from the White House that the defendant is a “liar”, etc.  The president as the ultimate chief prosecutor is mucking up the constitutional right to a fair trial.  He has a “right” to free speech, as Hannity is wont of saying, but his “right” clashes with the “rights” of others.  If Trump was a prosecutor – which he is as chief executive – he’d be sanctioned by the court.  And he does this in DC, a place already with a deep and popular disdain for him and Republicans in general.

That leads me, finally, to the messy matter of a forever-tainted jury pool in DC.  Overwhelmingly anti-Republican and anti-Trump sentiment are so deeply embedded in the DC population that Democrats are more-likely-than-not to skate.  The story of the jury forewoman in the Roger Stone trial is a good case in point.  For prosecutors of any Obama associate, they’d have to get beyond jury selection from a broad Resistance demography.  It’d be like getting a conviction in a lynching case in the Deep South after Reconstruction.  Currently in DC, a prominent Republican in the dock would get a hang ’em jury and a Democrat would have the advantage of jury nullification (a blanket refusal to convict).  In DC, just remove the blindfold from the statue of the lady of justice.

All the more reason to strip DC of many of its administrative functions.  Ship them out to environs less congenial.  Pick a Midwestern state.  Otherwise, we’ll be saddled with an unhinged and Democrat-dominated federal government for as far as the eye can see.  Elections, all of a sudden, become less important.  Were they ever, at least since FDR?

RogerG

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Is Trump a Reaganite?

Preface: Now that impeachment may be entering that proverbial dustbin of history, one’s attention can return to more mundane matters like, “Where does Trump fit in our normal political categories?”  The answer might be that he doesn’t.  The following is my latest ruminations on the subject.

***********

Is Trump a Reaganite?  The answer to the question: “No”, not exactly … and “Yes”, not exactly. Mostly, he is conservative on the social issues: abortion, and has made utterances critical of secularism’s assault on traditional faith (references to “almighty God” and “war on Christmas”, etc.). All well and good.

But his foreign policy has the strong flavor of isolationism. This goes well beyond more prudence in our interventionism. Taking cues from Trump, many conservative celebrity hosts and pundits have adopted some of the left’s old pejoratives such as “neocon” and “the world policeman” to castigate military actions like Reagan’s.

Economically, he’s all over the map. Domestically, he favors tax cuts – hurray! – and deregulation – also hurray! However, his free market stops at the water’s edge. He wants government to pick winners and losers in international trade with subsidies and tariffs. His speechified bombast is littered with demonstrable falsehoods such as “China is paying us billions in tariffs”. No, American consumers are; those “smelly Walmart shoppers”, in the memorable language of the FBI’s Strzok and Page, are!

Oh, by the way, Trump says “Don’t touch Social Security”. Sorry, Trump, that ain’t feasible. Since Trump is a big spender – something oddly reminiscent of LBJ – I can understand his reluctance on the matter of sensible reforms to prevent its ultimate collapse. Reagan and those around him expressed the need to do something. No Reaganite here.

A “never-Trumper” – of which I am not – like Jonah Goldberg at the American Enterprise Institute lays out the case. You can read about it here.

Jonah Goldberg

Like I said at the beginning, Trump is all over the map. But then again, beyond the sparse forays into liberal country, he mostly stays within the broad and imprecise borders of Conservativeland. So, I guess, at the end of the day, he’s a kinda-Reaganite.

RogerG

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Go See “Richard Jewell”

Not to see Clint Eastwood’s latest film “Richard Jewell” is to engage in citizenship malpractice.

The real Richard A. Jewell, 1997. (photo: Greg Gibson/Associated Press, 1997)

Every citizen should see Eastwood’s portrayal of how well-meaning people in powerful government positions, allied to rambunctious reporters, can be so awfully wrong and mature into a malevolent force without even knowing it.  It’s how prosecutors can pursue an individual, wrongfully convict the person, pursue harsh sentencing, and resist any effort to set the record straight.  It’s how investigations are pursued on the flimsiest of “probable cause” and can morph into other investigations because it is heartily believed that the guy must have committed some crime somewhere, somehow.  Does this remind you of the events leading to the current impeachment melee?

A notion gets stuck in the craw of government officials – call it a “profile”, an expectation about the kind of person who commit these sinful acts – and persists until action is taken to the detriment of all.  Richard Jewell was slapped by the powers-that-be as symptomatic of the “hero syndrome” (creating a situation or crime to become a hero).  The media’s and the FBI’s “rush to judgment” led to Jewell’s public humiliation as the Olympic Park bomber in 1996 – only 7 years later to find the real culprit, Eric Rudolph.

Eric Robert Rudolph being escorted from the Cherokee County Jail for a hearing in federal court in 2003 after being on the run for five years.

False ideas creep into the heads of mighty people in a burgeoning and energetic federal government.  And if these people have guns, watch out!  It’s how we can have a Ruby Ridge (1992).  It’s how we can experience a Waco (assault on David Koresh’s compound, 1993).  It’s how we can have serial investigations of a presidential candidate as a “Russian mole”, and later to try to pin something else on him when the first effort failed in the belief that he’s still corrupt to the core.

The Branch Davidian compound, Waco, Tx., Feb.28, 1993.

There’s something in the government ether from the 1990’s to the present that is so insidious.  No, it’s not a “deep state”.  It’s something endemic – or generic – to government.  The Founders’ idea of government as a necessary evil is as true today as it ever was.  It’s a lesson we had better repeatedly teach ourselves and our young.

RogerG

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Impeachment Forever … But Pelopsi Prays for You

I know, I know, it’s Christmas eve but I couldn’t resist commenting on the latest impeachment fracas.  Pelosi is holding impeachment hostage by refusing to deliver the articles of impeachment to the Senate.  Like the sword of Damocles, now in the hands of Pelosi, Trump will face an assembly line of impeachment articles as she demands more witnesses and documents for further expeditions into all things Trump before she turns over the already-approved articles to the Senate.  But she says that she is a good Catholic, hates no one, and prays for the target of her political jihad.  Really, how good of a Catholic is she?  Is this Christ-like behavior?

One has to wonder.  Is it Christian to endlessly hound a citizen by placing them under the perpetual gaze of inquisitors?  Is it Christian for one house of Congress to step outside its legal role of investigating possible wrongdoing and demand the other house, acting as jurors, step outside its role to do what the first house refused to do, such as produce the information that it chose not to provide as part of its duty?  Trump is no angel, and neither are Pelosi, Schumer, and the Resistance.

Is it Christian for her to proudly announce her Christian bonafides as she soils the very doctrines of her faith?  Under the euphemism “right to choose”, she crowed in 2018 that “I’m a rabid supporter of a woman’s right to choose …” Rabid indeed!  Earlier this year, rather than condemn Ralph Northam’s (D, governor of Va.) support of a live-birth abortion bill in the Virginia legislature and his description of it, she dodged the question when asked.  Not even the killing of a newborn can draw the ire of this allegedly “sincere” Catholic.

In addition, she has persistently opposed efforts to protect viable babies in the womb and those born alive in the course of an abortion.  She is absolutely grotesque when it comes to the Christian responsibility to protect life.

Former Vice President Joe Biden was rejected for Holy Communion by
a priest in South Carolina, Oct. 2019

It doesn’t stop there.  In that space where some assertions of gay rights conflict with religious freedom strides the hubristic Nancy Pelosi.  Religious freedom must give way, according to her holiness Pelosi.  Her House-passed Equality Act would strip protections for denominations with Bible-based views on sexuality and family, particularly if their Christian calling carries them beyond the sanctuary into running orphanages, hospitals, counseling services, schools, and wherever human need lies.  Pelosi wants to essentially rewrite millennia-old Christian doctrine to fit her social views.  Where’s the Christianity in this?

Here Polish World War II war orphans are being cared for at a Catholic orphange after the War in 1946.

This season to honor the birth of Christ is saddled with the preachiness of a pagan-Christian.  Yes, it’s an oxymoron and also a reality in today’s morally-confused Democratic Party.  I find it hard to take seriously Pelosi’s attempt to wrap herself in the garb of the Church.  Does the phrase “false prophet” remind you of anyone?

RogerG

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Galli’s Abomination

Galli (r) appears on Al Sharpton’s CNN program in the wake of the editorial.

A Preface

The December 19 issue of Christianity Today – prominent evangelical publication founded by the evangelist Billy Graham – came out with a scathing editorial calling for Trump’s impeachment by the magazine’s chief editor, Mark Galli.  A wide array responses critical of Galli views quickly ensued from notable evangelical leaders like Franklin Graham (Billy Graham’s son) and those affiliated with the Family Research Council.

It’s clear from Galli’s prior statements about Trump before the 2016 election that he had a strong anti-Trump bias.  In 2016 he disparaged not only Trump but his supporters, many of whom are evangelicals, when he wrote, “Enthusiasm for a candidate like Trump gives our neighbors ample reason to doubt that we believe Jesus is Lord.”

It would be a mistake to assume that Galli speaks for the majority of evangelicals, let alone his magazine’s founder, Billy Graham.  Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son, disclosed that his father voted for Trump: “Yes, my father Billy Graham founded Christianity Today; but no, he would not agree with their opinion piece. In fact, he would be very disappointed.”  Further he said, “My father knew Donald Trump, he believed in Donald Trump, and he voted for Donald Trump. He believed that Donald J. Trump was the man for this hour in history for our nation.”

Galli speaks for himself as he sets himself apart from the vast evangelical movement.  Below is my reaction to the obvious anti-Trump bias in a publication closely associated with Billy Graham.  Galli richly deserves the blowback of his words.

My Reaction to Galli

John O’Sullivan, adviser to Margaret Thatcher and pundit, announced O’Sullivan’s First Law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”  I’m beginning to wonder if Mark Galli’s (editor in chief of Christianity Today) condemnation of Trump in his recent editorial is confirmation of O’Sullivan’s insight.  One has to ponder the possibility.

The transformation of originally center-right organizations into center-left ones starts with a muddle.  Fundamental canons of the institution are confused with the passing fascinations of our cultural arbiters in well-to-do urban enclaves and the commanding heights of our media.  Environmentalism, for instance, creeps into sermons and encyclicals by melding “stewardship” with campaigns against plastics, CO2, and preservationist land use policies.  Not surprisingly, Sunday school lessons are littered with the pop politics.  And it doesn’t stop there.

Further evidence of the politicized leftward infection is the facile proclamation of faithfulness to long-established principles while accepting the premises of the left.  Now here’s a real muddle.  It was clearly evident in Galli’s call for Trump’s impeachment.

First, the cognitive clutter of Galli’s piece was palpable in the attempt to erect a parallel between Bill Clinton’s perjury before a federal grand jury with Trump’s request to investigate the corruption of people who include the scions of powerful Democratic Party personages.  Galli blindly endorses the worst possible interpretation of a conversational and rambling phone call to the Ukrainian president as if his and the Resistance’s interpretation is the only one feasible.  Aping Adam Schiff, Galli proclaims that Trump “attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents.”  This is nothing but tendentious political boilerplate.  It’s demeaning for the editor of one of the most respected of evangelical journals.  Galli just reduced the magazine’s reputation many notches.

President Bill Clinton’s videotaped grand jury deposition on Aug. 17, 1998

Perjury before a federal grand jury is a federal crime (18 U.S. Code § 1621), the last time that I checked.  Where would Galli put a rambling phone call asking the Ukrainians to investigate corruption of gold-digging American politicos in the federal penal code?  And if you wanted to put it in there, how would you state it without criminalizing the president’s Constitutional duty to conduct foreign policy?  Any effort would produce a hot mess.

Oh, I forgot, committing perjury in a federal district court and before a federal grand jury by a person with as many extramarital escapades as the Marquis de Sade – including quite probably a rape, like de Sade – is the equivalent of mentioning the Bidens in a congratulatory phone call.  Not!  Galli lacks the simple Biblical principle of proportionality.

For the benefit of Adam Schiff, Galli, and the rest of the Democratic scolds in the Resistance, here’s a more plausible alternative rendering of the call, one understandable to a 16-year-old.  Trump’s mode of conversation is not professorial, as in a lecture or a speech in the well of the Senate.  He rambles like a stand-up comedian in a club.  He’ll have a thought that originated on the couches of Fox and Friends and run with it.  So, if the eye-brow raising boast of Joe Biden getting the Ukrainian prosecutor fired for investigating the younger Biden’s company gets Trump’s attention, and not being careful with his mouth like a smooth-talking politician, Trump bounced the idea off his cohorts and in his call to Zelensky.  In such an atmosphere, policy arises from a series of rambling conversations with no clear and obvious determination.  Trump brings it up in passing to Zelensky and some administrative underlings understandably mistake it for a directive to withhold aid, both before and after the call, while others aren’t quite so sure.  In the end, the aid was released without anything in return.  If the previous sentence is “B”, and Galli’s moral condemnation of Trump is “A”, how does Galli (and Schiff) ever get to “A”?  Galli fell for a partisan canard.

This scenario was borne out by the testimony before Schiff’s tribunal.  Those who mistook a meandering policy-making process for a clear directive appeared before the tribunal, but even they couldn’t identify the crime.  And neither they nor the hanging-judge Democrats on the panel could account for the Ukrainians getting the aid as no investigations were conducted by the Ukrainians.

And the hypocrisy of the whole thing is astounding.  Trump gave the Ukrainians lethal aid – i.e., weapons – while these same Democrats and Obama were only willing give the Ukrainians band aids and cotton balls.  Spare me the convenient discovery of concern for the fortunes of a small country in the jaws of Putin’s Russia.  Only mild protests came from the likes of Obama, Schiff, Pelosi, and Schumer as eastern Ukraine and the Crimea were amputated.  Galli, the glaring hypocrisy of the hyper-partisan Democrats should heighten your sensitivity to their incredulous proclamations.  They have no evidence of wrongdoing – least of all an impeachable offense – and neither do you [Galli].

President Barack Obama answers questions during his news conference following the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, August 2014.

I suspect a deep prejudice against Trump in people like Galli.  A prejudice can exist whenever a prejudgment has been made in spite of the evidence.  The prejudice allows a person to lose perspective.  A history of political behavior in the era BT [before Trump] might prove enlightening if the prejudice didn’t get in the way of doing the research.  A stroll down memory lane to the 1930’s and the reign of Saint FDR would prove instructive if only Galli cared.

Where shall I start?  The bloating of the federal budget under the guise of “fiscal stimulus” was very useful for advancing the FDR’s political prospects and was put at his service.  He withheld federal aid to states and districts who opposed his initiatives.  The larceny was naturally more active during election season.  Political opponents found their FCC licenses revoked.  Charles Lindbergh found himself under FBI surveillance with FDR’s nodding approval.  And let’s not forget the prosecution and persecution of Samuel Insull to fulfill FDR’s need for the scalp of one of the “great malefactors of wealth” for allegedly causing the Great Depression.  What about the herding of Japanese-Americans into concentration camps?  Of course, going down the memory hole is any recognition that FDR is probably the cause of a depression becoming a Great one.

To put finis on the Insull affair, after FDR’s prosecutors got their hands on Insull, he was acquitted of all charges in two trials.

Do we need to unearth the sordid political activities of the Kennedys and LBJ as the Church Committee did in 1976?  Galli, come on, take a look.

We have an ample history of the conjoining of “politician” and “skullduggery”.  Some of it is illegal, and, by Galli’s standard, all of it is impeachable … far more impeachable than a one-off congratulatory phone call to the president of a small country.

Galli’s standard for impeachable offenses is so loose that we might as well have a permanent congressional committee to handle presidential impeachments, particularly during periods of divided government.  We’ll need it.  At that point, the presidency will become the handmaiden of whatever majority happens to capture the House.  Right alongside “sequestration” and “continuing resolutions” we’ll have “impeachment” as part of our daily news briefing.  Galli’s standard has no limiting principle, at least not one recognizable to mortal man.

Isaiah quotes the Lord as saying, “Come now, let us reason together …”  Galli confuses partisan hyperbole for reason.  Context, perspective, and proportion have no role in his thought process.  He has substituted invective for “let us reason together” rather than pursue a more thoughtful rendering of the issues before us.

Roger Graf