“Beto” O’Rourke at the scene of the El Paso shooting.
The two murderous rampages over the weekend are more than evil deeds. They have become, like most everything else, fuel to feed the unrelenting push to, in a modification of Eric Voegelin’s immortal phrase, immanentize progressivism’s eschaton – to bring to life the left’s dream of the better world. It’s like all that happens in the world is forever on the event horizon, ready to fall into the left’s interstellar black hole. Evil deeds can’t just exist to be fought against; they must be recruited for a partisan political agenda. The events’ magnitude and sorrow, therefore, is cheapened by a horde of demagogues.
El Paso after the August 3 shooting.Dayton after the August 4 shooting.
The airwaves are saturated with demagoguery. Fingers are pointing at Trump for super-charged rhetoric. Speaking of super-charged rhetoric, have you attended a Pelosi or Schumer presser, heard the bombast from AOC+3, seen “Beto” before a mike, or been verbally accosted by the rest of the herd running to seize the Democratic Party’s brass ring? If Trump is to blame for El Paso, then Bernie is to blame for the 2017 shooting of Republican congressmen; or the Sierra Club and Paul Ehrlich are responsible for the Unibomber. Anyone can play this game. And it is a game: something far removed from mature thinking.
The Unibomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, after his arrest, 1996.The 2017 shooter, James T. Hodgkinson, a Bernie Sanders activist.
A favorite of the mob is, you guessed it, “gun control”. Large numbers – 300 million guns in private ownership for instance – are contorted to serve the desired end, which is to make gun ownership as difficult as it is in Maduro’s Venezuela. Their list of banalities includes “universal background checks”, bans on “military guns”, and various forms of gun confiscation. What any of this has to do with straightening out the crooked timber of humanity escapes me. What any of it has to do with addressing the causes of these incidents also escapes causal reasoning. They do, however, serve a political end while advancing certain political careers. In my book, it’s shameful.
The federal government’s powers could be expanded in the manner of Australia and New Zealand and initiate gun confiscation, but still completely miss the point. And the point is the mental isolation of some of today’s young men, typically in the 20-25 age cohort. Could our modern society be a breeding ground for alienated youth? Parental absenteeism in the pursuit of careerism and material wants, or as a consequence of marital breakup and casual amours, have disturbing developmental effects on children. In addition, the buffer of other civil institutions such as neighborhood associations and church aren’t what they used to be. These factors are the ignored elephants in the room as the media chases the demagogues and their rantings. The fact is, a very few of these young people – and some older adults – would be dangerous whether an AR-15, machete, or spoon is available.
Trump-hatred overwhelms all. Could we just stop the hokum and take an adult look at how we are raising the next generation? It could be that all we have to do is draw back the state in order to allow room for civil society to breathe. Yes, and that’s no doubt a tall order in today’s atmosphere of smothering hyperbole.
Kyle Smith’s review of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood compared Tarantino’s film with Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America. Tarantino adopted Leone’s technique of a singular story thread set in a panoramic and historical scene. If some future filmmaker wanted to channel Watergate’s All the President’s Men and Leone, the current unraveling of the Russia-collusion-Mueller-Comey-et al saga would provide excellent grist for the mill.
The Setting
All the elements are present. The grand backdrop is present-day DC with 364,000 federal government workers, many at the top of the federal pyramid scheming and plotting for partisan and personal advantage, and a mass of hanger-ons populating K Street and other nodes in the metropolitan area. The administrator water cooler talk must be impregnated with the expectations born of a peculiar universe’s lifestyle and norms that are divorced from the real world’s preoccupation with producing the necessities and wants of life. It’s a world unto its own, all put on steroids by the 44th president’s ideological penchant for big government as a cure-all. It is great for those seeking highly remunerative and secure employment in a highly unproductive sector, coupled with fantastic opportunities for the city’s real estate agents.
Enter stage left, Donald Trump (protagonist or antagonist depending on one’s point of view): crass, boorish, sometimes vulgar, and a champion of the pitchfork brigade. He wasn’t supposed to win. And when he did, the curtain was thrown open as in the The Wizard of Oz.
Woodrow Wilson’s government of “experts” is exposed as a charade. I can only speculate about the extent of the conniving, scheming, and plotting for personal and partisan advantage as a normal facet of life particularly in the administrative suites of the nation’s capital. Regardless, the now-bogus collusion story ripped the smiley face off the Leviathan.
Act One: Pride Before the Fall
Like many scandals, this one has at least two acts or phases: the first one peddled by the left-oriented and self-styled cultural “betters” in the media, academia, and the Democratic Party in our cosmopolitan centers, and the later, more sinister one as the initial story began to unravel.
Phase one seemed implausible from the get-go for anyone with a scintilla of adult skepticism, but it was overwhelmed by volume, both in quantity and decibel levels in our left-dominated media channels. That story is now familiar. A litany of banalities consumed the airwaves: “Russia attacked our democracy”; “Trump is a Putin stooge”; “The Russians elected Trump”; “Trump conspired with the Russians”; etc., etc., etc. You’ve heard the carnival barking.
The party of more government and big government – the Democratic Party – needs government power, and they failed to get it. Their loss necessitates an explanation, and it can’t be that their vision of the better world isn’t popular enough. The default excuse is malevolence by some unseen and nefarious forces attached to the winner. It just so happens that an expedient was readily available from their own skulduggery in the 2016 campaign. Democrat trolling for dirt – often called “oppo research” – led to the Hillary campaign > Fusion GPS > Christopher Steele > the Steele dossier > FBI/DNI/CIA spying on Trump > leaks to a salivating press. The stage is set for its continuation after Trump’s shocking victory.
A common reaction after shock is rage. Sure, Trump’s bombastic rhetoric acted as an accelerant, but that matters little. George W bent over backwards in a contortionist’s pretzel to accommodate and still earned the rant, “Bush lied and people died”, alongside efforts at his impeachment. Rage is a powerful motivator to do some really bad things, even using falsehoods to repeal an election. Remember, power is far more important to a progressive than to those more conservative since it is needed to overwhelm parents’ concerns about such things as their little daughters sharing a bathroom with boys who believe – or simply make the claim – that they can think themselves into being girls.
The ploy required a predicate. It was found in the jingle, “Russia attacked our democracy.” We don’t have a democracy; we have a constitutional republic … but I digress. How did Putin attack our so-called democracy and purportedly steal the election from her highness? A few trolling farms and $100,000 in Facebook ads, half of which were pro-Hillary and half were after the election?
In fact, the presiding judge in the trial of one of the defendants (Concord Management and Consulting LLC) indicted by Mueller chastised Jeannie Rhee, a former Obama Deputy Attorney General and part of Mueller’s team, and Mueller (and by extension Atty. Gen. Barr) for prejudicing a potential jury by reaching conclusions in the publicly released Mueller report not supported in the indictment, thereby raising doubts about the strength of the evidence linking the firm to the Russian government. Could the mantra “Russia stole the election” be a bait-and-switch maneuver with the mantra being loudly proclaimed by a partisan mob in the media and Congress as the Mueller gang switches to the thin gruel of a far lesser claim in court? Are we, the public, being scammed?
Jeannie Rhee, former Deputy Attorney General under Obama and Special Counsel prosecutor under Mueller.
How could 1/100th ($50,000) of a 30-second Super Bowl ad bend a 63 million-vote election spread over 274, 252 precincts and 113,754 polling paces? Hillary alone was awash in $700 million. Trump fell $300 million short. The charge is preposterous given the minuscule effort, and ignores the history of this kind of thing. Almost every Israeli election results in American campaign operatives tramping over to Tel Aviv to help Labor or Likud. One of Obama’s chief campaign advisers, Jeremy Bird, showed up in the country in 2015 to try to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu. We’ve left our fingerprints in other countries as well. The PRC helped bankroll Bill Clinton’s reelection. Soviet disinformation money seeded street protests in America and Europe throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, a godsend to Teddy Kennedy’s efforts to frustrate Reagan. Soviet efforts didn’t stop there. The Venona disclosures in 1995 and the brief opening of Soviet Communist Party archives in 1991 showed evidence of Soviet espionage and the presence of agents of influence occupying powerful positions under FDR and Truman. And today’s Democrats and their fellow travelers are carping about a few bots and Facebook ads?
Venona Project. Meredith Gardner, at far left, working with cryptanalysts, mid-1940’s.
The predicate is a farce. It’s in the DNA of international relations for nations to influence strategically important countries. In another time it was called statecraft. We would be well-served if we remembered the concept when observing the vicious mullahs in Tehran.
Oh, they squeal that the Russsians “hacked our democracy” when they were alleged to have purloined Hillary’s and the DNC’s emails and began to disseminate them through Wikileaks. Wikileaks is most certainly a pipeline for Russian (and any other nation’s) chicanery. After all, they came out of the same anti-western and anti-US breeding ground that gave us CISPES (advanced the interests of the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua), the nuclear freeze movement (supported by Soviet disinformation measures), Code Pink, today’s Antifa, and the perpetual peace-at-literally-any-price crowd. The mission statement of being the guardians of government transparency is a facade for useful idiots. They’ll take information from any source so long as it further their end, which is the embarrassment of only western governments.
What’s missing from the hacked-our-democracy charge is any semblance of context. Of course, in our intensely techie world, cyber crime is as big a thing as mail fraud was in the days before Intel. No doubt, the bumbling Hillary made it easy by concocting her own digital communication system in her basement, bathroom, closet, or what have you. She would be an easy mark for any government with nearly unlimited resources (since all governments skim off as much as they want from their citizens’ private economic activity) to play this game. The 2015 Chinese (PRC) hacking of the federal OPM data base, getting personal information on 20 million persons in the process, is illustrative.
Any system is vulnerable, including Hillary’s garage setup, the DNC, RNC, and anyone else thought to be important. The Iranians remember Stuxnet in 2010, the joint US-Israeli worm to crash the regime’s nuclear program computers. Whether through phishing or incredibly easy passwords in the case of the DNC, cyber warfare is part of statecraft. Make the best safeguards as possible, but it will remain a staple of modern life.
Was it as vice-president Cheney called it, “an act of war”? Hardly. The behavior is so common that we would be in a constant state of war with almost any nation with access to a keyboard. Cheney’s declaration is ludicrous.
But is it even relevant to Hillary’s 2016 loss? Both candidates were held in low esteem going into the election. Hillary’s negatives were 24 points higher than her positives and Trump’s were even worse (41 points). It wasn’t hacked emails that dragged Hillary down. Hillary has left a well-known slimy trail from Arkansas to DC. She’s a known quantity, and it smells. As for Trump, he was stinking up the works with his boorish rhetoric, past sexual escapades, and Access Hollywood. Could it be that a easily dislikeable candidate, 8 years of Obama malaise, a horrible campaign strategy, poor campaign management, and Trump being a fresh face had more to do with the result than Wikileaks and $100,000 in Facebook ads?
However, giving the story heft was our FBI in DC, something euphemistically called the “intel community”, and who knows how many big cheeses in the Obama administration. More than putting a thumb on the scale, they were sitting on it.
First, Comey’s gang “exonerated” Hillary after her clear violations of 18 U.S. Code § 798 et al. Furthermore, and amazingly, Comey and his courtiers somehow reached the conclusion that bleach-bitting her hard drives and servers and smashing devices to smithereens didn’t qualify as obstruction of justice. And to think that Trump had to fight through hell for two and a half over the now-dubious charges of conspiring with Russia and interfering (obstruction) with Mueller’s inquisition into a non-crime.
Go figure. Now that’s the stuff of movies.
As Comey was clearing Hillary, he was conducting a surveillance operation against the Trump campaign since at least summer 2016. A piece of Democrat oppo research – the Steele Dossier – was funneled to the FBI, Obama’s Justice and State Departments, and Obama’s intel chiefs, Clapper and Brennan. The Democrat oppo research was filled with vile falsehoods but was peddled to FISA courts to entrap people connected to Trump, no matter how loose their affiliation. Ironically, the Dossier would turn out to be the only proven instance of collusion: the cooperative arrangement between the Russians, Steele, and the Hillary campaign/DNC.
With sycophants in the media, leaks would keep the pot boiling in an attempt to delegitimize Trump’s victory up to the point when drips and drabs of FBI/Obama mischievousness start to dribble into view, and the release of Mueller’s incoherent report in April of 2019 raised new concerns about the fable.
Anyway, the 2018 midterms gave the House to the Democrats and off into impeachment land we go.
By the time of the release of Mueller’s unintelligible tome, enough was known of the gross misbehavior of Obama’s people and his holdovers in the executive branch. The rogues gallery includes Strok, Page, McCabe, Comey, the Ohrs, Clapper, Brennan, maybe Lynch, and anybody else in the Obama claque now looking to lawyer-up. Include the minor interstellar bodies who are in the orbit of Obama’s intel glob like Halper and Misfud. Also, friendly foreign intel services were more than happy to participate in the scam.
The plot thickens. With one house of our bicameral legislature in hunger pangs for impeachment, getting Trump becomes more than partisan mudslinging. It becomes institutional, partisan mudslinging on the federal dime. Subpoenas fly and the Bolsheviks took over committee chairs. Who’d have thunk it?
Jerry Nadler, chrmn. House Judiciary Comm., and Adam Schiff, chrmn. of the House Intelligence Comm.
Impeachment was juiced up. The Democrats’ electoral success in 2018, though, could possibly end up breeding their own fall. In Sophocles’s tragedy, Ajax, Ajax proudly asserts that he doesn’t need Zeus’s help. Oedipus in Oedipus Rex boastfully claims the genius to solve a murder mystery. It didn’t end well. From the Book of Proverbs, 16:18: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Warnings abounded, but the Dems insisted on pushing the issue.
The April release of the much-anticipated Mueller Report made matters murkier. Trump collusion was put to bed but he was “not exonerated” (?) of obstruction, something Hilary did blatantly. Now that’s an extremely odd concept in a prosecutor’s brief, “not exonerated”. It’s such a loose concept that anybody not charged can be labeled “not exonerated”. That’s not how our system works. Innocence is presumed, not “not exonerated”. Well, it’s enough of a kernel for Democrats blinded with rage for losing in 2016.
Then Mueller reluctantly testified after the Dems threatened him with subpoenas. Mueller’s testimony proved to be the emperor with no clothes. Bumbling, stumbling, incoherent, and ignorant of his own report made the show an embarrassment for both him and the Dems.
The spectacle raises questions about who was running the show in the Office of Special Counsel. Was Mueller merely the man running interference for the likes of Andrew Weissman and Jeannie Rhee, both leftovers from Obama’s DOJ?
The Special Counsel and his team.
Mueller’s awkward performance and his lack of familiarity with the report that bears his name would seem to indicate that the partisan inmates were running the partisan asylum. 13 of the 17 prosecutors working under Mueller were registered Democrats – and prominent Democrat apparatchiks in DC – with the remaining four unknown or unaffiliated.
Mark July 24, 2019 on your calendar, the day of Mueller’s testimony. It’s the day for all-things-Russia to exit stage left. Another angle to the story, frothing beneath the surface, is about to spill over the top.
The curtain comes down on Act One.
Act Two: The Fall
The script for Act II has not been written. Yet, key elements are present for a second generation Watergate.
The full story of the lefty nexus of the mainstream media, the Obama holdovers in the executive branch, and the Democratic Party has yet to be written. This place has the potential for a real conspiracy. Attorney General Barr, US Attorney Durham, US Attorney Huber, and IG Horowitz will have something to say in due course, though the general outlines are already present. The investigation of the investigators has just begun, the start of Act Two.
Yes, the rogue’s gallery mentioned earlier should lawyer-up. It’s a great time to be a criminal defense lawyer in DC.
Here’s a possible scenario. The story begins with the effort to remove Trump from the political scene. Comey’s in the middle of it. Comey and his claque in the FBI were eager to use the fraudulent dossier to undermine the Trump campaign and presidency as early as summer 2016, after which they would end up with 4 FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. The applications for the warrants to begin the effort were deceptions to the FISA judges. The operation (“Crossfire Hurricane”) continued well into 2017.
The media played along to perpetuate the story. They acted like a megaphone for wild and lurid claims for gross partisan advantage. It was a cooperative venture among a triad of actors: (1) big name/legacy media, (2) the DNC/Hillary campaign, and (3) an executive branch that acted like its namesake, a community organizer – which is nothing but a rabble-rousing community activist.
But surprise, surprise: Trump won. And ….. Stay tuned for the rest of the story.
Democratic Party presidential contenders debate, 7/30/19.
The morning after last night’s Democratic Party debate I was reading Jay Nordlinger’s story (National Review, 7/29/19) about the Russian dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now in exile in Britain. It brought to mind an inextinguishable need in the enthusiasts of socialism, whether openly declared or as quiet fellow travelers (much of the Democratic presidential field), to constantly point to a non-existent, never-realized form of it. It’s a phantom only possible in the mind’s eye of the true believer and nowhere else. Bernie exhibits it in great bounty, and so does an increasing portion of the party’s activist base, the party’s stable of presidential candidates, and its giddy zealots in Congress (the dimwit Squad for instance). In addition to Stalin’s Socialist Realism in art, we must add Socialist Longing – the longing for a future and purer socialism that somehow will get it right – to the doctrines of the Church of Socialism.
Bernie sounds like he was mentally put into a cryogenic state during his glory days of the 1970’s and 80’s. Mentally, he’s still honeymooning in the Soviet Union. Khodorkovsky mentioned the everywhere-stated party slogan: “The Party solemnly promises that this generation of the Soviet people will live under Communism.” Bernie is stuck there as well. For Bernie, the promise is always in the future, or in a northern European country that, in reality, shed much of its experiment in socialism. Bernie’s socialism is the Sweden of 1970, for example, not the Sweden of today.
Does he know that Sweden isn’t far behind the US in Heritage’s economic freedom rankings? (The US position was bolstered by the recent tax cut law.) Still, Sweden has no minimum wage law, abolished its inheritance tax in 2004, and let go of much of its state-owned enterprises. It’s vaunted public healthcare system is remarkably decentralized, a far cry from Bernie’s sovietized Medicare for All. Bernie’s idea of socialism is the failed version, and can’t point to a functioning one this side of North Korea and Cuba.
Bernie wants to impose something that Sweden ran from. Does he know it? Don’t know, but the longing continues for a decrepit idea in the hope that it will be magically transformed into a success. Bernie is the chief exponent of a made-in-America cargo cult.
Church in Boston, Massachusetts @mattbannister via Twenty20
I’m constantly reminded of the general wrong-track numbers in opinion polls even when economic conditions have been improving. Why does there seem to be a nagging sense that things aren’t going well? Two books make a mighty attempt at an answer: “Dignity” by Chris Arnade (a self-described socialist) and “Alienated America” by Tim Carney (commentary editor of the Washington Examiner). Both books elucidate the deep social ills that accompanied the absolute deterioration of civil society in areas frequently referred to as “left behind”. The problem is far, far more than economic. The accompanying review of the books presents the case.
Why the rise of Trump and a resuscitated loony left with a home in the Democratic Party? I’ve heard some Trump supporters call for a government takeover of health care, adopting the nonsense language of turning an economic good or service, governed by scarcity, into a “right”. The loony left is the loony left, always has been, and has an off-the-shelf answer for all that plagues us: big, centralized government; it’s the Progressive way. The two elements have a nexus.
The roots of the current fascination with big, omnipresent government – or looking for saviors in large personalities on the public stage – may be found in the decline of something vital for personal well-being according to Arnade and Carney. Some call it civil society. Others, like Carney, refer to “social capital”. Both recognize the critical role of church, an institution beleaguered by the rising tide of secularization, another by-product of Progressivism. In so doing, the props of connection and support in the vast array of personal social networks have collapsed, leaving behind alienated folks in the vast stretches of the poorer sections of flyover country and young people facing declining opportunities. In our time, the default answer is a savior (Trump, Bernie, the nitwit Squad), vapid sloganeering (“Make America Great Again”, “Structural Racism”, “Make the rich pay their fair share”, “Equal [fill in the blank]”, “There are no illegal immigrants”, and so on), and the elevation of government as a super daddy and mommy. Church and family are replaced by commissars.
I support many of Trump’s initiatives, but he, like Bernie and the nitwit Squad, come to think of it, might be a sign of the times.
A group of migrants gather at the Chaparral border crossing in Tijuana, Mexico, Sunday, Nov. 25, 2018, as they try to pressure their way into the U.S. Rodrigo Abd/AP
The citizenship question should be on the ballot, and please don’t psychoanalyze repressed racism as is the wont of the pseudo-Freudians in the Democratic presidential field. It’s simply a matter of pure reason. However, there’s more to the story according to John Yoo (UC Berkeley law professor) and James Phillips (Stanford law professor). They see a silver lining in the Supreme Court’s decision (Dept. of Commerce v. New York) blocking the inclusion of the citizenship question for those concerned about rule by unelected administrative apparatchiks (“Roberts Thwarted Trump, but the Census Ruling Has a Second Purpose”, The Atlantic, see here).
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Associate Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan listen during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 30, 2018. REUTERS/Win McNamee/Pool/File Photo – RC183E07BA00
First, pure reason dictates the presence of the question. The Democrats’ lollapalooza of giveaways includes the extension of benefits to citizens of other nations in residence here, legal and illegal. How could you determine the fiscal impact of the lunacy if you can’t count the beneficiaries? Mayor Pete (Buttigieg) pulls 11 million out of the hat for the undocumented alone. MIT says its more like 22 million. A range of double means that we don’t know. Though, who would you trust for scientific rigor, Mayor Pete or MIT?
Mayor Pete
An additional reason cries for the inclusion of the query. I suspect that the foreign-born make up a huge slice of the population. If you want a data base on the nature of the current population for policy reasons – which is one of the reasons for having a census – to exclude a descriptor that stares at you as you drive through almost any hamlet, town, or city in California (and Chicago, New York City, etc., etc.) would limit the census to only being a tool to inflate Democrat representation in Congress. Get real, ferret out the non-citizens and their status.
Secondly, Yoo and Phillips see a positive in the Court’s majority opinion for those with qualms about omnicompetent administrative governance, particularly the promiscuous delegation of Congressional authority to the president and his administrative minions. Since Wilson and FDR, it has been the dream of “progressives” to supplant popular sovereignty with the rule of “experts”, never mind that the rule of experts can resemble the rule of Boss Tweed (“collusion” anyone?). The decision could be interpreted as a slap at “Chevron deference” (courts deferring to administrative judgment) and power-hungry power centers like the EPA.
If we still are prevented from knowing much about the people who are flooding into our country, at least we might be comforted by the realization that the EPA can’t kick us out of our house.
Read the Yoo and Phillips article.
RogerG
Postscript: On Friday, 7/12/2019, Pres. Trump issued an executive order to use other data bases to determine residency status of the population for the 2020 census. Expect more lawsuits in attempts to obscure the actual number.
One evening I received a call from one of my students in my community college Physical Geography class. He was disappointed in his grade and begged for a higher one. This was his second time around but couldn’t show much improvement. I told him that I couldn’t in good conscience raise his grade as it would be unfair to the other students. He pleaded, “If I don’t get a higher grade, I won’t graduate and I won’t rise to anything in my life.” My heart sank after hearing this. I proceeded to dispel him of the crazy notion. It may be crazy but it is instilled in the young from pre-school on. How did we get to this place?
Somehow, going to college has become our society’s default path to personal advancement. Call it degree inflation. The relentless drumbeat of “college, college, college” has warped public policy with its plethora of taxpayer subsidized financial aid, degraded entry and instructional standards, and produced new “soft science” degree fields that have little bearing on real learning and improved abilities and does much to produce alienated and disgruntled students with a bent for political activism.
Oberlin College students protest a bakery for alleged racism. Later, the college incurred a $44 million judgment for defaming the owners and an employee.
And it fabricates a raft of “disparate impacts”, that old bugbear of civil rights warriors since the 1960’s. College degrees aren’t distributed evenly among social groups, and some groups have protected status in law and court decisions (the Civil Rights Acts and the Griggs decision). As the college degree becomes a de facto test for employment, the brunt will fall disproportionately upon these groups. A new college-industrial complex has taken shape to provide new barriers to job entry and advancement, whose relevance to work performance is more hypothetical than real. The case is laid out beautifully by Frederick M. Hess and J. Grant Addison in National Affairs, “Busting the College-Industrial Complex” (see here).
I suspect that a social bias is at work in this call of “college for all”. Most people making the push come from social strata who predominate in college admissions. It’s how they did it; it’s how their parents did it; it’s how everyone in their well-to-do neighborhood does it. When they get into positions of influence, it’s their preferred prescription for everyone to reach elevated levels of esteem. For them, anything else is for the hoi polloi.
Pres. Obama with daughter Malia, who attends Harvard, and Pres. and Mrs. Clinton with Chelsea who attended Stanford.
Illogic abounds in the process. On the one hand, they complain about the escalating cost of college; on the other, they push as many people as possible into it. It’s as if college advocates want to suspend the relationship between demand and price. You can’t, and when you try, the disjunction will show in other damaging ways.
To put it bluntly, college isn’t for everybody. Nor should it be. Anyway, the heralded thing is debased beyond recognition. Many of our young would be better served if they looked elsewhere for personal growth.
On Jan. 30, 2017, CNN’s Jake Tapper was critical of White House spokesman Sean Spicer’s words in describing Trump’s executive order restricting some Muslim immigrants.
We are not well-served by our telegenic punditry class on cable TV nor our increasingly demagogic hucksters running for high office in order to gain power to tell us what to do. Particularly irksome is the collection of verbiage to avoid using “illegal immigrant” to refer to those who crossed our borders in violation of our laws. The rhetorical gymnastics are astounding, and misleading.
A favorite euphemism is the phrase “the undocumented”, meaning those “without papers”. Yes, in a superficial sense, these words work. Even “illegal immigrant” works, but all have an important ingredient missing. What’s absent is any indication that the objects of the phraseology are citizens. Yes, they are “citizens”, but not of here. These people are the citizens of other countries. They are not stateless people.
Central American migrants attempt to rush the border fence between Tijuana and San Diego and are dispersed with tear gas by the Border Patrol, 2018.
Putting it all together: “the undocumented” are citizens of other countries who willingly broke our laws to reside in our nation. The fact that they are the citizens of other countries puts the issue of what to do with them in an entirely new light.
So, extending universal health insurance coverage as some have proposed, subsidized by American citizens, to citizens of Guatemala (or any country for that matter) in our country in violation of our laws is an invitation for them to get here by any means available and partake of our fantastic medical professionals and facilities. American citizens get the honor of paying for the healthcare of Guatemala citizens. If the point is to rub away the distinction between foreign citizens and American ones, the idea accomplishes the feat in a quick stroke.
Patients wait to be seen in the emergency room of an LA hospital, 2012.
Trump’s citizenship question might have to be reworded. He’ll have to replace “United States” in front of “citizen” with “world” since U.S. citizens, functioning as taxpayers, become the world’s taxpayers for the world’s needy. Thus, “Are you a world citizen?”
I present the point not as mere sarcasm. If your concern is the treatment of a bleeding Guatemala citizen in our country in violation of our laws, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986 takes care of it. The hucksters, though, are brandishing cradle-to-grave healthcare for … Guatemala citizens, or any country’s citizens who happen to get here by any means available. American citizenship be damned.
Ludicrousness continues in the call for non-citizens to vote in local elections. Imagine the spectacle of city council elections turning into UN affairs. Citizens of Guatemala – or Honduras, El Salvador, Russia, etc. – if they account for a majority in a district due to the laxed enforcement of our immigration laws, get to tell US citizens what to do. So, nonmembers – national membership is the essence of citizenship – govern members. How does that make sense?
From now on, please clean up the language. All people are born in some country and therefore citizens of it – with but a few arcane exceptions. The anomalies are probably focused on the jet-set rich who can afford to be above it all. For the rest of us, citizenship goes with our presence on the earth. Let’s talk like we understand the fact.
CNN’s Jake Tapper interviewing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, June 27, 2019.
Remember the cry from Republicans that “character counts” during the Clinton impeachment battle? Now, nary a word of condemnation from them about Trump’s present public and past private (and not so private) behavior. Don’t worry, the Dems are a mountain of hypocrisies too. Remember Barbara Jordan (D, Tx.) and her U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform of 1994-1996? Her restrictionist views on immigration once found a home in the Democratic Party. If alive today, not only would she never make the stage in either of the recent Dem debates, she would be wiping spittle off her face after a visit to a local DC restaurant.
Don’t expect either party to offer a duplicity-free environment. Maybe it has to do with life constantly throwing monkey wrenches into our preconceived notions. What we once condemned – or loved – turns around and bites us in our posterior.
Barbara Jordan (D, Tx.)
Jordan said the following about immigration policy: “… it is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest.” Further, she wrote, “For immigration to continue to serve our national interest, it must be lawful. There are people who argue that some illegal aliens contribute to our community because they may work, pay taxes, send their children to our schools, and in all respects except one, obey the law. Let me be clear: that is not enough.” From there on, she continues to sound more and more like Trump.
The hood ornament for open borders is our giddy sophomore class president, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY). Lately, she strode into the land of Nazi-shaming about our immigrant holding centers, calling them “concentration camps”. It’s true that when a person resorts to making anything a clone of the Nazis, you’re close to admitting the sterility of your point. Game over, Alexandria.
What does she do when confronted with her banality? She dodges. In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, she was questioned, “… there were also ‘concentration camps’ under Obama and under Bill Clinton…. did you call them concentration camps at the time when Obama was president?”
Her awkward response was, “Well, at the time, I was working in a restaurant.” She tried to recover by additionally saying, “… I absolutely was outspoken against Obama’s immigration policies and the detention of families then.” He didn’t ask her about her past opposition. He queried her about equating our detention centers under Obama to what is colloquially understood to mean Auschwitz. She rhetorically zigzags like an Allied troop ship in a u-boat killing zone.
Quibbling is another favorite tactic when caught tasting your feet. She attempts to bring up a more benign and arcane definition of “concentration camp”. The over-caffeinated Ocasio-Cortez exhibits all the signs of a zealot caught being a zealot.
Baffoonishness is now a qualification for the political limelight.
Read the story of the Tapper/Cortez interview here.
I didn’t watch the Democrat debate last night. It’d be too painful. Anyway, the general script for the primary has already been written. The parade of the ambitious are functioning like the old March of Dimes telethon … in reverse. Instead of calling in to donate money, the candidates act like the volunteers in the phone bank announcing the latest request for more of other people’s money. It’s a marathon about how much to give away, not contribute.
Cartoon #1
In the first cartoon – “Bernie Panders” – Bernie Sanders proclaims he’ll call and raise the bids of the faux indigenous candidate (Elizabeth Warren) and our giddy sophomore class president (AOC) in their demands to write off the student loan debt of people who voluntarily stoked up their debt in their halcyon days on campus, much of it accumulated in grad school. Now they have to pay it back with a payback schedule bent-over-backwards to make it easy.
Who’ll pay for the giveaway? It won’t be the young scions of the upper income and upper middle income families who mostly ran up the debt. The favorite target of our politically ambitious rabble-rousers is the rich, out of which they won’t get anywhere close to retiring the $1.4 trillion price tag. All the while, the targets hide their money or flee the country, and the millstone around the neck of toddlers and the yet-to-be-born – called the national debt – will only get heftier. Too bad. Toddlers and the yet-to-be-born don’t vote. Not yet anyway.
Cartoon #2
Cartoon #2 brings up another antic of the spendthrifts. Here, the presidential wannabes magically transform an economic good/service into a “right”, resurrecting FDR’s old ploy. FDR, great guy, but occasionally he spouted nonsense. How do you turn something produced with limited resources into a “right”? Answer: you can’t. It’d be like reducing obesity by legislatively repealing gravity. Economic behavior is as natural to us as our teeth. The behavior can’t be repealed.
You make it a “right”, and therefore “free” to the user, and the demand floodgates are thrown open. The concept of a checking account with limited funds has no relevance. You want it; it’s a “right”; you get it. The only real limit is politics, and that is based on how much the people will tolerate the declining quality, the delays, and the denial of services. It plays out whether in the Soviet Union or the British Health Service.
It’s silly beyond belief to equate a “right” to an economic good/service to the right to free speech. Free speech has guard rails (Schenck v. United States, 1919), like a highway, but there is no set limit to the number cars taking the route in the course of its life. Healthcare is limited to the number of people who are capable of providing it and other resources not committed to other necessities. Healthcare isn’t geared to be a “right”.
Don’t tell that to the politically ambitious panderers. Also don’t tell them that “payer” in single payer means “taxpayer”, not “government”.
Cartoon #3
I heard that there was much Spanish speaking at the pander-fest in Miami. Spanish is a beautiful language, but I suspect the display was identity pandering. If it’s a “dog whistle” (using woke language), it’s one tuned to the ears of the multicultural barkers. Their agenda includes the practical erasure of the border. Thus cartoon #3.
Clause 4 of Section 8 of Article I is about to be read out of The Constitution. Once you eliminate border enforcement by dismantling ICE and turning the rest into a construction battalion to build bridges across the Rio Grande, any person living in a dirt floor hut is a soon-to-be-an-American. Would you ever again be able to connect the word “manage” to the word “immigration”? Would there be relevance of “rule of law” to the subject of “immigration”? Hardly. Where’s the law since you trampled it into the ground?
Cartoon #4
Cartoon #4 gives a clue about the state of mind of the Democratic Party. Gargantuan offerings of free government stuff is a certain path to ruin. It’s a race to emulate Argentina, or maybe Venezuela, or maybe the Soviet Union. Ruination can be a democratic choice.
President Obama: “We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people,” Obama told reporters at the White House. “We have been very clear to the Assad regime — but also to other players on the ground — that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.”
“That would change my calculus; that would change my equation.”
* Barack Obama from Aug. 20, 2012 press conference as reported by CNN.
******
Here we go again down the same road paved by Obama. On Thursday Iran shoots down one of our drones. Trump threatens action, speculates that the action might have been that of a lone wolf officer, issues the threat of retaliation, then couples the threat with a request for talks, and finally announces that he’ll do … nothing. What does this sound like to you? It’s worse than an unenforced red line. It’s open season on American surveillance of the Persian Gulf.
What accounts for the spastic reply to an Iranian provocation? I may be way off base but I think that he has a kitchen cabinet of a couple of Fox News celebrities: Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. Both make noises that they would like the U.S. to return to being a regional power. In broadcasts after the shootdown, Carlson and Ingraham rhetorically questioned the vital U.S. interest at stake in the Middle East. Call them the Rand Paul wing of cable news. The result is that the rest of Trump’s foreign policy team is left to compete with flashy cable TV personalities for influence.
Tonight, Tucker was at it again. A fire hose of hyperbole ensued about the evil influence of “neocons”, meaning John Bolton, who in Tucker’s mind, along with Bill Kristol, “planned” the Iraq invasion. Leaving aside the insult to fact and logic, Tucker appears to be channeling Charles Lindbergh and his America First Committee of 1940-1. Lindbergh fit into the overall climate of revulsion after World War I just like Tucker and a few others in the neo-isolationist right were repulsed by Bush’s messy Iraq adventure. Lindbergh and his group lasted until Japanese bombs starting dropping on our servicemen in Hawaii. What’ll happen to Tucker and Laura if American blood is shed because we failed to act when it was a drone?
Oh, I forgot. These types always have an easy out. They will claim that we should have never been there in the first place. Of course, the same logic would hold true wherever in the world that we happen to plant the flag. Soon our navy will be relegated to coastal patrol duty. Only in those places will neo-isolationists accept our interests to be “vital”.
Is this any way to run a foreign policy? You’ve got to wonder. At times, Trump’s foreign policy path resembles a user of LSD.
First, Trump thought he could charm the leader of a brutal thugocracy – North Korea – and came away with __?__ . He probably thought that he was engaging the equivalent of a city planning commission. The Kim clan, like many littering the world since the dawn of hominids, has so much blood on their hands that you’d mistake their fiefdom for the old Union Stockyards in Chicago. Underlings who fail Kim die, which was the fate of the unlucky chap who was Kim’s main functionary at the Hanoi soiree. Apparently, there’s no such thing as severance pay in North Korea.
And Trump actually thought that he was going to charm this guy?
Trump came out of both meetings talking up North Korea’s prospects as something like the next Atlantic City. Come to think of it, the current reality of Atlantic City comes close to matching the current reality of North Korea.
Trump campaigned as the anti-Bush and the anti-Obama. Trump personalizes issues such that policies and actions taken by these two bogeymen must be bad because … Bush and Obama did them. It’s not due to some grand strategic vision. Vision shmavision. His comes close to the hallucinations of the aforementioned LSD user. It took TV images of children being gassed to force Trump into his anti-Obama personality and enforce Obama’s rhetorical red line. TV works for Trump when “peace through strength” doesn’t. Absent a TV image for Trump, “peace through strength” has all the wallop of wet toilet paper.
Now we’re back to TV taking center stage with “sage” advice on dealing with Iran offered up by the Tucker and Laura gang. For them, so what if Iran’s proxies are tramping all over the Middle East firing rockets into Israel, propping up thugs, threatening our alliances, and turning the Persian Gulf into a minefield. For them, so what if the Middle East is a crescent of terror that’ll make another part of the world off limits to the United States, and a staging base for crazies with box cutters and pressure-cooker bombs. For them, so what if our regional allies feel abandoned and look elsewhere. China and Russia are waiting in the wings. For Tucker and Laura, so what.
For the rest of us, it smells like Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy of the 1970’s, or maybe Lindbergh’s of 1940-1, or the fallout of Obama’s apology tour. Are you sure we didn’t elect Barack Hussein Trump in 2016?
