An enemy that plays for keeps

ISIS has claimed responsibility for downing that passenger jet full of Russian tourists over Egypt.

The relentless march of the gender-fluidity jackboots

A physician, a medical doctor, undergoes years of rigorous immersion in such disciplines as general biology, chemistry, anatomy, and within that the study of the body's various systems: respiratory, skeletal, digestive, nervous, immune, etc. A patient can expect him or her to offer the most knowledgable assessment of the state of the patient's physical health to be found anywhere.

That's not enough for the DC City Council. That august body wants doctors practicing in the city to learn how to be "culturally competent':

With the number of gay and transgender people on the upswing in the District of Columbia, city council members want to force doctors to take cultural competency classes to better accommodate them.

The council heard testimony Wednesday from local activists urging them to pass legislation that would make “LGBTQ cultural competency training” a part of their continuing education requirements.

The new regulations would require any medical professional to take two courses on LGBTQ cultural competency in order to obtain or renew their licenses or certifications to work in the District.

According to the new law, the classes must “teach attitudes, knowledge, and skills that enable a health care professional to care effectively for patients who identify as LGTBQ.”

If passed, the new law would make D.C. one of just five other states that require cultural competence training.

Laquandra Nesbitt, director of the D.C. Department Of Health, said the training would teach doctors about body language and social interactions and how those from other cultures may have different opinions about what certain things mean.

“[The training] helps you to identify skills that help you to have interactions that are not offensive to people of other cultures,” she said.

Aw, shut up, Nesbitt. These abnormal people are part of the same culture as the rest of us. It's a culture in which a doctor says to you, "Here's a prescription for your diagnosed condition. We'll refer you to a specialist if needed." End of story.

But the jackboots already have their foot in the door. The "one of just five other states" link is to a webpage run by the HHS's Office of Minority Health. Yes, there is such a thing, and your tax dollars pay for it. The states in question are Washington, California, Connecticut, New Jersey and New Mexico.

Basically, we're now at a point where someone from a self-proclaimed alienated demographic can strut into a doctor's office and say, "Watch how you word things as you tell me about my condition, or I'll have your head on a platter."

Post-America is one pathetic place.

The hideous effects of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

In an interview with FNC's Bill Hemmer, John Boehner openly acknowledges that he got punked by the Most Equal Comrade when he offered a gesture of trust in the vilest Freedom-Hater of them all:

When asked about a grand bargain to reduce the debt and deficit with Barack Obama which, ultimately, did not happen, Boehner said that he, Eric Cantor, and Obama had shook on it in the Oval Office, but Obama “walked away from the agreement.”

Boehner explained: “The deal was done. Over $5 trillion worth of deficit reduction… tens of trillions of dollars over the next 20 years in terms of really fixing our entitlement programs and getting us onto a much more solid foundation.”

Boehner insisted that he was “shocked” when Obama walked away, and the “country went through a lot more than we needed to.”

However, Boehner said that he and the president still had a good relationship. When Boehner announced his retirement, Obama called him and said that he was going to miss him. Boehner replied, “Yes you are, Mr. President, yes you are.”

Any ostensible Republican who, even after such a betrayal, brags about a "good working relationship" with the Most Equal Comrade ought to be banished from the party.

There is no excuse for this outlook.

The damage John Boehner has done is enormous.

Post-America has boots on the ground in both Syria and Iraq now

A frequent commenter here at LITD recently chimed in under a post about Iran saying that "the Middle East is not ours," and, when the observation was made that his position could be seen as giving a pass to the mullahs, said that if war were the answer to the region's ills, the W-era policy would have done the trick.

War per se, of course, is not a policy but an occasionally and unfortunately inevitable means by which a policy is pursued.

What Mideast policy - and foreign policy generally - should have as its first principle is consistency, and that consistency should be on behalf of national security. Of course, much emanates from that core tenet. It entails an understanding that the United States of America is - or maybe the operative term is "should be" - the most reliable preserver of Western civilization, and therefore must assure all Western nations (including Westernized Middle Eastern and East Asian nations) that it will not falter in so preserving. Then, driven by the best values distilled from the West's long history, the United States is in a position to recognize mischief by bad guys before it rises to the level of an actual threat.

In the case of Iran, for instance, that would have meant seeing that Shiite radicals were the most likely force to fill the power vacuum it we let Shah Reza Pahlavi fall in the late 1970s. And, yes, it would have meant, given that he did indeed fall and the radicals did indeed come to power, that there should have been no back-channel communications, and certainly not arms sales, to Iran in the mid-1980s. And that would have been the time to make damn sure an Iranian nuclear program never got off the ground. Move forward to the immediate aftermath of the September 2001 attacks and it would have meant bringing all available intelligence and propaganda resources available to bear in fomenting regime change in Iran. It was ripe for it at the time. (The last great opportunity was in June 2009.)

In the case of Syria, it would have meant treating the Assad regime as an unqualified enemy throughout the years. No dinners between Assad and then-Senator Global-Test. No patty-cake visits from Nancy Pelosi. No statements from Hillionaire about Assad being a force for stability. We therefore would have been exhibiting consistency when the Arab Spring occurred and post-America, under the Most Equal Comrade, switched to calling for Assad's ouster. Alas, we obliterated any hint of consistency when the MEC allowed Assad to cross the chemical-weapons red line.

Consistency driven by self-identification as the West's preserver would have meant being the ally to Israel that were were supposed to be, and never engaging in pointless conferences such as Oslo and never letting a terrorist like Arafat visit the White House.

Alas, post-American policy has been downright incoherent. The Most Equal Comrade has sworn that post-America would not be drawn back into combat in the Middle East, and now that's exactly where we are:

The U.S. will send a small number of U.S. special operations forces into Syria as part of a shift in its strategy against ISIS, officials said Friday. 

A senior administration official confirmed that President Barack Obama has authorized a contingent of less than 50 special operations forces to deploy into northern Syria. 

"We have been focused on intensifying elements of our strategy that have been working, while also moving away from elements of our approach that have proven less effective," the official explained. 

The White House was expected to announce the decision later Friday.

"Moving away from elements of our approach that have proven less effective." What a nice touch.


But, as has been the way post-America had done this sort of thing, the measures being taken are less than what is required for a decisive outcome (also known as victory):

Rep. Mac Thornberry, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said the expected announcement made clear the White House was feeling the pressure of a "failed policy" against ISIS.
"I'm concerned that the administration is trying to put in place limited measures — too late — that are not going to make a difference," he told NBC News. "I don't see a strategy towards accomplishing a goal, I see an effort to run out the clock without disaster."
Obama and his administration have come under mounting pressure amid signs the anti-ISIS coalition has stalled or at least failed to turn the tide against the militants — including the recent Pentagon decision to abandon a failed program to train and equip Syrian rebels. 

Small signs of a sea change in strategy have been filtering out in recent weeks and gained steam in the wake of a U.S.-backed raid to free ISIS hostages that cost the life of a Delta Force commando. 

SecDef Ashton Carter is using the term "combat" to characterize what post-America is engaged in.

We also have troops on the ground once again in northern Iraq.

These are the fruits of a policy consisting of preening about an "international community" and "all sides tamping down the rhetoric" and "reset" and "getting a political process on track."

No, this doesn't make the MEC regime into a bunch of warmongers. It exposes them as being so in thrall to a fantasy vision of a world where conferences in Vienna, Geneva and Paris are worth a damn that they let Western civilization crumble in real time.

Let's check in with Russia

What's the latest with post-America's partner in reset and greater flexibility?

Well, it's shipped Iranian weapons to Syria 20 times in the last 10 days.

The flights are not registered and are in violation of an arms embargo on Iran imposed by two United Nations Security Council resolutions, the report notes.

Russian cargo planes have transported Iranian weapons to the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria “twice a day over the past 10 days,” the unnamed sources told Fox News.

Earlier this month, the planes were spotted on the tarmac at Moscow’s airbase in Syria’s primary port city, Latakia.

Fox News learned that “the increased Russian transport of Iranian weapons is being coordinated by Qassem Soulimeini, the head of the Iranian Al-Quds force, as well as President Vladimir Putin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.”

Moreover, Iranian military personnel are being flown from Tehran into Latakia several times each day by Mahan Air, an Iranian civilian airline, points out Fox News.

“Tehran’s support has been crucial to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s survival. Besides significant financial aid to Assad, Iran has acknowledged that its Revolutionary Guard officers are on the ground in Syria in an advisory role,” adds the report. “There have been multiple Iranian officers and soldiers killed in fighting in Syria, though Tehran denies the presence of actual combat troops in the country.”

Gives us an indication of what Soulimeini was discussing during his July trip to Moscow.

Let us remember that  both Russia and Iran are part of this cozy little group currently meeting in Vienna to discuss the Syrian situation, and that Russia sits on the Security Council that imposed the arms embargo.

Also, two Russian spy jets have buzzed a post-American naval carrier strike group.

The USS Ronald Reagan scrambled its fighter jets earlier this week after two Russian naval reconnaissance aircraft flew within one nautical mile of the U.S. aircraft carrier as it sailed in international waters east of the Korean Peninsula, according to 7th Fleet officials.

In the latest in a series of incidents involving Russian aircraft, two Tupolev Tu-142 Bear aircraft flew as low as 500 feet Tuesday morning near the Reagan, which has been conducting scheduled maneuvers with South Korean navy ships. Four F/A-18 Super Hornets took off from the Reagan’s flight deck in response to the Russian advance, 7th Fleet spokeswoman Lt. Lauren Cole said Thursday.

Ronald Reagan monitored the Russian planes while communicating with South Korean and Japanese forces and launched its fighters well before the Russians made their closest approach, Cole said.

U.S. officials attempted to contact the Russian aircraft but received no radio response. A U.S. ship escorting the Ronald Reagan followed the Russian aircraft as they withdrew, Navy officials said.

Still the Most Equal Comrade and Secretary Global-Test think there's something chic about deliberate weakness.

The Most Equal Comrade's foreign policy is nothing short of evil

As if the nuke deal didn't legitimize the hate-driven regime in Iran enough, post-America has invited it to a meeting of the minds on Syria:

  Iran on Wednesday accepted an invitation to attend a broad new round of negotiations to resolve the Syrian war, sitting with longtime adversaries including the United States and Saudi Arabia who once sought to bar the Iranians from any role in Syria’s future.The inclusion of Iran in the talks represented the first time that the United States has chosen to formally engage the Iranians diplomatically on the Syria issue. It also came a little more than three months after Iran signed a historic nuclear accord with the United States and other powers that promised to end Iran’s economic isolation in return for limits on its nuclear enrichment, suggesting an effort to broaden the discussion beyond that successful negotiation.

Quite a feather in the mullahs' cap:

“We should thank President Rouhani for his efforts in reaching out to the international community, and the nuclear deal,” said Farshad Ghorbanpour, a political analyst close to the government in Tehran. “Now we are seeing the rewards: We are playing an increasing active role in the international arena.”
That role is something that Iran has desperately sought: Diplomatic weight and respect that bolsters its claim that it, not Saudi Arabia, is the most influential power in the region. “It’s very important because it shows that, following the nuclear agreement, Iran is now ready to cooperate on crisis management in the Middle East,” Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian diplomat and nuclear negotiator who now teaches at Princeton, said in a telephone interview. “I’m not surprised, because the leader had said that if the deal were done fairly, with face-saving for all parties, Iran would agree to next steps on other issues. This is a big step forward.”

Yes, indeed, giving this regime a role in "cooperating on crisis management in the Middle East" on the heels of its long-range missile test in violation of UN Security Council resolutions is just a dandy idea.

Our partner in patty-cake is a regime that does this:

After the nuclear deal was signed, the human rights situation inside the country deteriorated signficantly.

Arrests — and hangings — grew in number.

Read the entire linked article. It tells the story of a dissident filmmaker in Iran and the regime's inability to crush his spirit despite years of beatings and torture. He has escaped over the border into Turkey, but Turkey has given him a two-week time frame for finding someplace else to go. He has contacts in the United States and is hoping that can lead to a positive outcome.

And even in Turkey, he's not what you'd call safe:

 . . . his adversaries would not let Emad be, even in Istanbul. He received a “private” phone call consistent with IRGC’s pattern of terrorizing dissident targets abroad. He had to change his SIM card, abandon his acquaintances, and flee.

Also, consider that Iran is at the table in Vienna because Russia has insisted on it.

The eclipsing of post-America is pretty well complete.  What kind of chance does righteousness and real justice have to flourish on the world stage now that no one in a position of influence is interested in such things?

In fractured post-America, there's consensus about something this morning

How's this for a flying-pigs moment? LITD linking to Think Progress.

Reporters from both conservative and liberal-minded news organizations seem to agree: the CNBC Republican presidential debate was kind of a trainwreck.

That wasn’t really because of the candidates, though — it was because of the moderators. For the first hour, CNBC moderators Becky Quick, John Harwood, and Carl Quintanilla didn’t let candidates interact with each other, resulting in multiple moments of incomprehensible yelling. This may have been because of stricter time limits — this particular 10-candidate debate was only two hours, while the previous Republican debates have spanned three hours.

But constant interruption wasn’t the only problem. Candidates were also highly critical of the CNBC crew, accusing them of being part of the “liberal media.” At one point, Ted Cruz ripped into the moderators for asking what he called unfair and non-substantive questions. And in two instances, audience members actually booed at questions the moderators asked of Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee.

The author of the piece Emily Atkin quotes observers both left and right who concluded it was a disaster.

The sordid last days of the Boehner era

The orange weeper from Cincinnati says he wants to "clean the barn" for his successor, presumed to be Paul Ryan.

The irony is that Representative Ryan is not at all pleased with Boehner's style of barn-cleaning.

It's a sentiment shared by the editors of NRO

and Stephen Moore at Investors Business Daily:

Federal spending in 2016 was already expected to climb by more than $250 billion — or close to $1 billion extra spending each day. This was to be a 6% rise in outlays in a year when inflation is running at slightly less than 2%.

But the budget deal adds to the orgy of spending. The plan raises spending by at least $100 billion over two years and busts through the spending caps for two years.

And it raises the debt ceiling by about $1 trillion for the next year and a half so that Washington doesn't have to deal with it anymore.

What a calamity.

The only victory Republicans have had in six years under Obama is the spending caps, and now they want to punt those away?

Obama dangled the bait of cuts in the long-term income-transfer programs like Medicare and Social Security.

Sure. These are the same Democrats who show TV ads of Republicans shoving grandma over the cliff with her wheelchair. Are Republicans really dumb enough to fall for that Lucy-and-the-football trick again?

And David Harsanyi at The Federalist:

For one thing, the GOP will have to live with the precedent set by the terrible deal in future negotiations. Barack Obama, as The New York Times points out, is now going be able to “break free of the spending shackles” of the imaginary reign of austerity that was brought on by Budget Control Act of 2011. So are all Democrats.

For another thing, conservatives will almost surely see this as a betrayal. The administration came up with the idea of sequestration, and it turned out to be only tangible victory Republicans could claim on spending.

And what the hell is this business of the House voting to reopen the Ex-Im Bank all about?

The left (such as the authors of the above-linked NYT story, as well as Jill Lawrence today at USA Today) are eager to see this as a sign that Reasonable Gentlemen will indeed still prevail and that those wacky absolutist firebrand types have been marginalized.

And this is why there was some degree of controversy surrounding the rise of Ryan to the position of most likely next Speaker.

So, Representative Ryan, what will it be? What does your rise portend?

UPDATE: The very latest signals are not encouraging. Maybe this rise business is not such a certainty after all.

Now, that's what I'm talkin' about!

House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz has begun impeachment proceedings against IRS commissioner John Koskinen.

Beautiful and glorious.

Geez, Squirrel-Hair, all the interviewer asked was why a voter should pick you over Ben Carson

But Squirrel-Hair could not resist the opportunity to go on one of his quintessentially circuitous rambles, touching on matters ranging from why, ahem, Medicare is a great thing to the Bowe Bergdahl exchange, before arriving at his direct and dazzlingly substantive response to the question:

“Because I will make the best trade deals, I will be strongest and best on the military. I will get rid of Obamacare. You know, Ben wants to knock out Medicare. I heard that over the weekend. He wants to abolish Medicare. And I think abolishing Medicare, I don’t think you’re going to get away with that one. And it’s actually a program that’s worked. So, it’s a program that some people love, actually. So, if you look at what’s going on with our country, if you take a look at the horrible deals that we’ve made, including the Iran deal, including, even you take a look on a different subject, Sergeant Bergdahl. We get Bergdahl, they get five of the killers that they’ve wanted for a long period of time. I mean, you know, it’s — the whole thing is ridiculous. And that’s why people are just so unhappy. I will make some of the great trade deals.  I will bring our jobs back. I’ll bring our money back. I’ll bring our manufacturing back. Ben cannot do that.”

Whooee. So much for this business about how he's getting more polished out there on the trail.

Pre-Paris energy-cost-bearing squabbles

Nothing like a leftist meme based on a fantasy to bring actual human nature into sharp relief.

It seems that China and India, with the world's "developing nations" in tow, are rather miffed that the cost of achieving the big global-average-temperature goal to be set in stone at next month's climate pow-wow in Paris will be disproportionately borne by those developing nations. The argument goes something like, "You Western nations goofed up the global climate with your Industrial Revolution; you should have to bear most of the expense of addressing it."

The irony is that the only realistic way for these developing nations to - well, develop - is to use good old, dense, cheap and readily available energy forms just like the Western nations have done:

All issues that require collective action, especially on a global scale, are difficult to resolve because they suffer from the free-rider problem, i.e. some parties seek to benefit from the "common good" without springing for it. But as Oren Cass, a Manhattan Institute analyst, notes, fighting climate change is a particularly vexing problem because the individual cost to each country, especially Third World ones, will be immediate and huge — and the benefits distant and uncertain. The notion that emission cuts can pay for themselves through increased energy efficiency is at best fanciful and, at worst, a lie.

There are no low-carbon energy technologies available today that can sustain the economic growth rates these countries need to lift their people out of abject poverty, let alone offer Western living standards at anything resembling an affordable cost. Over 300 million Indians still live below the poverty line, earning less than $1 per day. India's per capita energy consumption is 15 times less than the United States'. India has to keep boosting its energy use — and therefore carbon emissions — for at least another two decades to eliminate dire poverty, which is why its reduction plan only commits to slashing "emission intensity" — its emission rate as a percentage of its GPD — not emissions themselves.

Even this much, India claims, will require up to a $2.5 trillion investment over the next 15 years in renewable energy sources and adaptation technologies. Even if that figure is exaggerated, clearly this would be a challenge for a country that has yet to offer basic sanitation, transportation, and clean-water infrastructure to all its citizens. 

So, from India on down the scale to Haiti, leaping over the part in the development story where societies use lots of fossil fuels to boost their standard of living, is a plainly insurmountable challenge.

And now we get to the heart of the matter. The only way the whole thing could really be straightened out so that everybody is on board with drastically changing the way the whole world lives in order to achieve a silly, completely unnecessary energy-use goal is to - you guessed it - bring the implicit use of force into the equation:

When there is abundant wealth to solve a problem, moral accounting matters less. Whoever has the means will often step forward without caring too much about responsibility or returns. That clearly is not the case with global warming. The stakes are high for everyone so each side will vehemently assert the morality of its position. But the one most likely to prevail is not necessarily the one with superior claims, but superior force. Might, after all, makes right.

Indeed, notes Cass, if climate change will unleash an eco-catastrophe as claimed, then the harsh reality is that it might be more cost-effective for America and the West to impose their will by military force. Trade sanctions against non-complying countries that are being considered in Paris won't cut it for the simple reason that developing countries can band together and impose countervailing sanctions of their own. The upshot will be a full-scale trade war that won't reduce emissions (although the economic attrition that'll result will help).

Hey, Paris attendees, here's an idea. It's an idea that has convenience, peace, prosperity - and, most of all, freedom - going for it.

Just let everybody obtain normal-people fossil fuels at prices determined by the free market.

Period. Just go with that. Since the global climate isn't in any kind of real trouble, actual problems such as sanitation and food supply and civil order could be addressed. Quickly and elegantly.

In a sane world, such a suggestion would look to everyone like the natural way forward. Alas, eventually, since we're so determined to base these decisions on an utter fantasy, the point of a gun will eventually enter the picture.

It's on purpose - today's edition

The Most Equal Comrade's agenda of hobbling the post-American cattle-masses is right on track:

Fifty-one percent of working Americans make less than $30,000 a year, new data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) shows.

That’s $2,500 a month before taxes and just over the federal poverty level for a family of five. The new numbers come from the National Wage Index, which SSA updates each year based on reported wages subject to the federal income tax.

In 2014, half of working Americans reported an income at or below $28,851 (the median wage), and 51 percent reported an income of less than $30,000. Forty percent are making less than $20,000. The federal government considers a family of four living on an income of less than $24,250 to be impoverished.

That's going to make it ever harder to sustain Freedom-Hater-care:

ObamaCare’s image of invincibility is increasingly being exposed as a political illusion, at least for those with permission to be honest about the evidence. Witness the heretofore unknown phenomenon of a “free” entitlement that its beneficiaries can’t afford or don’t want.

This month the Health and Human Services Department dramatically discounted its internal estimate of how many people will join the state insurance exchanges in 2016. There are about 9.1 million enrollees today, and the consensus estimate—by the Congressional Budget Office, the Medicare actuary and independent analysts like Rand Corp.—was that participation would surge to some 20 million. But HHS now expects enrollment to grow to between merely 9.4 million and 11.4 million.

Recruitment for 2015 is roughly 70% of the original projection, but ObamaCare will be running at less than half its goal in 2016. HHS believes some 19 million Americans earn too much for Medicaid but qualify for ObamaCare subsidies and haven’t signed up. Some 8.5 million of that 19 million purchase off-exchange private coverage with their own money, while the other 10.5 million are still uninsured. In other words, for every person who’s allowed to join and has, two people haven’t.

Among this population of the uninsured, HHS reports that half are between the ages of 18 and 34 and nearly two-thirds  are in excellent or very good health. The exchanges won’t survive actuarially unless they attract this prime demographic: ObamaCare’s individual mandate penalty and social-justice redistribution are supposed to force these low-cost consumers to buy overpriced policies to cross-subsidize everybody else. No wonder HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said meeting even the downgraded target is “probably pretty challenging.”

The HHS survey shows three of four ObamaCare-eligible uninsured people think having coverage is important—but four of five say they couldn’t fit their share of the premiums into their budgets even after the subsidies. They’re not poor; they tend to have jobs in industries like construction, retail and hospitality but feel insecure financially; and they prioritize items like paying down debt, car repairs or saving to buy a home over insurance.

This is part of the over-arching plan, too. Good old Cloward and Piven. Overload the system in order to bring about the conditions for imposing full-blown socialism.

The fruits of planned decline - today's edition

Filling the vacuum is a world without American leadership:

Russian submarines and spy ships are aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications, raising concerns among some American military and intelligence officials that the Russians might be planning to attack those lines in times of tension or conflict.
The issue goes beyond old worries during the Cold War that the Russians would tap into the cables — a task American intelligence agencies also mastered decades ago. The alarm today is deeper: The ultimate Russian hack on the United States could involve severing the fiber-optic cables at some of their hardest-to-access locations to halt the instant communications on which the West’s governments, economies and citizens have grown dependent.

Even though the Most Equal Comrade and his nomenklatura remain complacent, professionals in the business of knowing the severity of world-stage developments are, shall we say, deeply concerned:

Inside the Pentagon and the nation’s spy agencies, the assessments of Russia’s growing naval activities are highly classified and not publicly discussed in detail. American officials are secretive about what they are doing both to monitor the activity and to find ways to recover quickly if cables are cut. But more than a dozen officials confirmed in broad terms that it had become the source of significant attention in the Pentagon.
“I’m worried every day about what the Russians may be doing,” said Rear Adm. Frederick J. Roegge, commander of the Navy’s submarine fleet in the Pacific, who would not answer questions about possible Russian plans for cutting the undersea cables.
Cmdr. William Marks, a Navy spokesman in Washington, said: “It would be a concern to hear any country was tampering with communication cables; however, due to the classified nature of submarine operations, we do not discuss specifics.”
In private, however, commanders and intelligence officials are far more direct. They report that from the North Sea to Northeast Asia and even in waters closer to American shores, they are monitoring significantly increased Russian activity along the known routes of the cables, which carry the lifeblood of global electronic communications and commerce.

 

Reset button.

More flexibility after re-election.

1980s calling asking for their foreign policy back.

Looks like a fine day for 18 holes.

Continue reading the main story

Ryan as Speaker is fine with LITD

I just haven't mustered the motivation to cover the horse-race minutiae of the matter.

Has Paul Ryan occasionally evoked mild dismay in me?  Certainly. But I think Ross Kaminsky at The American Spectator gets to the essence of why I can live with a Speaker Ryan. At this point, I am far less interested in a politician's voting record, involvement with particular policy initiatives or pieces of legislation, associations with particular organizations or political savvy than I am what kind of person he or she is - how he or she stacks up with regard to character, intellect, degree of decency, understanding of what has made America exceptional, and reliance on God.

Kaminsky feels like he has hung with Ryan enough to be able to take the measure of the man:

 I’ve known Paul Ryan since before his first election to Congress and supported him with a contribution in that first campaign. (We also had a few beers at a Chicago White Sox game, although I’m a Cubs fan. Hey, at least they made the playoffs.) He was then and remains today an intelligent, funny, slightly nerdy, patriotic, policy-minded, family-oriented, self-effacing true gentleman.

Paul Ryan is a policy wonk’s policy wonk, a man who has his dream job as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and whose political aspirations relate solely to trying to make this country a better place for his three children — and your children as well. He did not run for president and, much as in this case, did not want to run for vice president but has a sense of public duty that is rarely found in politicians of this or any era if convinced that he is truly the right person at the right time to do something meaningful.

Although I do not agree with every vote he has cast, I defy you to name a member of Congress who has done more to further a national discussion on the proper role of government and on how, particularly when it comes to federal spending and taxation, the federal government can be reformed in accordance with our Founding principles and common sense.

Elsewhere in his piece, Kaminsky expresses his irritation with litmus-test freaks and self-styled purists who are apparently incapable of getting a balanced, comprehensive view of those who are at least ostensibly our ideological brethren. You know the type - the ones who in comment threads call for "throwing the bum out" if there is one instance of tactically disappointing behavior.

Now, that said, thinking about this entire matter gets me to thinking about a mirror-reverse inclination of mine. I can compile a fairly lengthy list of thoroughly decent, smart, God-fearing people whose general orientation is toward freedom, tradition and a mature engagement of the world, who I have nonetheless written off because of transgressions that, for me, constituted bridges too far. Think Kasich and Medicare expansion (and his insipid defense of his position in which he referenced the Pearly Gates), or Mitt Romney (forthright assertion that he would go for cost-of-living minimum-wage increases, assertion that human activity was disturbing the global climate, the characterization of the Most Equal Comrade, who is the most poisonous figure in American history, as "not a bad guy, he's just in over his head").

Ryan has uttered no such deal-breaker. And, as Kaminsky says, he's smart and principled. And consider this question: Now that his running is a reality, which even more pure contender has an actual shot?

I think Paul Ryan would fight for what is good, right and true as House Speaker. That's not something you can say about most people - on Capitol Hill or anywhere else.

The voice of reality

Amidst all the spin and skewed sense of priorities, Mr. Ingmire grasps the essence of the Benghazi scandal and its place in the death of Western civilization:

On Saturday’s “Fox & Friends” on the Fox News Channel, Michael Ingmire the uncle of Benghazi attack victim Sean Smith said that he’s “glad” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a “party” after her testimony before the Benghazi Select Committee, and it was “too bad” his nephew couldn’t make it. Ingmire further stated he was “embarrassed” at the Democrats on the committee.

Ingmire stated, “I’m glad that Mrs. Clinton had an Indian food, wine, and beer party. It’s too bad my nephew and Ambassador Stevens, you know, couldn’t show up.”

Ingmire further said that the difference in what Hillary told her family and what she told the victims’ families about the cause of the attack is “consistent to her career as a serial liar. Without a doubt, you know, Mrs. Clinton really has a problem embracing the truth.”

He also added that he was “embarrassed” at the “tantrums” Democrats on the committee had. Ingmire continued, “if you don’t want to be part of the process, nobody’s forcing you, resign, [Representative] 

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD)

14%

, [Representative] 

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)

14%

, and [Representative] 

Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA)

11%

 in particular, were an embarrassment.”

He notes the same thing LITD pointed out the other day: While the serious grownups on the select committee were dealing in facts and timelines and irrefutable evidence, the committee's Freedom-Haters used their time to indulge in feelings-based generalities, unsubstantiated vitriol and expressions of admiration for a public figure who is clearly one of the most despicable and morally decrepit human beings drawing a breath today.

The problem isn't full jails, it's an increase in violent crime

In today's WSJ, Heather MacDonald has a powerful, I-strongly-urge-you-to-read-the-whole-thing piece on the recent push to reduce sentences for a range of crimes. The Most Equal Comrade has a front-and-center role in the effort, but even some righties I generally respect have gotten on board to varying degrees.
It's predicated on some faulty notions. One is the "Systemic racism" meme that constitutes Black Lives Matter's raison d'être. Another is that the jails are full of fine people who happen to have penchants for recreational drug use, end of story.

The reality is different and much starker:

Pace Mr. Obama, the state-prison population (which accounts for 87% of the nation’s prisoners) is dominated by violent criminals and serial thieves. In 2013 drug offenders made up less than 16% of the state-prison population; violent felons were 54% and property offenders 19%. Reducing drug-related admissions to 15 large state penitentiaries by half would lower those states’ prison count by only 7%, according to the Urban Institute.

In federal prisons—which hold only 13% of the nation’s prisoners—drug offenders make up half of the inmate population. But these offenders aren’t casual drug users; overwhelmingly, they are serious traffickers. Fewer than 1% of drug offenders sentenced in federal court in 2014 were convicted of simple drug possession, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Most of those possession convictions were plea-bargained down from trafficking charges.

Another myth promoted by the deincarceration movement is that blacks are disproportionately targeted by federal drug prosecutions. The numbers tell a different story: Hispanics made up 48% of drug offenders sentenced in federal court in 2013; blacks were 27%, and whites 22%.

Even on the state level, drug-possession convicts are rare. In 2013 only 3.6% of state prisoners were serving time for drug possession—again, often the result of a plea bargain on more serious charges—compared with 12% of prisoners convicted of trafficking. Virtually all the possession offenders had long prior arrest and conviction records. 

Nor is it true that rising drug prosecutions drove the increase in the prison population from the late 1970s to today. Even during the most rapid period of prison growth—from 1980 to 1990—violent prisoners accounted for 36% of the rise in the state prison population, compared with 33% from drug offenders. From 1990 to 2000, violent offenders accounted for 53% of the census increase and all of the increase from 1999 to 2004.

MacDonald goes on to demonstrate how the criminal justice system actually pukes all over itself to employ alternatives to incarceration, resulting in a whole lot of violent crime that goes unpunished, much less unprevented.

Again, as we noted in yesterday's post about Hillionaire's appearance before the House select committee on Benghazi, the left has perpetuated a meme that appeals to well-meaning people's sense of "social justice." So that just as with such lies as that the goal climate is in some kind of trouble, or that there was, circa 2008, some kind of crisis in health-care access in America, or that Islamic radicalism isn't the specific problem regarding terror threats, we are asked to swallow hooey that hobbles and imperils our once-great nation.

Hillionaire's Hill grill and the stark contrast between serious Americans and lie-loving post-Americans

Of all the aspects of Hillionaire's testimony before the House select committee on Benghazi yesterday - the theater of it, the specific revelations, , the Sid Blumenthal factor, her overall poise, save a coughing fit that briefly interrupted proceedings, the media spin that began even as the hearing was still in process - the most significant was how it pointed up the difference between Republicans - and here I mean serious Republicans, those who are worthy of an R behind their name, who understand that American leadership is destiny's call in an otherwise senseless world, who cherish truth, decency, freedom and life, as opposed to Reasonable Gentlemen, carnival barkers and one-note johnnies - and Freedom-Haters.

Freedom-Haters, as exemplified by Elijah Cummings, used their time yesterday to keep pushing the "this-is-all-a-partisan-witch-hunt" meme, in keeping with their modus operandi in any situation - craft and perpetuate a narrative that readily resonates with the feelings-driven, low-information post-American cattle-masses to the point that it drowns out any and all facts that are damning to their case and their cause.

In the case of post-American foreign policy in the age of the Most Equal Comrade, that has meant grabbing on to any circumstantial sliver that could allow them to come up with a sound bite conveying the lie that the MEC and his nomenklatura had eradicated worldwide jihad, even as it had bequeathed a robust economy here in post-America:

In early September 2012, at the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Joe Biden summarized to thunderous applause the administration’s re-election pitch: “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.” Translation: The president had revived the economy, even as he had put “al Qaeda on the run,” as Mr. Obama put it.

The Benghazi attack occurred five days later.

And then came the willful deception involving the video:

The administration instead immediately presented the attack as a spontaneous mob backlash to an anti-Muslim YouTube video. At 10:30 on the night of the attack, Mrs. Clinton issued a statement about the violence, blaming the video. She repeated the charge in a speech the next day. President Obama gave his own speech that day, referring to the video and refusing to use the word “terrorism.”

The next day, Mrs. Clinton mentioned the video twice more. The day after that, Press Secretary Jay Carney said: “We have no information to suggest that it was a preplanned attack.” Mrs. Clinton promised the father of one of the victims that the administration would “make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.” In his weekly address, Mr. Obama talked about the video. When the Libyan president said there was evidence the attack was planned months in advance, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice contradicted him. She instead told five Sunday talk shows—five days after the attack—that “based on the best information we have to date,” the attack “began spontaneously” in response to “this hateful video.” Mr. Obama for two full weeks continued to talk about YouTube. 

By the end of those two weeks, the meme had an aura of implausibility to it in the minds of many post-Americans, but many others were sufficiently impressed by the faux seriousness of those spouting it to conclude that the matter was as those spokespeople were presenting it.

Cut to October 22, 2015, the day the irrefutable smoking gun was made visible to the whole world:

Two hours into Mrs. Clinton’s testimony, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan referred to an email Mrs. Clinton sent to her daughter, Chelsea, at 11:12 the night of the attack, or 45 minutes after the secretary of state had issued a statement blaming YouTube-inflamed mobs. Her email reads: “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Queda-like group.” Mrs. Clinton doesn’t hedge in the email; no “it seems” or “it appears.” She tells her daughter that on the anniversary of 9/11 an al Qaeda group assassinated four Americans.

That same evening, Mrs. Clinton spoke on the phone with Libyan President Mohamed Magariaf, around 8 p.m. The notes from that conversation, in a State Department email, describe her as saying: “We have asked for the Libyan government to provide additional security to the compound immediately as there is a gun battle ongoing, which I understand Ansar as Sharia [sic] is claiming responsibility for.” Ansar al Sharia  is al Qaeda’s affiliate on the Arabian Peninsula. So several hours into the attack, Mrs. Clinton already believed that al Qaeda was attacking U.S. facilities.

The next afternoon, Mrs. Clinton had a call with the Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Kandil. The notes from it are absolutely damning. The secretary of state tells him: “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack—not a protest.” And yet Mrs. Clinton, and Ms. Rice and Mr. Obama for days and days continued to spin the video lie.

Jordan also presented evidence that career-level types at State knew, even during the above-mentioned two-week period, what was really going on:

In a series of e-mails shown by Jordan, experts in the State Department’s Near East Affairs Bureau are shown reacting dubiously to Rice’s claim. “I think Rice was off the reservation on this one,” one wrote. “Off the reservation on five networks!” another responded. Another e-mail said the “WH [was] very worried about the politics. This was all their doing.”

The essence of what is going on here is the same as it always is with Freedom-Haters: develop the keenest possible sense of where the vulnerabilities lie as you are amassing power, and address them immediately:

 The Benghazi attack shortly before the 2012 election didn’t fit the administration narrative that the war on terror was over and that al-Qaida was on the run. It endangered President Obama’s reelection chances and Hillary’s chances to succeed him. That is why she invented and propagated the Benghazi video lie and told it to the parents of the Benghazi dead in front of their son’s caskets.

Thus we see one informative way in which we can speak of two types of Americans (although there is actually a third in this formulation - the great swath of the populace that is so addicted to amusement and distraction that all this is going right past them). There are those who understand the value of mining the essence of our national identity - that is, the first nation in history to be founded on an idea, that idea being that freedom is the essential condition for human well-being - and being fiercely dedicated to preserving that essence, and those who see the entire social / cultural / political stage as a platform for extolling "fairness" and "equality" and "social justice" because it is the fast track to a degree of power enjoyed by tyrants.

Wednesday roundup

S. Fred Singer has a piece at The American Thinker on the three reasons why upcoming international conference in Paris on the environment won't amount to diddly:

. . . developing countries have other priorities; scandals are brewing and may flare up; and the climate itself is not cooperating.

ISIS has compiled and is distributing a 12-chapter, 63-page book on how lone wolves and small cells can blend in.  Pretty thorough:

Jihadis are also warned not to draw attention to themselves by falling into routines, whether eating at the same restaurant or taking the same route each day. And other habits are deemed security risks, as well: “One of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan used to love tea, he couldn’t stop drinking tea. So when he got arrested, they only needed to deprive him from tea and they started getting information from him.”

The handbook notes that lone wolves are especially valuable because they don’t catch attention for being fish out of water — they’re “already in their natural environment and know the customs around them very well.”

In addition, an ideal lone wolf candidate, they stress, “should make sure to not look particularly attached to religion.”

“Also, you shouldn’t be going too often to places like mosques, Islamic institutes or Islamic libraries. You should also wear western-style clothes as to appear neutral and not draw attention to yourself.” The text adds that “most operations that failed in the West did because of brothers who were unsufficiently prepared.”

“Keep your political and religious point of views to yourself, and don’t get yourself involved in any kind of debates with anyone. When asked, tell what people want to hear… Do not create any kind of problem with your neighbors or colleagues.” 

You may already know that Post-America and Russia have reached an agreement on flying in Syrian airspace, but how about this development: Embattled Syrian prez Assad recently turned up in Moscow to confer with Putin. 

And, folks, this is why we call them Freedom-Haters:

The principal of Everett Middle School in San Francisco has decided to withhold the results of the school’s student-council elections because the group of students elected wasn’t diverse enough. Local news source KTVU reports that the election was held on October 10, and that Principal Lena Van Haren sent an e-mail to parents on October 14 informing them that the results would not be released because they didn’t reflect the school’s diversity. “That is concerning to me because as principal I want to make sure all voices are heard from all backgrounds,” Van Haren told KTVU.

And Squirrel-Hair continues to prove some things about the post-American public that, however reluctantly, we must acknowledge.

When lawmakers are lawbreakers

The post-American Senate blocked a vote on a bill to cut off federal funding for sanctuary cities.

Two Pubs, both terminal cases of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, joined the Freedom-Haters in an otherwise party-line vote. Mark Kirk and Lindsey Graham, how do you sleep at night?

"Government" and "socialism" are terms with different definitions

I'd not seen the particular meme discussed by Charles C.W. Cooke at NRO, but I've seen plenty like it, and encountered the basic argument on social media. And I fully expect that I'll run across this one.

Here it is:

Socialist programs in the U.S.: The Department of Agriculture, Amber Alerts, Amtrak, Public Beaches, Public Busing Services, Business Subsidies, The Census Bureau, The CIA, Federal Student Loans, The Court System, Dams, Public Defenders, Disability Insurance, The Department of Energy, The EPA, Farm Subsidies, The FBI, The FCC, The FDA, FEMA, Fire Departments, Food Stamps, Garbage Collection, Health Care, Public Housing, The IRS, Public Landfills, Public Libraries, Medicare, Medicaid, The Military, State and National Monuments, Public Museums, NASA, The National Weather Service, NPR, Public Parks, PBS, The Peace Corps, Police Departments, Prisons and Jails, Public Schools, Secret Service, Sewer Systems, Snow Removal Services, Social Security, Public Street Lighting, The Department of Transportation, USPS, Vaccines, Veteran Health Care, Welfare, The White House, The WIC Program, State Zoos.

You no doubt have also run into those smartasses who think they have successfully conflated government with socialism.

Let's remember what socialism is: government control or ownership of the means of production.

Cooke parses the above list of governmental activities and determines this:

. . . of the 55 items listed, I can count only a handful that have anything whatsoever to do with the abolition of private property, the nationalization of industry, the central planning of the economy, or “the governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution.” The vast majority are either “public goods” (i.e. “non-excludable” and “non-rivalrous” offerings such as the CIA, the FBI, the police, the military, the courts, street lights, public monuments, roads, sewers, etc.); quotidian government operations of the sort that are found in all political and economic systems (the Census Bureau); services that, in practice, can really only be provided or operated by the state (the IRS, the Secret Service, prisons, the White House); services that can feasibly be provided privately but toward which governments are inevitably tempted (NASA, the postal service, garbage collection); or welfare provisions that, while certainly redistributive in nature, are not necessarily “socialistic.”

There is a world of difference between saying, as Madison did, that, because men are not angels they need government, but that due to its having, by definition, a monopoly on the coercive use of power, it must be kept as small and limited as possible, and saying, "Whee! Let's make everything a public endeavor!"

The Freedom-Haters count on you to be intellectually lazy. Don't oblige them.

Several takes on the broken and bitter post-American landscape

An ironic truth of our time is that the one point of agreement for citizens of all stripes is that post-America and the West generally in characterized by an atmosphere of polarization, decadence and incoherence.

LITD has come across some substantive analysis of the situation lately.

The Hoover Institution's Peter Berkowitz looks at a new article by Eric Liu. Liu is director of the Aspen Institute's Citizenship and American Identity program. Corroborating the point I make above, Liu says these are times of brittleness and joylessness for the nation. Berkowitz points out that Liu's proposed way out, however, is more of what got us here: doubling down on identity politics.

Liu envisages a cultural literacy list that would “catalyze discussion and even debate.” It would be many-colored and inclusive, rich with references to movies and music, and to the ethnic, racial, and religious minorities that populate America. In the spirit of progressives’ “living Constitution,” it would be “an evolving document, amendable and ever subject to reinterpretation.”

The content of this list would demonstrate that “the essence of American life is that it relentlessly generates hybrids.” So would the method by which the list is produced. It would be “an online, crowd-sourced, organic document that never stops changing, whose entries are added or pruned, elevated or demoted, according to the wisdom of the network.” And it would teach that the story of “diversity and hybridity” is “the legitimate American story.” Serving as “the mirror for a new America,” Liu’s cultural literacy enterprise, he claims, would overcome the conflict between the claims of a common culture and multiculturalism by illustrating that multiculturalism “is our common culture.”

But multiculturalism is not our common culture. Nor is the essence of American life hybridity and diversity. It is the American commitment to individual freedom and equality under law that is fundamental, and which makes possible the bounteous American pluralism that Liu justly celebrates. At this moment of dizzying change, recovery and restoration of the enduring principles at the core of the American experiment in self-government is decidedly more urgent than construction of a document that echoes the clamor characteristic of contemporary public life.

Liu confuses a part of the American story for the whole. To be sure, any respectable list of cultural literacy today must reflect the richness of American popular culture. It must also feature women’s and nonwhite people’s contributions to the American experience as well as the injustices to which they have been subject. But it should not banish to the periphery what is most basic to the American experience, what nourishes hybridity, and what enables Americans—amid diversity and disagreement—to forge their own futures while forming a single nation that remains the envy of the world.

Liu obscures this larger picture—call it the American constitutional tradition—in part, it seems, because he dislikes what a significant segment of fellow citizens do with their freedom. 

So Eric Liu is no one to consult about a positive way forward.

Maybe James Peireson, in his new book Shattered Consensus, has some useful input? Michael Goodwin of the New York Post thinks so:

Here’s the good news: The chaos and upheaval we see all around us have historical precedents and yet America survived. The bad news: Everything likely will get worse before it gets better again.

That’s my chief takeaway from “Shattered Consensus,”a meticulously argued analysis of the growing disorder. Author James Piereson persuasively makes the case there is an inevitable “revolution” coming because our politics, culture, education, economics and even philanthropy are so polarized that the country can no longer resolve its differences.

To my knowledge, no current book makes more sense about the great unraveling we see in each day’s headlines. Piereson captures and explains the alienation arising from the sense that something important in American life is ending, but that nothing better has emerged to replace it.

The impact is not restricted by our borders. Growing global conflict is related to America’s failure to agree on how we should govern ourselves and relate to the world.

Piereson describes the endgame this way: “The problems will mount to a point of crisis where either they will be addressed through a ‘fourth revolution’ or the polity will begin to disintegrate for lack of fundamental agreement.”

A bracing splash of cold water right there.

Sam Gerrans, writing at Russia Times, has the diagnosis right, pointing, in bullet-point fashion, to  a litany of contributing factors: the fading of agriculture as an occupational field (something LITD made note of the other day), an economy that has not been robust for some time (here, Gerrans gets on some shaky ground, blaming this in part on the wars of recent decades; he trots out the "hubris" charge and asserts that post-American involvement in Middle Eastern situations has been driven by a perceived need to keep the price of oil stable), the prevalence of mind-altering drugs, and declining morals.

Regarding this last factor, he makes some interesting observations that probably could only come from an outsider's perspective (Gerrans is English):

Around 250 million shoppers participated in the Black Friday sales in 2013 in which around USD 61 billion was spent on consumer items – up roughly 100 percent on 2006 figures.

Stampedes and even murders are not uncommon each year with people openly fighting each other over reduced-price items.

The goods bought in such sales tend to be non-essential and many of them are bought on credit cards which then have to be paid off at interest.

Part of the problem in what I have outlined above is that there is little explicit tension. Sure, it is depressing, vulgar and immoral. But it doesn’t look catastrophic. It looks normal.

Indeed. It probably takes this external look to inject some kind of objectivity into our own perception of our behavior. Is not the phenomenon of people getting up from the Thanksgiving dinner table and heading out into the afternoon chill to camp out in front of some big-box store to secure a prime spot for rushing the doors at 3 the following morning just plain bizarre? What would it take for a critical mass of post-Americans to readily see it as such?

There is the sense, and it shows up in a tone of uneasiness in many comment threads under social-media posts or opinion pieces, after all the bitter disagreements have been hashed through, that the status quo cannot be maintained. Let's cut to the chase and spell out the two most likely events that would lance our civilizational infection: economic collapse or a catastrophic attack by an enemy.

Each of those is nearly unthinkable, of course, which sets the mind to searching for some less tumultuous yet equally decisive break from the current state.

Any ideas out there?