How ugly is the atmosphere in post-America?

You knew it was coming to this:

Louisiana state Democrat doesn't want schoolchildren to get anywhere near the Declaration of Independence because it's racist and unfair.

State Rep. Barbara Norton opposes a new bill that would mandateschoolchildren in grades four, five and six to recite a portion of the historic document in the first class of each day. HB 1035 was presented by Republican state Rep. Valarie Hodges and did very well early on, sailing through the House Education Committee. But now the bill has stalled and is possibly dead.

Somehow it was considered controversial with some black members saying it would be better for students to recite portions of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream Speech." One, Rep. Ed Price (D), wrote an amendment to the bill for students to do so. He said, “We fought a long way to get where we are today and I think Dr. King’s speech really personifies what has happened.”

But nothing compares to the assault on the Declaration of Independence made by Norton when she addressed Hodges on the state House floor last week saying:

"I'm not really sure what your intent is, but one thing that I do know is, all men are not created equal. 

"When I think back in 1776, July the 4th, African-Americans were slaves. And for you to bring a bill to request that our children would recite the Declaration, I think it's a little bit unfair to us, to ask those children to recite something that's not the truth."

Hodges responded in disbelief, "You don't think that all men are created equal? You think that's not true?"

Norton continued, with little assurance that she's actually read the document:

"Let me finish… and for you to ask our children to repeat the Declaration stating that all mens [sic] are free, I think that's unfair. 

"In 1776, Dr. King was not even born. African-Americans were in slavery, so since they were in slavery, in the Declaration of Independence say [sic], we were all treated eq -- we were all created equal. we were not created equal because in 1776, July the 4th, I, nor you, nor any of us were born, nor was Dr. King born, so, we were in slavery. And to have our children to repeat, to repeat again and again documents that was not even validated [sic], I don't think that that's fair because we're teaching them a lie."

Hodges responded on Facebook, saying of her fellow members, "It is disturbing to see the lack of understanding of the founding of this country and patriotism." She then added a reminder to something Dr. King said during his most famous speech:

"When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Apparently, Norton doesn't know King's words as much as she'd like to think.

Thus do the last vestiges of Western civilization get stomped out of existence.

A litte more end-of-holiday-weekend just-because music

A little

Just-because music for sliding into the darkening evening of a holiday weekend

Sunday roundup

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line exposes the flimsiness of the excuse given by the WaPo's Ruth Marcus for Hillionaire's email troubles, namely, that she was motivated by "scar tissue built up over years of politically motivated attacks." No, Ruth, it's just the way she's always rolled:

We know the explanation is false because Clinton engaged in similar behavior before she came to Washington as First Lady. I’m referring to her handling of her law firm’s billing records in the Castle Grande matter, which I discussed at length here,” in a post based mainly on the evidence developed by the Office of Independent Counsel that investigated “Whitewater.”

Clinton stole and/or caused to be destroyed the records that established her role as the attorney for participants in the fraudulent Castle Grande scheme. She did so to avoid the political price she feared would be exacted if, with candidate Bill Clinton decrying the “decade of greed” that had brought on the S&L scandals, she was exposed as having been the lawyer for a crooked S&L.

For this purpose, Clinton, working with Webster Hubbell and Vince Foster, stole hard copies of the billing records of the Rose law firm where they were partners. They erased the electronic version of these records. One set of the documents was later found in the White House, just outside Hillary’s private office, by an employee. Another set was found in Foster’s attic by his widow, some years after he committed suicide. Clinton’s time sheets (handwritten, as was the practice back in the day) were never found.

The theft of the billing records occurred on March 7, 1992. It was then that a story on Whitewater/Castle Grande by New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth “hit the wire.” That night, Rose Law Firm documents were passed to a Clinton campaign aide in the firm’s parking lot. 

The theft of these documents thus preceded the ugliness of the Clintons’ eight years in the White House. It preceded the “endless investigations” of that era. It helped fuel some of these investigations.

Hillary’s pattern of document destruction seems to have continued during the White House years.  The New York Post reports that in 1999, investigators discovered that more than 1 million subpoenaed e-mails had been mysteriously “lost” due to a “glitch” in a West Wing computer server. The hole in the White House archives covered a critical two-year period — 1996 to 1998 — when special prosecutor Ken Starr was subpoenaing White House e-mails. 

Homicides are up 52 percent over this time a year ago in Chicago.

The Clean Power Plan was never about combatting "climate change." It was about the federal leviathan usurping ever-more power that ought to belong to states and free individuals and the economic agreements into which free individuals enter.

The theme of my most recent podcast was how willingly signing on to patently untrue narratives has been elevated to a virtue in our society. I didn't include this example, but I certainly could have:

Murray Straus, a researcher in family violence at the University of New Hampshire, died last weekend at the age of 89. He was a man of fierce integrity, and since I covered the social sciences for two national publications, I can tell you that his evidence always checked out. I can also tell you that his memory will not be cherished by gender warriors.

In almost 50 years of research, Straus and the researchers who followed his lead, established beyond any doubt that domestic violence isn’t an instrument of patriarchal control as feminists claim. Nor is it a gender crime as the Violence Against Women’s Act insists it is, but a crime that troubled male and female partners commit against one another at roughly equal rates. Men do more damage than women do, but women conduct and initiate violence as often as men do, and one of three killings by partners is by women.

The frequent claim that women commit violence in self-defense is not borne out in the research. In his 2010 paper, “Thirty Years of Denying The Evidence of Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence,” Straus says the long uproar was fueled by the 1975 National Family Violence Survey, which found a perpetration rate of assault by men partners of 12% and by women partners 11.6%. The rate of severe assaults such as kicking, punching, choking, and attacks with objects was also about the same for men and women (3.8% by men and 4.6% by women). Neither of these gender differences was statistically significant. The response by those who wanted to use domestic violence  as a lever to reduce patriarchal power was furious. Reports that men and women are  equally culpable are not what many wanted to hear.

Among other things, that fury led to dishonest surveys that suppressed evidence of female violence, dropped some findings, blocked publication of some research. faked some statistics, touched off campaigns of intimidation of researchers in the field, and made it risky for graduate students to study under Straus.

Straus had to endure a lot of pressure, demonstrations and death threats. The late Suzanne Steinmetz of the University of Delaware was frequently harassed  for research similar to Straus’s, and a bomb threat was called in at her daughter’s wedding.

British sports venues, music festivals and nightclubs are on high alert in anticipation of ISIS attacks.

At NRO, the great Kevin Williamson examines the full scumbaggery of Katie Couric's role in that sleazily edited gun-policy "documentary."

A bracing heads-up about the jihadist threat

We'd do well to heed Representative McCaul's warning:

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, warned that ISIS and its affiliates have expanded to 20 countries and that the terrorist group is connected to 80 percent of the 1,000 terrorist plots being investigated by the FBI.

“Two years into the fight, our Iraqi partners are making some progress in clearing ISIS outposts but I worry they cannot hold the territory they take back and in Syria; we still do not have a coherent ground force. The president’s original strategy — a $500 million program to train and equip local rebels — has been suspended because it failed miserably to train or equip anyone capable of confronting ISIS,” McCaul said during an event at George Washington University titled "The Terrorist Exodus: Resurgent Radicalism & The Threat To The West."

“In the meantime, the Iranian-Russian intervention has strengthened Assad, which our commanders privately admit has benefitted ISIS…even as terrorists lose some ground in Syria and Iraq, globally they are gaining new ground. ISIS and its affiliates are presently in nearly 20 countries, from Algeria to the Philippines and as they expand, so does the danger to our people and our allies,” he added.

McCaul, who recently led a congressional delegation on a trip to the Middle East, stressed that the U.S. is not winning the war against Islamic extremism.

“Violent extremists are not on the run as the president claims. They are on the march and expanding at great cost to the free world,” he said. “Today we worry about more than just terrorist cells — we worry about full-fledged terrorist armies as they capture territory and enlist thousands to join their ranks.”
In Syria and Iraq, McCaul said the world is witnessing “the largest global convergence of Islamist terrorists” in modern history.

“All you have to do is look at the numbers. More than 40,000 aspiring jihadists have entered the conflict zone providing groups like ISIS with a larger fighting force than entire nation-states like Denmark or Norway and in some ways, terrorists have put together a broader coalition than the one trying to defeat them,” he said. 

In all the prognosticating currently taking place in this election year in post-America, we'd do well to remember that the future does not unfold in a linear fashion. While some trends are clear, and will clearly impact developments that have yet to occur, we ought to count on being blindsided by some events that come from left field.

And actually, the argument could be made that jihad harm done to us will fall under that first category: the clear trends that yield fairly foreseeable occurrences. If, when it hits us, it seems more like something belonging to the latter category, it will be because we reacted to the likes of what Representative McCall is saying with a shrug.

A thought upon watching the pre-race Indy 500 pageantry

They're doing it up right for the 100th running. No sparing of dazzle-dazzle.

What occurs to me is how much petroleum is going to be burned through by those mighty engines today. And that's fine; we're awash in the stuff.

The Greatest Spectacle in Racing can be seen as a celebration of the bounty of resources with which God has blessed us (along with, of course, his endowing of the species made in his image and likeness with the prowess to not only invent automobiles but take them to this level of advancement).

So burn it, people, and give us that thrill like no other once again.

Pubs and Bots, this is your guy

Maybe he's trying to top the Most Equal Comrade's prediction that the waters would cease to rise.

In any event, he assures us it's a piece of cake.

He’s so smart, and he uses the best words. Keep telling yourself that. Soothe yourself with it, so you can sleep at night.

Or face reality that this is the single most, biggest disaster we’ve ever had to grapple with, as nominee for the GOP.

Speaking in Fresno, California on Friday, Donald Trump gave his plans for meeting the needs of farmers in the area.“’If I win, we’re going to start opening up the water so you can have your farmers survive, so that your job market will get better,’ the presumptive Republican nominee said. ‘We’re going to get it done and we’re going to get it done quick, don’t even think about it, that’s an easy one.’”

Yes. That’s an easy one. Just open up the water. I’m sure California’s lawmakers are hearing this and feeling pretty ridiculous, about now.

And if he can turn demeanors off and on at will, it's pretty clear he hasn't decided to trot out his presidential self yet:

In one of his most personal attacks against an apolitical figure since becoming the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump delivered an extended tirade about the federal judge overseeing the civil litigation against his defunct education program.

Mr. Trump’s attack on U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel was extraordinary not just in its scope and intensity but for its location: Before a crowd packed into a convention center here that had been primed for the New York billionaire with a warm-up speech from former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

“I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump, a hater. He’s a hater. His name is Gonzalo Curiel,” Mr. Trump said, as the crowd of several thousand booed. “He is not doing the right thing. And I figure, what the hell? Why not talk about it for two minutes?”

Mr. Trump spoke for far more than two minutes about Judge Curiel and the Trump University case–he devoted 12 minutes of a 58-minute address to the litigation, which is scheduled to go to trial in San Diego federal court Nov. 28. Mr. Trump’s attorney said earlier this month that Mr. Trump would testify in the six-year-old case.

The plaintiffs in the Trump University case, whom Mr. Trump also condemned by name Friday, accuse him and the now-defunct school of defrauding people who paid up to $35,000 for real estate advice. Mr. Trump said Friday that Trump University received “mostly unbelievable reviews” from its 10,000 students.

To the San Diego crowd, Mr. Trump argued that Judge Curiel should be removed from the case because he is biased against him. The evidence Mr. Trump presented: Rulings against him and the fact that Judge Curial was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama. The Senate confirmed Judge Curiel by a voice vote in September 2012.
An aide in Judge Curiel’s chambers on Friday said the judicial code of conduct prevents him from responding to Mr. Trump.

“We’re in front of a very hostile judge,” Mr. Trump said. “The judge was appointed by Barack Obama, federal judge. Frankly, he should recuse himself because he’s given us ruling after ruling after ruling, negative, negative, negative.”

Mr. Trump also told the audience, which had previously chanted the Republican standard-bearer’s signature “build that wall” mantra in reference to Mr. Trump’s proposed wall along the Mexican border, that Judge Curiel is “Mexican.”

“What happens is the judge, who happens to be, we believe, Mexican, which is great. I think that’s fine,” Mr. Trump said.

Judge Curiel was born in Indiana.

Squirrel-Hair, where whiner meets clown.

Oh, and he's looking into using one of Cleveland's major-league stadiums on the Lake Erie shore for his acceptance speech.

How advanced is the rot? - today's edition

They may have appeared to be wading into the foamy sands of the water's edge, but these strange post-American beings were actually diving right off the cliff:

A professor at Santa Monica College took a group of students on an “EcoSexual Sextravaganza” trip earlier this month, during which they “married the ocean” and were encouraged to “consummate” that marriage.

Why? Well, as one of its organizers, a professor named Amber Katherine, told Campus Reform, it was to get students to love the environment more through “exocentric passion and even lust.”

Oh, right. Duh.

The leaders of the trip were UC–Santa Cruz professor Elizabeth Stephens and pornographic actress/writer/sex educator Annie Sprinkle — both of whom are “the effective leaders of the ecosexual movement,” according to a writeup on the event in the school’s student newspaper, the Corsair.

Yeah, that’s right — “ecosexual movement.” This is an actual movement, and, not wanting to be behind the fray, SMC has its own Ecosexual Club.

Its president, Diego Martinez, told The Corsair that this was actually his second marriage to the ocean:

“It was actually our second marriage so it was kind of like renewing my vows for me,” Marquez said.

The students were specifically instructed to think of this marriage as one involving sex, and encouraged to “consummate” the marriage and “make love to the water” by sticking parts of their bodies into it, according to Campus Reform.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435916/santa-monica-college-professor-leads-ecosexual-sextravaganza 

According to the Corsair, the attendees were handed plastic rings and gave their own personal vows to the sea before Sprinkle stated, “With this ring, I thee wed, and bestow upon the sea, the treasures of my mind, heart and hands.” Stephens added, “As well as our body and soul,” and Sprinkle concluded, “And with that, I now pronounce you one with the sea” — officially making all of the participants married to the sea, apparently.

And then it was back to the playpen called their campus.

What is good, true, right and sensible remains the same as it ever was even if Donald Trump has come along

Until just about a year ago, it was, in a certain sense, easy to sit down and write posts for this blog. To be sure, there was a way in which it most definitely wasn't easy, because Western civilization had already spun so far out of control as to make me feel embarrassment for my species pretty much constantly.

The point of posts here was to appeal to what was left of post-American society's sense of dignity, common sense, fealty to clarity, love of freedom and desire to please God as we, writer and readers alike, encountered each new outrage, absurdity and victory for darkness. The mirror this blog holds up to this countervailing force is a worldview called conservatism.

And then, as I say, just about a year ago, the lines of demarcation, and the kinds of players recognized to be on the stage, underwent unprecedented transformation. A new element, and, in its wake, a new host of perspectives, upended the duality we had always understood to be the defining characteristic of our civilizational struggle.

No matter how absurd the developments we looked at became - transgender bathrooms, Ferguson riots based on a lie about a law-enforcement incident, laws dictating maximum sizes for soda-pop servings, subsidized solar-panel "companies" - they all fell under the rubric of leftism. And while there were various shadings of conservatism with different points of emphasis, sometimes to the ignoring of certain essential components of any stance that could be called conservatism, the most viable category within that label was the one that embraced the three pillars we feel so compelled to stress here. Yes, it's true that Pat Buchanan has written for Lew Rockwell's Antiwar.com site and, conversely, David Brooks is on record as being in thrall to the crease of the Most Equal Comrade's pants. But there was a peak to the bell curve called conservatism, and its nature was still what it had been in the heyday of Russell Kirk, Whitaker Chambers and Barry Goldwater.

Now, in late spring 2016, with Donald Trump pulling within three points of Hillary Clinton, the question "Who gets to define conservatism?" is being asked very loudly.

There's a certain breed of person asking it who is being nakedly disingenuous. Laura Ingraham, for instance, has spent - well, just about the time span I'm talking about: this past year - setting up a false dichotomy between an "establishment" consisting of the Bush family and big-money donors and "the people," the proverbial American family huddled at the kitchen table with a stack of bills and a calculator. How disingenuous is this setup? Disingenuous enough to lump Ted Cruz and Trump together as "outsiders" as long as Cruz was a viable candidate and thereby served their purpose.

Then there is the the "this-insistence-on-a-change-of-an-unprecedented-degree-and-kind-is-exhilarating-to-see" camp, as represented by folks like Roger L. Simon at PJ Media. They're thrilled at the emergence of a "man of action from the business world" to serve as a foil to the "wonky theorists" - you know, the ones who have strived to maintain clarity about the three pillars of the worldview we ostensibly share.

The burden ought to be on these types, but such are the times that they can skate right past any reckoning they ought to have to face.

Never are they held to account for any of Trump's nearly infinite utterances of an alarming nature - not the ones that make clear his shallowness, not the ones that reveal his inconsistency, not the ones that are incoherent to the point of being incomprehensible, not the ones that are plainly mean.

I won't take space hear to once again catalogue them. They're well known, and this blog has a "Donald Trump" category full of posts documenting them.

The most recent one, though, is telling. Asked how he envisions the essence of the Republican party fifteen years from now, Trump says he sees it as a "workers' party," and goes on to flesh out what he means by resorting to his populist message about wage stagnation.  I must note that the link I provide is to a Hot Air post by Allahpundit, who seems to have a throatful of Kool-Aid. After quoting Trump, he expends considerable verbiage on why he sees this as a good thing.

I want to conclude this post by bringing it to a fairly simple point: Trumpism, to the extent that it is a coherent approach to policy, culture and life, is leftist. There is nothing - nothing - conservative about any of it. As I said the other day in my post on how any politician who harps on "jobs for the middle class" is blowing smoke, enthusiasm over vague promises to restore economic good times is always predicated on a view that government properly has some role in economic life.

It doesn't. Conservatives understand this. Like everyone else, our situations are more precarious than they were in more stable times, but we refuse to become so desperate as to buy the bottle of snake oil.

This is why I have no patience for observations of the current juncture that get in the demographic weeds, looking at what southern whites, or third-generation Polish Rust-Belt skilled tradesmen, or single urban women, or poor blacks, or transgendered college students, or evangelical Christians perceive as their pet grievances and yearnings. Any remedy for any or all of them that merely offers an improvement of their material situations is the stuff of even more civilizational confusion.

I don't care if I'm not crafting my message of three-pillared conservatism effectively enough to reach millennials or women or Asians or anybody else. This blog is merely about stating and defending the basic approach to our national life that would pull us up from our morass with the actual rapidity that charlatans routinely promise. I don't yet know how to doll it up to make it palatable to particular demographics.

You're expected to be smart enough to get it whoever you are.

And that's not dismissiveness; it's part of the principle being defended. Human beings ought to strive to be sharp. When they don't . . . well, you get what we have in the spring of 2016 in post-America.

Rethinking Diem

In the course of an article about the Most Equal Comrade's current visit to Vietnam and how it is of a piece with his entire record of overseas behavior since becoming ruler of post-America, Paul Kengor at The American Thinker discusses the perspective put forth in a book published late last year that sets the record straight on Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam from 1954 to 1963.

First, to set the table, Kengor's establishing of the proper context for viewing the MEC's trip:

Barack Obama has an exquisite sense of timing with things communist.

In March, he caught a ballgame in Havana with Raul Castro, where the national pastime since 1959 has been less baseball than bean-balling dissidents and destroying a beautiful country 90 miles south of Florida. As Barack and Raul bantered, Belgium burned while ISIS claimed victory in another terror attack -- the very ISIS enabled by Obama’s outrageously bad decision to prematurely pull U.S. troops from Iraq.

In September 2009, Barack went to Poland where, stunningly, he cancelled plans for a joint U.S. missile-shield with a former Soviet Bloc country that has been one of our closest post-Cold War allies. This was merely one of Obama’s craven pro-Putin accommodations. He did it -- as every Pole noticed -- on the 70th anniversary of the date (September 17, 1939) that Stalin’s Red Army invaded Poland in compliance with the Hitler-Stalin Pact that started World War II and launched a 50-year totalitarian occupation of Poland.

And now, a week before Memorial Day, when Americans honor (among others) the 58,000 boys who died in Vietnam, Obama flew to Hanoi to make amends and “move on” (as John Kerry put it) with another communist regime. There, our president discussed the glories of lifting the long-held U.S. arms embargo against Vietnam.

It is truly a new era, folks, with our President of Fundamental Transformation lifting embargos on old communist enemies from the Western Hemisphere to Southeast Asia.

There were those of us who warned incessantly of the pitfalls of electing our first Red-Diaper Baby president, the product of pro-communist parents and a literal card-carrying member of Communist Party USA who mentored him. But we were told by liberals that none of this mattered. Nah, this was mere McCarthyite red-baiting, a witch-hunt smear against this impressive “progressive” president.

And alas, here we are: we are treated this week to the image of a smiling Obama shaking hands in Hanoi with the president of communist Vietnam in front of a large bust of a grinning Ho Chi Minh poised in front of a big red flag with a star, outdone only by the image of Obama standing proudly, head up, ramrod straight, with the communist leadership in front of a giant mural of Che Guevara in Havana in March.

What’s next? A beer at the DMZ with Kim Jong-un?

Now, on to what Kengor - actually, historian Geoffrey Shaw, author of the book in question - has to say about Diem. It was eye-opening stuff for me. I'm an academically trained historian as well, and I didn't realize how skewed by view of Diem was.

The book is a superb work by author Geoffrey Shaw, The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam (Ignatius Press).
If you do not know the full story of Diem, and just how badly the Kennedy administration blew it by allowing for his assassination, then you need to read this book. The Kennedy team sanctioned the November 2, 1963 coup d’etat against Diem. Ironically, Diem was assassinated the same month that Kennedy himself was assassinated, and both men were strong anti-communists. The deaths of each man allowed for successors who wildly escalated the violence in Vietnam. One more irony: Kennedy was, of course, America’s first and still-only Catholic president. Diem himself was not merely Roman Catholic but a remarkably devout Christian who would have preferred a monastery to the leadership of Vietnam. He was better suited for the priesthood than presidency. Quite profoundly, Diem was at Mass the morning he was killed. That was typical, as he was up for Mass at 6:30 every morning. This particularly fateful day happened to be All Souls’ Day, and he was seized on church grounds and killed. The United States either approved or set up (or at least sanctioned, as scholars still debate this) the assassination.
Diem was not only a devout man, but a man of principle and character and an unusually honorable politician as well as patriot, despite how he was vilified by detractors in the United States. The communists in Vietnam knew that the respect that he rightly earned from the populace was their greatest obstacle. After his killing, everything would spin out of control.
Shaw’s book sickeningly chronicles the slow, steady abandonment, demonization, and betrayal of Diem by certain elements in the United States, thus leading to his martyrdom. And yes, many Vietnamese consider it martyrdom. To be sure, Diem had his supporters, from the likes of William Colby and Dean Rusk to two excellent ambassadors, Frederick Nolting in the United States and Robert Thompson in Britain. Nonetheless, they were no match for a relentless anti-Diem campaign led by the New York Times (reporters like David Halberstam) and most egregiously by Kennedy adviser and esteemed liberal “wise man” Averell Harriman. It was Harriman who led the cabal to do in Diem, and he pulled it off.

“The actions of these men led to Diem’s murder,” Shaw grimly concludes. “And with his death, nine and a half years of careful work and partnership between the United States and South Vietnam was undone. Within a few weeks, any hope of a successful outcome in Vietnam -- that is, of a free and democratic country friendly toward the United States -- was extinguished. Truly, in order to solve a problem that did not exist, the Kennedy administration created a problem that could not be solved.”

And if you go to the Amazon page for the book, you'll find this edifying reader review:

As a veteran of the Vietnam War who spent 32 months in that war-torn country as a combat Marine, I found Dr. Shaw's book both profound and refreshing. I say this because when I went to Vietnam I was influenced by what I read in the national press, especially the New York Times, about President Diem. I was lead to believe that he was an Asian mandarin, a religious zealot, a Roman Catholic who oppressed the Buddhist majority in his country, and a puppet of the US who had to be removed from office if democracy and freedom would prevail. However, in Vietnam I came to a very different conclusion, based upon my interviews with dozens of enemy POWs and political cadres, and my Vietnamese friends who were Buddhists. I found that President Diem was respected by the communists and loved by the Buddhists. One southern communist political leader I interviewed even told me that he thought the greatest gift the Americans had given to the Viet Cong was the murder of President Diem since he "was a true Vietnamese nationalist who was loved and respected by people in both North and South Vietnam." Several Buddhists told me that they supported President Diem because he had built many new Buddhist temples and repaired even more that had been neglected during the French colonial period. These comments and others made by my Vietnamese colleagues and friends led me to change my mind about President Diem and see him as a national leader who truly enjoyed the respect and love of his countrymen. This well-researched and brilliantly written book lays bare the many myths and falsehoods concerning President Diem and clearly explains why the American government sought to remove him from power.

No one disagrees with the view that it was one of our nation's worst tragedies that 58,000 young American men lost their lives in the Vietnam war. Were they wasted? I hesitate to characterize it thusly, but I also saw the North Vietnamese tanks smash through the gates of of the presidential palace in Saigon on television in April 1975 - and, of course, the desperate people trying to grab the runners of the helicopter lifting off from the US embassy roof.

And a much different course could have been taken twelve long years earlier, a course that might have made for a far more favorable set of circumstances for Vietnam, the US and the world that grim spring.

How advanced is the rot?

This advanced:

Students at Oberlin College are asking the school to put academics on the back burner so they can better turn their attention to activism. More than 1,300 students at the Midwestern liberal arts college have now signed a petition asking that the college get rid of any grade below a C for the semester, and some students are requesting alternatives to the standard written midterm examination, such as a conversation with a professor in lieu of an essay.

The students say that between their activism work and their heavy course load, finding success within the usual grading parameters is increasingly difficult. "A lot of us worked alongside community members in Cleveland who were protesting," Megan Bautista, a co-liaison in Oberlin's student government, said, referring to the protests surrounding the shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by a police officer in 2014. "But we needed to organize on campus as well — it wasn't sustainable to keep driving 40 minutes away. A lot of us started suffering academically."

And they're couching this garbage in a we're-paying-customers argument:

"You know, we're paying for a service. We're paying for our attendance here. We need to be able to get what we need in a way that we can actually consume it," student Zakiya Acey told The New Yorker. "Because I'm dealing with having been arrested on campus, or having to deal with the things that my family are going through because of larger systems — having to deal with all of that, I can't produce the work that they want me to do. But I understand the material, and I can give it to you in different ways."

Listen, you little twerp. Until about five minutes ago, those paying college tuition understood that the "service" involved getting introduced to rigorous standards and being challenged to manage their time well. They understood that erudite grownups were going to take the empty space between their ears and fill it with some knowledge of particular fields. And they understood that "activism" and getting arrested was no excuse for not being prepared for their final exams.

Any creating of a nation resembling the old United States of America from the smoldering ruins of post-America is going to involve creating an educational system from the ground up. The one we had is now a joke, a network of playpens, a sewer of nonsense.

 

Squirrel-Hair's thuggery on full display in New Mexico

Squirrel-Hair's message to Republican office-holders who don't reflexively get on board his train to Hell: I will savage you:

Is there any conceivable strategic value to doing this? Martinez hasn’t endorsed him, has criticized him for what he’s said about immigration, and made a point of skipping his rallylast night. She doesn’t like him, so naturally he doesn’t like her. But that doesn’t answer my question. What’s the strategic value of attacking a Republican governor, at an event held in her own state, when job one for Trump right now is unifying the party? Martinez isn’t just any governor either. She’s the chair of the Republican Governors Association this year and she’s the first Hispanic woman to govern a state in the U.S. She’s also term-limited so she’s under no electoral pressure to get onboard the Trump train. She needs to be wooed, not threatened, and she’s worth wooing because the support of the country’s most prominent Hispanic woman politician is obviously worth something to Trump in the general election. The way to play this is to be gracious and complimentary of her despite her disdain and then wait to see if the olive branch is accepted.

Instead he walked into the rally last night with a list of criticisms of her that he read at the podium. And not even a smart list. It’s true that food stamps have increased in New Mexico since 2000, but that’s true across the country. And Martinez has opposed accepting more Syrian refugees. No wonder her spokesman hit back hard:

Mike Lonergan, Martinez’s press secretary, responded to Trump’s attacks in a statement late Tuesday night: “Apparently, Donald Trump doesn’t realize Governor Martinez wasn’t elected in 2000, that she has fought for welfare reform, and has strongly opposed the President’s Syrian refugee plan. But the pot shots weren’t about policy, they were about politics. And the Governor will not be bullied into supporting a candidate until she is convinced that candidate will fight for New Mexicans. Governor Martinez doesn’t care about what Donald Trump says about her – she cares about what he says he will do to help New Mexicans. She didn’t hear anything about that today.”

That’s the only explanation that makes sense besides Trump throwing a tantrum here out of pure spite for being snubbed. Maybe he’s sending a message to other Republicans who are holding out on endorsing him by showing them that they’ll be attacked on the stump too if they don’t get onboard — and many of those Republicans, unlike Martinez, aren’t term-limited. They’ve got something to lose by alienating Trump voters. Then again, they’ve got something to lose too if they hug Trump too closely and he ends up turning toxic to swing voters over the course of the campaign. Some incumbents are destined to keep their distance, whether for reasons of pure electoral dynamics (e.g., Mark Kirk, running for reelection in deep blue Illinois) or principle (e.g., Mike Lee, running for reelection in deep red Utah). Is Trump going to hit them too? How insane would it be to see the GOP nominee this summer and fall essentially campaigning against incumbents in his own party who’ve chosen to keep their distance? Does this guy not understand that, his Democratic leanings notwithstanding, a Republican House and Senate are still more likely to do his bidding as president out of blind partisanship than Democratic majorities are?

Gracious and complimentary would indeed be the way to play it, but they are utterly foreign concepts to Squirrel-Hair.

Why any politician who runs on "jobs for the middle class" is blowing smoke

NRO has an interesting piece today. It's an interview by Neal B. Freeman, whose association with National Review goes back to having been personally acquainted with Frank S. Meyer and James Burnham, of Kevin Williamson, who, longtime LITD readers know, is regarded around these parts as one of the most eloquent and principled defenders of our Three Pillars writing today.

In the course of their conversation, they touch on the rank protectionism implicit in Squirrel-Hair's position, such as it is, on international trade. That in turn leads them to a look at what S-H and his Bot minions are attempting to do: Play upon post-Americans' yearnings for some kind of proverbial good old days.

Williamson makes two points that are really of a piece regarding the reality of human work and human advancement's effect on it:

FREEMAN:​ A related question, then. All elections, as they say, are about jobs. Traditionally (by which I mean, self-obsessively, through the span of my own lifetime), one party has been about new jobs, the other about old jobs. That is to say, one party, usually the Republican, promotes policies that it says will create new jobs, while the other, usually the Democratic, promotes policies to protect existing jobs. This year both parties seem committed to saving the old jobs. Has the party of fear routed the party of hope? Is this what a tipping point looks like?

WILLIAMSON:​ Maybe not a tipping point, but an unfortunate period of confluence. The average life of a Fortune 500 company in the early Sixties was about 75 years. Today it’s about 15 years and declining. Even if you have the most sought-after skills in the world and the best career plan ever, it’s nearly impossible today to get out of school and go to work for a company where you’re going to stay for the rest of your working life. Add to that the facts that production lines have shorter lifespans, skills become obsolete more quickly, and markets change more rapidly. There is very little “job security” for anybody.

FREEMAN:​ And that explains the nostalgia for the old jobs?

WILLIAMSON:​ What people miss about those old jobs — at least as they existed in our national mythology — is that they were stable. They paid crap. Go back and look at how expensive ordinary food staples such as butter and sugar were in the Sixties as a share of the typical household income, to say nothing of meals out or travel, and it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that these people were poor, and quite poor, by our standards. But they had — again, the mythology isn’t quite the reality — a measure of stability that is no longer available even to the highly skilled and highly educated, and many of us long for that, intensely. 

The S-H camp is not the first political movement to make that the lens through which it would have voters view the defining issue or their time. Mitt Romney prattled about "jobs for the middle class" in 2012, and there were precedents to his rhetoric.

The fact is, anybody who asks the public to hire him or her to assume a position in government on the basis of being able to "bring good jobs back" is taking a leftist line, even if he or she claims to be a conservative (maybe even a "severe" conservative). Like health care, which is a subcategory of general human endeavor, work only happens when someone somewhere comes up with an idea of providing something of value to his fellow human beings. There is no over-arching entity that can possibly guarantee that there will be something for anyone to do that can earn one a living.

Real conservatism requires faith in human ingenuity. And that's only unleashed when all collectivist constraints upon it are removed.

Conservatism is a real, fleshed-out worldview. "Populism" is a mere hodgepodge, a sentiment, an unfocused insistence that some caped superhero ride in and restore things to some mythical stability.

We'll do a lot less fretting when we think, regarding this matter of work, in the least centralized terms we can. It boils down to the age-old question: What would you like to do, and is there a market for it?

Perhaps the lamest defense yet of Squirrel-Hair's Clinton-inconsistency problem

Check out how this guy tries to squirm his way through an explanation of S-H's badmouthing of Billy Jeff the Zipper's sexual-predation accusers:

Top Donald Trump surrogate and attorney Michael Cohen struggled to explain Tuesday why his boss demonized those who accused Bill Clinton of rape and sexual impropriety in the 1990’s but now believes those accusations, saying that Trump was just “being a good friend” at the time.

“He defended Bill Clinton for years. He said the same allegations that you guys are talking about now were a waste of time, were wrong, were hollow, that Bill Clinton was a terrific guy. That he was a great president, that the impeachment was wrong, that it was a waste of time…” the host of CNN’s New Day Chris Cuomo rattled off.

“He was a private citizen who was friendly with the Clintons and he was trying to protect a friend,” Cohen explained. “Now, it’s a different game. It’s 2016, he is the Republican presidential nominee.”

“So he was lying then?” pressed Cuomo.
“He was not lying, he was protecting a friend. There’s a difference,” Cohen insisted. “The difference is he was being a true friend. It didn’t matter to him.”
Cuomo returned to the topic later in the interview. “Why would I trust you if you say all the things you said then were false?” he asked.
“He was a private individual…” Cohen began.
Cuomo cut in: “So you tell the truth when you’re politician but lie when you’re a private individual?”
“…he had no obligation to say anything to anybody,” Cohen finished.
“He said plenty,” Cuomo shot back.
“So what? Because he’s Donald Trump,” Cohen said.

The mind tends to start pondering how two groups of people are going to react to to this: the Bots (Ingraham, Hannity, Charles Hurt, Conrad Black, Newt Gingrich, Ann Coulter) and the women who have so accused Billy Jeff.

In a sane world, this would do Trump in. Then again, so would a multitude of other utterances and behaviors from this lout over the past four decades.

H/T: Leon H. Wolf at Red State 

An Oregon teacher who resents her DNA goes full DeBlasio

A pronoun jackboot with access to the impressionable minds of very young children cashes in big:

A “transmasculine” teacher at an Oregon elementary school has been awarded $60,000 by her school district as compensation for harassment she claims to have suffered on the job, including being referred to by the wrong pronoun.

According to The Oregonian, Leo Soell was born a woman, but now prefers to identify as “transmasculine” and “genderqueer,” meaning she does not consider herself to be male or female. After getting breast cancer in late 2014, she had her breasts amputated to create a more masculine appearance and changed her name to Leo. Once she returned from medical school in May, 2015, Soell was fully public with her gender-neutral identity.

Once she returned to work, Soell claims she fell victim to relentless harassment from her co-workers. She says employees persisted in calling her hurtful terms like “Miss Soell,” “lady,” and “she.” If a student asked Soell’s sex, she says she was ordered to reply it was a private matter not suitable for discussion at school.

Some teachers were even worse, Soell said. She claimed one teacher screamed at her in the hallway that her gender choice was offensive to God, and she said teachers conspired to use the school’s only gender-neutral bathroom so Soell would have to wait a half-hour or more to use it.

The school conducted an internal investigation after Soell complained, but found no proof of harassment.

Eventually, Soell was able to cut a deal with the school to have her referred to by her preferred pronoun, “they,” but Soell said the harassment didn’t stop, so she finally hired an attorney and prepared to file an official complaint.

Oregon is a very friendly state for individuals who claim they have suffered discrimination based on gender identity. The state’s labor commissioner, Brad Avakian, forced a bakery to pay $135,000 to a lesbian couple they wouldn’t bake a cake for, and he has also compelled a bar owner to pay a whopping $400,000 to a group of transgender customers he tried to ban from his bar.

Eager to avoid meeting a similar fate, district officials agreed to pay Soell $60,000 in compensation for her emotional distress . . .

The district is also imposing the kinds of rules for addressing others that DeBlasio is pushing in NYC.

Along with leftism and Trumpism, Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome is still a pervasive force within the Beltway

Herewith a list of the Senators who blocked Mike Lee's effort to defund the horrible and tyrannical Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Initiative:

Lamar Alexander
Kelly Ayotte
Roy Blunt
Richard Burr
Dan Coats
Thad Cochran
Susan Collins
Lindsey Graham
Orrin Hatch
John Hoeven
Johnny Isakson
Mark Kirk
John McCain
Lisa Murkowski
Rob Portman
Thom Tillis

The term "squish" does not do them justice. The individuals on this list  have seen to it that conservatism, the one worldview that would cure all that ills post-America with astonishing rapidity, is the one worldview that will not get an airing in our nation's legislative branch.

Tuesday morning roundup

Erdogan consolidates his power in Turkey by making his cabinet unfailingly loyal to him, so that the country's parliamentary system will be just for show.

His opponents, and skeptical Western allies, fear growing authoritarianism. Prosecutors have opened more than 1,800 cases against people for insulting Erdogan since he became president in 2014. Opposition newspapers have been shut and journalists and academics critical of government policies sacked.

European Parliament President Martin Schulz criticized Erdogan's accumulation of power in comments published on Monday, describing it as a "breathtaking departure from European values" in a nation negotiating for membership of the EU.

"We see Turkey under Erdogan on its way to being a one-man-state," he told German newspaper Koelner Stadtanzeiger.

This doesn't mean that the climate jackboots have entirely given up their quest, but Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker dropping his demand for a decade's worth of records from the Competitive Enterprise Institute is a significant win against the forces that attempt to demonize the oil industry.

Very incisive analysis of the China issue at NRO from Jerry Hendrix. He says that China probably doesn't actually want war with post-America, but that its regional strategy seems to be a response to phase three of the Joint Operations manual that has guided US thinking about conflict for about 20 years:

China’s actions are representative of a new phenomenon that is increasingly characterizing the foreign policies of authoritarian states around the world. Like states such as North Korea, Iran, and Russia, China has recognized that America is trapped by its doctrinal adherence to “phasing,” the method by which it goes to war as delineated in Joint Publication 3-0, “Joint Operations,” first published in the early 1990s. As its name suggests, the method lays out six major phases of war: phase 0 (shaping the environment), phase I (deterring the enemy), phase II (seizing the initiative), phase III (dominating the enemy), phase IV (stabilizing the environment), and phase V (enabling civil authority). It’s a step-by-step approach that has come to dominate American tactical and strategic thought.

The problem is that when you write the book on modern warfare, someone is going to read it, and those that seek to challenge the United States most certainly have. They know that U.S. war planners are all focused on phase III — the “Dominate the Enemy” phase — and treat the separation between phases as impermeable barriers. America’s concentration on phase III has allowed rising competitors to expand their influence through maneuvers that thwart U.S. interests in the preceding three phases, maneuvers cumulatively grouped in a category known as “Hybrid” warfare. Authoritarian states have mastered the art of walking right up to the border of phase III without penetrating it, slowly eroding American credibility without triggering a kinetic response.

He sees a scenario in which post-America may have to land with some kind of force on one of these artificial islands China has made, in order to assert the notion of international territory.

In the latest example of the current regime's let-them-eat-cake attitude toward the cattle-masses (following closely on the heels of the wait lines at some post-American airports so long that they resulted in hundreds of missed flights, and Jeh Johnson's response), VA Secretary Robert McDonald says that since wait times at Disney resorts are comparably long, it's nothing for anyone to get steamed about. Yeah, he actually said that.

And ICE is opening special detention centers for transgendered illegal aliens.

Even in post-America, sometimes that which is good, just and true can still prevail

Take the positive development that just transpired in that moral sewer called Baltimore:

A Baltimore officer was acquitted of assault and other charges Monday in the arrest of Freddie Gray, dealing prosecutors a second straight blow in their bid to hold police accountable for the black man’s death from spinal injuries suffered in the back of a police van.

The judge who decided Officer Edward Nero’s fate in the non-jury trial concluded Nero played little role in the arrest and wasn’t responsible for the failure by police to buckle Gray in during the jolting ride.

Upon hearing the verdict, Nero hugged his attorney and appeared to wipe away a tear.

Nero, who is white, was the second of six officers charged in the racially combustible case to stand trial. The manslaughter case against Officer William Porter ended in a mistrial in December when the jury deadlocked. Prosecutors plan to retry him at some point.

Truth is like life. It will sprout up between the cracks in the sidewalks of even the most blighted and benighted environments. May Officer Nero be able to put his life back together speedily and with much support.

Post-America's partner in patty-cake - today's edition

What the Supreme Leader utters here is really nothing new, but how many more of such utterances - backed up by missile tests and the taking hostage of soldiers and the purchase of an anti-aircraft battery - would it take for the Most Equal Comrade, Secretary Global Test and Wendy Sherman to reverse course and tear up last summer's "agreement"?

More comforting words came forth last week from the United State's nuclear partner, Iran. That is to say, the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said America is the "great Satan" and a major idolator.

The Arabic word is "taghut" -- a theological term usually reserved for other Muslims who are in transgression against Islamic tenets and values. Khamenei said:

“America is the major taghut and the great Satan. Those who are implementing the American policy in the region are adhering to taghut.”

Khamenei continued speaking out against the U.S., assuring that the only goal Iran has in its dealings with our country is non-compliance:

"Resistance against America is the main point of Iran’s prowess."

Iran's leader also aimed his ire towards "blasphemous" Saudi Arabia for helping the U.S. implement its nuclear policies. Khamenei made it clear that Iran is not frightened by America and doesn't believe the Obama administration intends to stand by its promises under the nuclear deal.

 The Great Leveling Project is going to get us all murdered in our beds.

Clinton friends generally have the stench of corruption wafting off them

I Was rather concerned when Terry McAuliffe was elected governor of Virginia. Given his track record, I had a feeling this kind of thing might happen:

The FBI is investigating whether Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe's 2013 campaign accepted illegal contributions, law enforcement officials confirmed to NBC News. 

Federal officials say for the past several months, the FBI has been looking at whether McAuliffe's 2013 campaign for governor of Virginia accepted political contributions that were forbidden by federal law. 

McAuliffe is a one-time board member of the Clinton Global Initiative, the foundation set up by former President Bill Clinton and likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. 

The former chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 2000 to 2005, McAuliffe was also a co-chairman of Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. 

Records show more than 100 donors contributed to both the foundation and McAuliffe's campaign. 

Federal officials say investigators are looking at those overlaps and are especially interested in contributions from Wang Wenliang, a Chinese politician. The investigation was first reported by CNN.

Contributions by foreign nationals in U.S. elections are barred, but Wang's spokesperson says he has permanent U.S. resident status.

This is how these people roll.

The fruits of patty-cake - today's edition

Think Cuba is just a washed-up regime with no ability to harm the West the way it did in its heyday?

Think again:

In brief, regarding the terror-sponsoring totalitarian regime on our doorstep that pulled off the biggest and most brazen armed burglary of U.S. property in history, who tortured and murdered Americans both at home and in North Viet-Nam, whose senior military officials were indicted by U.S. courts for the gratuitous murder of U.S. citizens, who managed the deepest and most damaging penetration of the U.S. Defense Dept in recent history, who steals and traffics in U.S. military secrets, who came closest to nuking us, who facilitates the entry of hundreds of criminals, spies and potential terrorists onto our soil—regarding this place most Americans (thanks largely to the mainstream media) qualify as “low-information” voters.V

“Wait a minute?!” Some readers say. “What was that last point again? The one about facilitating the entry of potential terrorists onto our soil?”
Thanks for the cue, amigos. Thought you’d never ask. Now here’s a recent story in the Washington Post (no less!)
“Over the past two months, travel agents in Kabul have been surprised by Afghans showing up at their offices with Cuban visas, which are suspected of having been issued in Iran or acquired on the black market.

Other agents in Kabul also report a spike in interest in Cuba, and U.N. officials in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz say they recently encountered a family with Cuban visas. Havana has been a way station in the past for South Asians hoping to transit to Central America and from there to the United States. 

Ten or 15 people have come just since January asking for tickets for Cuba,” Sayeedi said. “And they are not staying there. The only option is to move forward, probably on to Mexico and then America or Canada.”

Iran is collaborating with Venezuela and Cuba to exploit the seams in the Canadian immigration system,” documents Canada’s Center for a Secure and Free Society. “From 2009 to 2011, Latin America was the largest prior embarkation region for improperly documented Iranians migrating to Canada. Venezuelan authorities provided at least 173 passports, visas and other documentation to Islamist extremists seeking to slip unnoticed into North America.”

Nowadays “Venezuelan authorities,” actually means authorities from Venezuela’s colonial overlords: some of the 50,000 KGB-trained Cubans who essentially run Venezuela’s military, police and foreign policy sectors. This item has been thoroughly documented in the bombshell “Panama Papers” and was recently disseminated in a crackerjack investigative report by Capitol Hill Cubans: “as recently confirmed in the Panama Paperleaks, Venezuela's passport and national ID systems are completely controlled by Cuba's regime.” 

This is what you get when you are ruled over by someone who absorbed liberation theology and America-hatred for twenty years in the pews of Jeremiah Wright's Trinity Church, someone mentored in his youth by Frank Marshall Davis.

And the chances that someone equipped - morally and intellectually - to begin reversing his damage next year are pretty much nil.

 

IEW CARTOO

Mounting resistance to the campus jackboots

Dartmouth College has not yet managed to turn its entire student body into cattle.

Here's what some who insist on reclaiming their humanity have done:

At least some Dartmouth College students have had enough. In a scathing petition on change.org, five leaders in Dartmouth’s student government, joined by more than 1,200 signatories, have called on the administration to return the college to its mission of educating, rather than policing, students. Although the growth of bureaucracy in academia is no secret, it is always sobering to confront the statistics. According to the well-cited petition, non-faculty staff at Dartmouth grew by more than 1,000 people from 1999 to 2004, and in spite of faculty layoffs, that number had increased to 3,497 by 2015. And most administrative staff do not come cheap, especially at prestigious research universities. As the petition points out, this contributes to the institution’s sky-high tuition; the sticker price for a year at Dartmouth is now just below $70,000.

But the petition points out that the cost of non-faculty staff is only part of the problem; what many of these people do all day damages the college as a place of learning as well. The petition does not mince words:

Instead of making a sincere and concerted attempt to resolve the [cost] issues mentioned above, the Dartmouth administration has spent its time policing student life. Buoyed by the idea that the College should support exclusionary “safe spaces” that act as a barrier against uncomfortable ideas, administrators have assumed the role of paternalistic babysitters. By effectively taking sides in sensitive debates and privileging the perspectives of certain students over others, administrators have crossed the line between maintaining a learning environment that is open to all and forcing their own personal views onto the entire campus. In doing so, they have undermined the value of civility, harmed the free exchange of ideas, and performed a disservice to those students who see their time in college as preparation for success in the real world. [Footnotes omitted.]

Will try to follow up on this.