Wednesday roundup

Huge suicide-bomber attack near the cluster of embassies in Kabul. Many casualties and injuries.

UPDATE: At least 90 killed, at least 400 injured.

Kathy Griffin tries to go all contrite in the face of the backlash to the bloody-head-of-DJT photo. You buyin' it?

This is reassuring:

The U.S. military successfully shot down a mock nuclear warhead simulating the speed and range of a potential North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency said Tuesday.

In a statement, the agency said an unarmed rocket launched from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean was "destroyed" by a ground-based interceptor launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California as it traveled outside Earth's atmosphere.

The successful test was the first of its kind in nearly three years.
It came two days after North Korea tested a SCUD-type ballistic missile that landed in Japan's maritime economic zone in the Sea of Japan.

This system is vitally important to the defense of our homeland, and this test demonstrates that we have a capable, credible deterrent against a very real threat," said MDA Director Vice Admiral Jim Syring. "I am incredibly proud of the warfighters who executed this test and who operate this system every day."

The mayor of Portland, Oregon wants to use that atmosphere-of-hate jive to try to deny some US citizens their First Amendment rights:

Portland's mayor is at odds with the ACLU over his request that the federal government revoke a permit for Sunday's scheduled "Trump Free Speech Rally Portland" on federal land, citing Friday's deadly stabbings on a city train after good Samaritans tried to stop the killer from harassing Muslim and African-American teen girls.

And, per the previous post, in which we once again make the case for the camp that cedes conservative bona fides to no one, but remains resolute in its conviction that DJT is a mess as president, we are the faction that knows it must acknowledge good moves when they occur, and pulling out of the Paris climate agreement certainly is that.

We will, of course, have to applaud it unflinchingly even as Leftists on social media try to conflate it with some kind of identifiable Trumpism, which is, as we know, not the case. And, per the previous post, the Dennis Pragers of the world are no help in this task.

Dennis Prager kicks up a dust storm on the Right - over Trump

Here is the piece that catalyzed the controversy. It's entitled "Why Conservatives Still Attack Trump."

I don't need to except from it directly, because the responses at National Review, where Pragers' piece appeared, such as Jonah Goldberg's response, do so in the service of counter-points he wants to make. For instance, Goldberg questions some particular wording upon which much of Prager's argument hinges:

[A] problematic turn of phrase can be found here:

I have come to believe that many conservatives possess what I once thought was a left-wing monopoly — a utopian streak. Trump is too far from their ideal leader to be able to support him.

Maybe this was just inadvertently poor word choice. If he’d written that Trump critics are making the perfect the enemy of the good or some such, he’d be on much firmer ground. But Dennis knows what utopianism is, and I cannot for the life of me understand why he thinks this is the right word here.

Another explanation for why some conservative critics refuse to report for duty is, according to Dennis, spite, pettiness, or self-interest. In short, he accuses the conservatives he says he admires of operating in bad faith. Indeed, one of their chief motives is — wait for it — the ability to attend elite dinner parties. C’mon. I thought we were done with this stale chestnut a long time ago. He also says that because our predictions were wrong, we’re too bitter to admit error and that we’re undermining Trump to save our reputations.

I’m not going to try to psychoanalyze Dennis’s motivations here. But I will say that this essay reads more like an effort to affirm what a talk-radio audience wants to hear than a good-faith effort to understand and persuade conservatives that he claims to admire. If Dennis is truly interested in persuading the very diverse group of conservative Trump critics on the right, my advice would be to call them on the phone and ask them why they — we — say what they say and do what they do. Insinuating that conservative thinkers and writers are vain elitists who are betraying their cause by not becoming spinners (never mind soldiers) is not, to my mind, the best way to persuade them — or me — of anything.

Dan McLaughlin, also at NRO, stresses the importance of examining the particulars so as to refrain from inaccurate generalizations:

in discussing current and former Republicans who went “Never Trump” in 2016, it’s critical to remember that we’re not talking about a monolithic group of people, so we should be unsurprised that – since the election – we have gone our separate ways. Some have broken for all purposes with the GOP, some have made their peace with Trump, and many of the rest of us fall somewhere in between. Using the three final challengers to Trump as a shorthand for the various factions, the Ted Cruz-type conservative purists (like Erick) have been the ones least willing to up and join any sort of Democrat-led resistance to Trump, but many have continued to pound him with criticism for being a bad and phony conservative and a man of low character. The Rubio faction has more or less broken in two parts. On the one hand, the “practical conservative” type policy wonks are still trying to work with the Paul Ryans of the party to salvage a good policy agenda from the shadow of Trump. By contrast, there are those who belonged to the Rubio faction mainly to further either a neoconservative foreign policy or a more inclusive Republican Party; both groups have mostly been even more embittered by Trump’s success. The foreign-policy-first people (like Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and Tom Nichols) have been among the most vocal conservative voices against Trump. (These folks are mainly making substantive criticisms of Trump’s handling of foreign policy). Then there’s the Kasich faction (the David Frums of the world), the people who already thought the Republicans needed a softer, more centrist makeover. Despite the election of a Republican president who has no real ideology, this group has tended to be the most horrified by Trump, and most likely to leave the party entirely following the election, especially at the rank-and-file level. Continuing to clump these various groups together for purposes of generalizing about their motives and their actions is unhelpful to the reader.

Second, far too often, columns like this one fail to be specific and avoid generalized ad hominems about our motives. Prager does too much of that here, but I will counter with an important point that he understands well enough to have articulated halfway through this column: “Every time we do good, we make a deposit into our moral bank account. And every time we do something bad, we make a withdrawal.” For those of us in the business of advocacy – writing and speaking to persuade people of the merits of conservative ideas – our first duty is to tell the truth to our readers. Not the whole truth, necessarily; nobody can always cover every angle of every story, and advocacy necessarily involves some choices about what to emphasize, which criticisms (or bad arguments in one’s favor) to ignore, and which to confront. But you only have so much credibility with your audience, and you expend that at your peril. Our moral bank account is not only with Trump supporters judging how well we stand with them, but also with the audience of voters at large (as well as with our own consciences).  As I always preach, you argue mainly for the benefit of the unconverted, and they are watching. Every time you have to defend a falsehood, excuse an error, or ignore a misdeed by Trump in order to promote The Greater Good, you are drawing down on that moral bank account with them. Conservatives who defended Nixon all the way – the liberal domestic policy, Harry Blackmun, Watergate – were running pretty empty by 1974.

Third, and maybe most importantly, Prager’s core argument is instrumental: Trump will get us what we want, so pick up a rifle and man a post. To begin with, I think he does a disservice by arguing that Trump’s conservative critics don’t share the view of Trump supporters that the nation faced very significant stakes in the 2016 election. I never liked the whole “this election is like Flight 93″ metaphor, since it assumes that we should adopt a strategy that ends with us all dead. 

He also goes through the list of what Prager deems excellent achievements so far in the Trump era, acknowledging that many of them are indeed worthy of applause, but that nearly all of them can be reversed if not backed up by codification from the legislative branch and, in the case of having an excellent UN ambassador in Nikki Haley, by having a foreign policy riddled with inconsistencies.


Jim Jamitis at Red State also has a significant contribution to make to the push-back to Prager.

I like the way he turns the whole notion of persuading a particular side to change its mind completely around:

Like many of the arguments from pro-Trump conservatives, it expresses an imperative that anti-Trump conservatives “fight” on Trump’s side while neglecting to say what “fighting” means.

When people you know well and admire, and who share your values, do something you strongly oppose, you have two options: (1) Cease admiring them or (2) try to understand them and change their minds.

Actually there are three options. The third is to try to understand them and be open to changing your own mind. anti-Trump conservatives have had people whom they admire, like Prager, do something they strongly oppose as well. We’re in the same boat in that respect.

And I appreciate his examination of Prager's use of  the term "general":

War means guns and bombs and people dying and killing on battlefields. Too many people are resorting to using this metaphor. At least I hope it is only a metaphor. It’s a disturbing trend because “war” can be used as justification for very bad moral compromises.

They can join the fight. They can accept an imperfect reality and acknowledge that we are in a civil war, and that Trump, with all his flaws, is our general. If this general is going to win, he needs the best fighters. But too many of them, some of the best minds of the conservative movement, are AWOL.

I would argue that they are the remnant of the conservative movement, refusing to abandon it for Trumpism.

I beg them: Please report for duty.

I wrote about  Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs using such martial language last week. Those who don’t love Trump are being called out for not fighting for Trump. What does that even look like? For what duty are we being asked to report? Seriously, someone answer that for me. What does that mean?

Clearly, Prager is not coming at this with quite the mindset of a Hannity or a Laura Ingraham or a Conrad Black. He's a far more thoughtful person than any of them. But he has clearly swallowed the binary-choice Kool-Aid and it's distorted his ability to see those of us who are staunch defenders of classic three-pillared conservatism and who still find Donald Trump as unlikeable and unfit as ever accurately.

Self-adornment, taste and the tension between individual sovereignty and cultural health

It seems pretty obvious that at least one major point of the photo montage at Clash Daily of bizarre and grotesque facial tattoos is to give the reader a little breathing room in which to feel superior to some of his or her fellow human beings. You know, "My God, what gets into some people? How do you reach such a nihilistic dead end in your life?"

An interesting question comes to mind: What did people who had reached nihilistic dead ends do to express it to the world before tattoo "artistry" became so prevalent? Were they just inclined to keep it under wraps? Is there a chance there were fewer people reaching nihilistic dead ends in our society 40, 50, 80 years ago?

When I was growing up, tattoos were generally sported by guys who had been in the Navy and had had a few too many drinks on shore leave. They'd generally get a simple anchor icon, or the silhouette of a shapely woman, generally on the forearm.

I guess it was biker gangs that started the spread of the phenomenon. Then maybe rock and roll performers associated with particular genres, such as southern rock or the various types of heavy metal. At some point, athletes went in for tattoos in a big way, to the point where it seems deeply ingrained in the ethos of several sports.

It seems to have coincided with the metastasizing of the notion of what body piercing is all about. Until the late 1960s, no one in our culture wore earrings except women. Then men began sporting simple rings in one ear. Then came the punk movement, and that was the end of any sense of limits.

Here's another question: Is there - ought there be - a line of demarcation between what is tasteful - acceptable - in the way of tattoos, and that which not only offends but properly evokes alarm and pity?

Consider the young adult woman who gets a small butterfly etched on the small of her back, or her ankle. We're talking about an innocuous lark, right?

I'd like to offer the possibility that its look-at-me factor feeds a sense of self-importance, of a neurotic yearning for autonomy that is one of the chief signs of post-American society's rapidly declining health. It feeds this notion that everything about our daily lives ought to bear our signature, that everything must reflect personal style. Compose your own playlist to pump through your earbuds. Festoon your car with bumper stickers - maybe even a license plate - that trumpet to the world what you care about, or what reviles you. Get your coffee, your pizza, your salad dressing, exactly like you want it. (Let's see if I can remember all the varieties of ranch dressing I saw when I was shopping for the original kind the other day: bacon, avocado, cucumber, buttermilk, lite, fat-free . . . I'm forgetting some, but you get my point.)

Then there's the question of what the balance is between Christian acceptance and the complete jettisoning of discernment in the name of being "nonjudgmental." We all know about the storefront churches and Friday-night coffee gatherings attended by people new to substance-addiction recovery or a change in direction from other forms of hopeless living. Their need for the gospel message is nothing short of desperate. Often these people sport tattoos in abundance. Some, upon coming around to an acceptance of grace and determination to act on the gratitude that that entails, go out and get tattoos expressing as much, emblazoning big crosses, or even likenesses of Jesus on body surfaces not previously covered in ink.

What's that about? Is there a bit of desperation involved in that, as if, without that constant reminder on one's chest, one might lapse back into an outlook that didn't include salvation?

It seems to me there's a bit of a dare involved. The fact that Christians come not only in all demographics, but with an infinite variety of individual notions about taste, is right up in everybody's face, even the faces of people from backgrounds in which tattoos just weren't done.

But consider who owns a given human body. One's own conception happens without the person in question signing off on it. One's body develops and then ages according to a timetable not of one's own making. I submit that this fact has everything to do with scriptural admonishments to be modest in self-adornment.

Conservatives have always been faced with the question of the extent to which they ought to "get with it." Moving that needle led to the refreshing breed of the movement's younger lights in the 1980s, such as P.J. O'Rourke. Even Rush Limbaugh made the splash that he did because of the rollicking irreverence with which he surveyed the scene before him.

But no cultural phenomenon remains static. In fashion, music, food, recreation, and even political opining and satire, anything provocative that comes on the scene is bound to metastasize, usually finding "mainstream" forms in which to manifest, as well as opportunities to manifest horrifically, as is the case in the above-linked collection of facial tattoos.

But it seems to me conservatives have been suckers for the notion that they ought to lighten up and accept the permanence of a great many things.

It's always been possible to argue that conservatism is actually the countercultural impulse in our society. National Review's 1955 mission statement, after all, says that the magazine would "stand athwart history, yelling 'stop!'"

For instance, is it not an establishment of a nearly all-encompassing kind that would mock someone for saying, "I can enumerate quite a few reasons why [fill in the blank with a particular cultural phenomenon] is ill-advised, in poor taste, and feeds the general atmosphere of narcissism"? And what is the rejoinder? Is it anything more elevated than, "Aw, let people alone and let 'em do what they feel like doing"?

Pretty weak tea if we're ever to recover a sense that it's laudable to cultivate our God-given dignity.

Capretta vs. Moore on the Mulvaney budget proposal: compare and contrast

Here is an encapsulation of the irony-rich nature of the times we live in. Both Stephen Moore and James C. Capretta are, at least broadly considered free-market economists - and yet I've recently come to have a profound disagreement with each.

In the case of Moore, I've eyed him warily ever since his “just as Reagan converted the GOP into a conservative party, Trump has converted the GOP into a populist working-class party" remark. He's one guy I really thought would be impervious to the Kool-Aid.

In the case of Capretta, it's his recent insistence that any alternative to the "A"CA include even stronger inducements for citizens not to interrupt their health-insurance coverage. Excuse me, but government is not supposed to be in the business of inducing anybody to do anything.

But today we are faced with a juxtaposition of their views on the Trump-administration budget proposal that budget director Mick Mulvaney has unveiled, and I honestly don't know which guy comes close to the mark on their points of divergence.

Moore brings a there's-a-pony-in-here-somewhere optimism  - that he shares with his friend and collaborator Larry Kudlow - to the proceedings, saying it's a fairly simple formula: cut taxes and watch the growth happen:

A recent front-page story in The Wall Street Journal proclaims that 3 percent economic growth isn't achievable. We are told that 2 to 2.5 percent growth is the best we can do, because of low labor-force and productivity growth. 

If that were true it would be dismal news for the country. The long-term growth path for the U.S. economy from 1950 to 2000 was 3.3 percent. Now we can't even strive for a number below the average? Almost every year he was in office, President Barack Obama forecast that he would achieve more than 3 percent growth -- but he never once got there. So the left says it must be impossible. Since they can't figure out how to get growth, nobody can.

But the naysayers are dead wrong. Start with the tax plan that Larry Kudlow and now-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and I put together for Donald Trump during the campaign. That plan cuts U.S. business taxes from 35 percent (the highest in the world) to 15 percent (which would be among the lowest rates in the world). This will lure more jobs and businesses back to the United States. Apple CEO Tim Cook says the Trump tax plan could bring $250 billion of Apple profits back to these shores, where it can be reinvested in Michigan, Ohio, California and so on rather than Ireland, China or Europe. 

The plan also simplifies the tax system and cuts the taxes of 26 million small businesses, which create about two-thirds of the new jobs in America. Without healthy, prosperous employers, you can't have healthy, well-paying jobs.

This alone can boost economic growth by as much as 1 percentage point per year and will generate about $3 trillion more tax revenue over the next decade.
One reason many economists believe that 2 percent growth will be the new normal is demographic changes. Baby boomers are retiring, and there presumably aren't enough younger workers to lift growth higher. That's flat-out wrong. We have at least 5-7 million Americans of working age who aren't working and could and should be on the job. 

How can we get Americans to start working or working more hours? Here again, tax cuts matter. A tax cut raises take-home pay and makes work more rewarding. It happened in the 1980s after the Reagan tax cuts: We saw huge gains in people entering the workforce, especially women. 

One problem, according to Capretta: the Mulvaney budget is not predicated on the Moore-Kudlow tax cuts:

  . . . the budget plan provides no details at all on the administration’s tax plans. Instead, it assumes a revenue-neutral tax reform, which will only occur if higher growth offsets some of the revenue loss associated with lower rates. Separately, the budget also assumes $2 trillion in additional revenue from the growth effects of the administration’s policies, of which tax reform must be considered the centerpiece. In other words, instead of building into the budget forecast a major tax cut, as the president has touted, the administration says its tax policies will result in an additional $2 trillion in revenue over the next decade. This is what is known as a heroic assumption.
The administration claims it will get this additional revenue because its policies will push economic growth up from just under 2 percent annually in recent years to 3 percent per year beginning in 2021. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) assumesthe economy will grow 1.9 percent annually starting in 2021, and most economic forecasters expect growth to hover around 2 percent for the foreseeable future.

Higher growth is essential for an improved fiscal outlook. But the Trump administration hasn’t proposed anything that would justify such a large deviation from the consensus forecast. The administration says it is pushing for pro-growth tax reform, but that’s not the same thing as actually proposing a pro-growth tax reform plan. At this point, projecting 3 percent growth in the outyears of the budget is little more than wishful thinking. 

So which is it? While, as I say, I have  fundamental issues with both economists, I am well aware that both of them are experts and my observations are merely at the engaged-citizen level.

But, given that this is the big chance for free-market champions to show the nation they have their ducks in a row for the first go-round at which they have an ostensible seat at the table, it would be nice to know whose take on this is unmitigated by either giddiness or myopia.

Saturday morning roundup

Jazz Shaw at Hot Air on how the Washington Post is on the verge of a major well-duh revelation - namely, that the reason why a country so astoundingly rich in natural resources - namely, Venezuela - is a sewer of poverty, violence and despair:

The cause of the starvation is obvious. Even under the most benevolent of socialist regimes, the government is ill equipped to operate such a complex system. And this one is far from benevolent, with the party leaders more interested in ensuring their own comfort and security than that of the rank and file. But all of this was predictable because, as we’ve said here more times than I can count, this is how socialism ends. Every. Single. Time.

A bracing upside-the-head from Secretary Kelly:

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly on Friday said the terror threat is worse than most realize, saying some people would "never leave the house" if they knew the truth.

“I was telling [Fox host] Steve [Doocy] on the way in here, if he knew what I knew about terrorism, he’d never leave the house in the morning,” Kelly said on “Fox & Friends.”

He noted there were four major terror attacks in the last week — in England, Egypt, the Philippines and Indonesia — "by generally the same groups."

David French at NRO makes a great point about how today's campus jackboots may well avoid ever having a real-world wake-up call:

Conservatives tend to respond to incidents like this by rolling their eyes, calling the students “snowflakes” (a term many on the right need to stop using, given their own hysterical reactions to leftist critiques), and relishing their inevitable education in the so-called “real world.” The presumption is simple — these kinds of antics won’t fly when they’re trying to sell insurance or write code or balance a company’s budget. The “real world” is a harsh teacher, and soon they’ll have to grow up.

This response, however, is fundamentally wrong. For the most committed campus radical, the “real world” doesn’t await; a lifetime of activism does. They’ll move seamlessly from academia into government, art, and politics, and sometimes right back into academia.

They can avoid it even if they join the corporate world:

Indeed, even the “real world” isn’t what it used to be. Now that we live in hyper-partisan times and increasingly work in geographically separated ideological cocoons, it’s easy to take your activism straight to work, even if it’s not a philosophy department or progressive law firm. Corporate boycotts directly extend campus politics into the world of commerce, and any person who works for a major progressive corporation knows very well what they risk if they publicly dissent from the company line on the same hot-button cultural issues that trigger campus meltdowns.

There are many real worlds now, and a person of any ideology — if they so choose — can live their entire life without facing the stereotypical “wake-up call” that tends to moderate political extremes. So don’t look at campus craziness and take any comfort at all from the fact that these so-called “snowflakes” will graduate and enter the marketplace. The real world they’ll choose to join will indeed change them, but not in the way that conservatives imagine. Their real world will only magnify their voice.

Dale M. Coulter, associate professor of historical theology at Regent University, has a great piece at First Things on something I personally relish: verbal jousting:

During my brief sojourn in the English system, I became accustomed to the English model of clear argumentation spiced with wit and supported by a well-crafted rejoinder. For those not used to such an approach, it can feel more like a bludgeoning with a long sword than the incisive jabs of a rapier. There is always a fine line between destroying an argument and destroying the person who made it.

This approach teaches you to turn words into weapons in the service of argument. It can begin with a series of questions, seemingly innocent and yet designed to ferret out weaknesses. Depending on the answer, the second round of questions may be punctuated by “Surely you don’t mean X,” or a series of well-placed modifiers (“gross” oversimplification, “fallacious” reasoning, etc.). Appeals to authority are sometimes dismissed with a simple wave of the hand (“Shortest dissertation in the history of that school” was one such dismissal I witnessed). For those who understand it, this cultural form is a kind of rhetorical flair designed to elicit a strong response, rather than deliver an actual blow to the argument.

I experienced reverse culture-shock after moving back to the U.S., when I offered a critique of a paper written by a colleague. I had assumed that my own concern for the colleague’s argument would come through in the careful way I had read the paper. Not so. I discovered that I had offended not only my colleague, but many observers, who rushed in as though my criticisms had done permanent damage. I realized that I had to find softer ways to criticize my American colleagues, who had not been formed in the hard-hitting English system.

One thing to be said for that “aggressively English dialectic of debate” is that it has a leveling effect among socio-economic classes. On the other side of the pond, where regional accents function as signifiers of whether one is cultured or not, the art of skillful argumentation can make equals out of those who come from different classes. One learns to stand on the strength of argument alone.

This art of verbal jousting does not fit in the postmodern world, so concerned with providing safe spaces. Verbal jousting is an invitation to respond in kind, much as “joning” functions in the African-American community to cultivate and display verbal skills that integrate individuals into the community. Yes, joning can lead to violence—just as there is a reason why, at an Oxford viva in the Middle Ages, there was to be precisely one sword length between the examiners and the examined.

Many a writer has dealt with the subject of why the Indianapolis 500 is unique and even magical among the world's sporting events, but I think Christopher Jacobs at The Federalist nails it as well as any effort I've seen.

 

Squirrel-Hair comes home to a hot mess

DJT's first official world-stage tour as president was on balance successful. Lots of things happened at each stop - the bizarre glowing globe in Saudi Arabia, the visit to the Western Wall in Israel, the revelation that Melania is a practicing Catholic - but the two important takeaways are

• the notice served to Iran that the era of patty-cake is over, and 
• the notice served to Europe that the US understands that the Paris climate accord is a lot of hooey and that the US will be finding the most diplomatic way possible to bow out of complying with it

But the roiling swirl of controversies at home did not abate in the Big Guy's absence.

It's important to remember that no one that the FBI is either formally investigating or merely looking at has been charged with anything criminal, but Jared Kushner is a "person of interest" due to the meetings he had with Russian officials and business executives.

The F.B.I.’s interest in Kushner appears to be related to the two known meetings that he had with Russian officials. The first, which was originally reported by The New Yorker, occurred in early December, at Trump Tower, when Kushner and Michael Flynn, then the incoming national-security adviser, met with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador to the United States. On Friday evening, the Washington Post added dramatic new details about what occurred at this meeting, which it said took place on December 1st or 2nd. Kushner and Kislyak, according to the Post’s sources, “discussed the possibility of setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin, using Russian diplomatic facilities in an apparent move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring.” Kushner then met with Sergey Gorkov, the head of Vnesheconombank, a Russian bank, later that month, reportedly at Kislyak’s request. The bank is the subject of U.S. sanctions that were placed on Russia in 2014, after its invasion of Ukraine. Perhaps more concerning, Gorkov is also a graduate of Russia’s Academy of the Federal Security Service, which trains the country’s spies. The meetings may have been entirely innocent. It’s not uncommon for an incoming White House adviser to meet with foreign officials. But the meetings seemed even more curious when it was reported that Kushner failed to disclose them on a standard security form, known as a SF-86, that all White House officials must fill out and sign.

Then there is the consideration afoot to put a damper on S-H's favorite way of shooting off his mouth:

The White House is considering whether to appoint a legal team to police President Trump’s tweets, it was revealed on Friday.

The administration could have lawyers scrutinize Trump infamous social media posts as numerous investigations have been launched into White House officials, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The lawyer’s goal would be to avoid potential pitfalls from the president’s verbose volleys on Twitter.

Trump, a prolific tweeter, has caused controversy during his time in office after issuing unverified claims about President Obama wiretapping the Trump Tower and attacks on former FBI director James Comey.

The tweet review comes as the White House expands its legal team to deal with ongoing investigations into whether Trump officials colluded with Russia to interfere in the presidential election.

It's dismaying, to be sure, especially because a number of really good folks in Congress would like to act on important policy initiatives, starting with turning the Mulvaney budget proposal into something consistently conservative and fiscally sound, but can't rely on much help from a White House hobbled by shady shenanigans.

To what extent do you find comfort in the fact that at least our current juncture is slightly less terrible than it would have been four months into a Madame BleachBit administration?

Two new tales from the campus-jackboot files

Racial hatred at Hunter College:

American colleges and universities, and the Leftists who dominate them, are blind to their own bigotry and hypocrisy.

If a school offered a class titled "The Problems of Blackness," academia -- and everyone else -- would be outraged, and for good reason. That class material would be racist as hell. Yet change it to "The Problems of Whiteness," and you have a course that would be applauded for speaking openly about race.

Of course, I'm sugarcoating it. The modern Left isn't into simply discussing their hate anymore.

The class in question sounds like it's moved far beyond "speaking openly" to outright advocating for genocide, as it's actually called "The ABOLITION of Whiteness":

The course, taught by Women and Gender Studies Professor Jennifer Gaboury, is cross-listed for both her department and the Political Science Department, where it  fulfills one of four required courses in the “4 subfields of political science” under the umbrella of POLSC 204: Contemporary Issues in Political Theory.

While the school’s official course catalog discloses very little about what is actually discussed in the course, a flyer advertising a previous iteration of the class from the fall of 2016 describes it as “an overview of whiteness studies in the United States,” specifically “focusing on concepts of consciousness, in/visibility, disavowal, and resentment.”

“We’ll be examining how whiteness -- and/or white supremacy and violence -- is intertwined with conceptions of gender, race, sexuality, class, body ability, nationality, and age,” the description continues, adding that “a petition for this course is on file with the College Senate so that it fulfills Pluralism and Diversity Parts B, C, or D,” referring to mandatory courses that focus, respectively, on “the historical conditions, perspectives and/or intellectual traditions” of ethnic minorities in the U.S., women and those with non-traditional sexual orientations, and Europeans.

While the description of the class implies the usual racist bunk that white people are inherently evil, sitting on top of the heap, looking down at everyone around them, the biggest issue may just be that title. Gaboury, who is white, doesn't seem to understand that "abolishing" whiteness is going to involve, you know, genocide.

Yale confers accolades on a foul-mouthed, unhinged little snowflake and a self-styled brownshirt:

Our story begins in the fall of 2015, when a mob of students surrounded professor Nicholas Christakis in the courtyard of Silliman, the residential college of which he used to be Master, a term used to describe head faculty members who oversee undergraduate life (more on this later). Christakis, a world-renowned sociologist and scientist, was there to answer complaints about an email sent by his wife, Erika, in response to a campus-wide message distributed by a Yale College dean of “student engagement,” Burgwell Howard, warning students away from wearing Halloween costumes that “threaten our sense of community.” For her mere suggestion that Yale undergraduates—adults who can legally vote and fight and die in the nation’s wars—be entrusted with the responsibility to choose their own Halloween costumes (and, furthermore, be entrusted to share whatever discomfort they may have about potentially “offensive” costumes with their peers, rather than encouraged to whine to overpaid, utterly superfluous, administrative busybodies), Erika Christakis was denounced by hundreds of Yale students, faculty, alumni, and countless off-campus agitators as an incorrigible bigot and “white supremacist” whose job should be taken from her.

But Nicholas Christakis was doing more than just defending the honor of his wife that afternoon in the Silliman courtyard. As video of the several hours-long ordeal revealed, Christakis was defending the most fundamental principle of higher education: that the university should serve as a place of free inquiry where individuals can respectfully engage with one another in the pursuit of knowledge.

At least, that’s what places like Yale claim to stand for. Not anymore.

Of the 100 or so students who confronted Christakis that day, a young woman who called him “disgusting” and shouted “who the fuck hired you?” before storming off in tears became the most infamous, thanks to an 81-second YouTube clip that went viral. (The video also—thanks to its promotion by various right-wing websites—brought this student a torrent of anonymous harassment). The videos that Tablet exclusively posted last year, which showed a further 25 minutes of what was ultimately an hours-long confrontation, depicted a procession of students berating Christakis. In one clip, a male student strides up to Christakis and, standing mere inches from his face, orders the professor to “look at me.” Assuming this position of physical intimidation, the student then proceeds to declare that Christakis is incapable of understanding what he and his classmates are feeling because Christakis is white, and, ipso facto, cannot be a victim of racism. In another clip, a female student accuses Christakis of “strip[ping] people of their humanity” and “creat[ing] a space for violence to happen,” a line later mocked in an episode of The Simpsons. In the videos, Howard, the dean who wrote the costume provisions, can be seen lurking along the periphery of the mob.

Of Yale’s graduating class, it was these two students whom the Nakanishi Prize selection committee deemed most deserving of a prize for “enhancing race and/or ethnic relations” on campus. Hectoring bullies quick to throw baseless accusations of racism or worse; cosseted brats unscrupulous in their determination to smear the reputations of good people, these individuals in actuality represent the antithesis of everything this award is intended to honor. Yet, in the citation that was read to all the graduating seniors and their families on Class Day, Yale praised the latter student as “a fierce truthteller.”

This, for a hysterical liar who accused one of the university’s most distinguished academic minds of inciting “violence” upon his own students. And the chair of the selection committee? Burgwell Howard.

It's very late in the day in post-America.

The inevitable cannibalization among the identity-politics jackboots

Maggie Gallagher reports on what happens when millennial snowflake-ism encounters the boundary-pushing popular music of a half-century ago:

Lou Reed was the minstrel boy to the wars of the sexual revolution. His haunting 1972 anthem urged young Americans to “Take a Walk on the Wild Side.” It celebrated the polymorphous perversity of Andy Warhol’s New York:

Holly came from Miami F.L.A.

Hitchhiked her way across the U.S.A.

Plucked her eyebrows on the way,

Shaved her legs and then he was a she.

She said, “Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side.”

Lou Reed was transgressive, progressive, and prodigiously talented. And yet somehow over the weekend Reed became the poster child of “transphobic” intolerance? How?

It’s a strange story.

Meet Chelsea, Emily, Becca and Kayla. They’re the executive officers of the University of Guelph Central Student Association in Ontario, Canada. Guelph is one of Canada’s top five universities. Last Thursday, these young women held an event to distribute summer bus passes. One of them (they won’t say which one) prepared a playlist. It included Reed’s anthem.

Apparently a transgender student complained. The young executives posted a heartfelt apology on the CSA’s official Facebook page. They said that the song appeared because of “ignorance as the person making the list did not know or understand the lyrics.”

We now know the lyrics to this song are hurtful to our friends in the trans community and we’d like to unreservedly apologize for this error in judgement. We have committed as an organization to be more mindful in our music selection during any events we hold.

The next paragraph is both precious and appalling:

If there are students or members of the campus community who overheard the song in our playlist and were hurt by its inclusion and you’d like to talk with us about it and how we can do better, we welcome that. We also recognize you may not want to talk with us and we acknowledge that it is not your responsibility to educate us. Please know that we are taking the steps to educate ourselves further to ensure this error is avoided going forward.”

The post went viral, to vast ridicule. “I don’t know if Lou would be cracking up about this or crying because it’s just too stupid,” Reed’s producer Hal Willner told The Guardian. 

I was reminded of a paragraph from my own post two days ago:

But we really are into some uncharted territory now. We have people assuming an air of great self-righteousness in their proclamation that we all ought to become fungible beings with no reason to find each other attractive in any natural sense, yet still craving the stimulation that we'd experienced in each other's company back when we were still boys and girls - and had some dignity and common sense. Just automatons existing for gratification and to perform whatever technocratic task the state deems us fit for. 

 . . .  when I read Gallagher's depiction of the two "big ideas" of this bizarre post-American age:

Our emerging morality has two big ideas: First, our most important job as a society is now to create good gender-neutral workers who have equal access to good jobs. This is the social task that is critical and must be accomplished. Second, our identity as sexual beings is socially unimportant except to the extent it brings us personal happiness. Sex accomplishes no important social task. Therefore it follows as marriage once followed sexual love that everyone must support all our sexual identities. There is no objective standard a reasonable outsider can apply. Even the intent of the artist doesn’t really matter. The consumer might hear it differently.

She nails it with the last two lines of her piece:

The old . . .  codebreakers threw out the Biblical baby with the bathwater (often literally).

But at least they understood one great and obvious truth: You can’t take a walk on the wild side in a safe space. 

Exactly.

 

Mr. President, back away from this supposed opportunity to strut your deal-making chops

The American Enterprise Institute's Marc Theissen puts some numbers on the futility of a president - any president, really, and they all succumb to the temptation to try it - seeking to be The One Who Achieved Peace Between Israel And The Palestinians.

It looks like a particularly tantalizing project to DJT, since he loves to be seen as a deal-maker nonpareil.

But he'd be wise to consider this before embarking on that perennial fool's errand:

polling data show that Palestinians are the most radicalized, anti-peace population in the entire Muslim world.

According to a 2014 Pew Research Center poll, support for suicide bombings has declined significantly across the Muslim world in recent years – everywhere except the Palestinian territories.

For example, in Pakistan just 3% of the Muslim population now says that suicide bombings are “often” or “sometimes justified”.  In the Palestinian territories it is 46% – nearly half – which is the highest among 21 countries polled.

In Gaza, territory controlled by Hamas, support for suicide bombings is even higher, at 62%.

Or take the recent spate of knife attacks by Palestinian terrorists targeting Israeli civilians and police. A March 2016 poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey (PSR) found that a 58% majority of Palestinians support knife attacks (which the poll notes had dropped from 67% in a poll three months earlier). In Gaza, support knife attacks was 82% (down from 85% three months earlier).

The poll also notes that “a majority in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip continues to support an armed intifada and continues to believe that such an intifada would help Palestinians achieve national rights in ways that negotiations could not.” In the West Bank, 60% hold this view while in Gaza it is held by 75% of the population.

The poll also found that “a slim majority of 51% supports and 48% oppose the two-state solution. Three months ago, 45% supported and 54% opposed this solution.” So essentially only half of the Palestinian population is ready to live side-by-side in peace with Israel.

The December 2015 PSR poll (the one taken three months earlier) had another interesting finding: “only 39% [of Palestinians] support a mutual recognition of national identity of Israel as the state for the Jewish people and Palestine as the state for the Palestinian people and 61% oppose it.”

How is Israel supposed to make peace with people who support suicide bombings and knife attacks against innocent people and do not recognize the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state?
The answer: They can’t.
The fact is Palestinians still refuse to recognize the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish homeland, a Jewish state, in any boundary. They support terror and violence over negotiations and compromise. That is the true core of the conflict.
It’s not about settlements. Israel withdrew all 21 settlements in Gaza. In fact, Israel withdrew from Gaza entirely. And today Gaza is the most radical part of Palestinian territories. More than 8 in 10 Gazans support knife attacks on innocent Israelis.
Why is this? Because Palestinian leaders fill their people with hatred for Israel every single day. They name youth soccer teams after terrorists who blew up innocent Israeli citizens and erect statues to them. They produce children’s shows that show Jews as subhuman. As Prime Minister Netanyahu pointed out during Trump’s visit, they pay the families of suicide bombers who kill Israelis.

President Abbas – the so-called “moderate” – has said, “We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem.” One of his advisors urged Palestinians to “slit the throats of Israelis wherever you find them.” 

And the Pew poll shows that the younger they are, the more likely Palestinians are to hold these views.

Just stick to supporting Israel, Mr. President, and don't follow your predecessors down the road of pointless folly.

Gianforte, tribalism and the increasing brittleness of post-American society

First, let me state that I'm glad he won.

Yes, I'm inviting the temptation to the disingenuousness that would take that statement out of context, but it's really not that hard to defend.

It's always good when Democrats get defeated. In this case, there wasn't much to recommend Rob Quist. He does have a small-business background, which seems to be his motivation for advocating tax reform, and he's a Second Amendment supporter, but on just about anything else, he's decidedly to the left. Supports the "right to choose" to exterminate fetal Americans. Supports the Paycheck Fairness Act. Has that leftist fetish for public schools. He campaigned with Bernie Sanders, and is on record as advocating single-payer health care.

Gianforte is pretty much his mirror opposite. With regard to an entrepreneurial background, he's distinguished himself impressively by founding RightNow Technologies, which was eventually sold to Oracle.

Rather than talk about how government ought to facilitate a citizen's ability to retire, in his remarks on the subject, he's stressed the notion that it is noble to work in some fashion throughout one's life.

He understands that shuttering coal-fired power plants would not affect the global climate one bit.

And I really dig that fact that he only came around to supporting Trump with notable reluctance.

Okay, so that explains that.

Now, we of course have the incident from the other evening in which it's pretty clear he roughed up Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs. FNC reporter Alicia Acuna seems to have the most credible eyewitness account of the occurrence, and there is audiotape that makes it clear that Gianforte was steaming mad.

Now, a display of anger can be an attractive thing. (There, I've offered some more low-hanging fruit to those tempted to disingenuousness.) There is that legendary bit of videotape from 1968 of William F. Buckley telling Gore Vidal he'd "sock [his] god-damn face, and it'll stay plastered" in response to Vidal calling him a crypto-Nazi on national television.

It was clear that Gianforte was one fed-up dude at the moment of the scuffle. It would be interesting to know what he'd dealt with in, say, the hour previous to the incident.

But, finally, we cannot excuse this. He crossed a line of self-control and in the process did harm to societal standards of decorum and civility.

What is truly dismaying about all this is the reaction from some on the Right. In the cases of Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, I'm not the least bit surprised, given that they became shills for the idea that Trump is a worthy figurehead for the party where conservatism finds a home. They are Kool-Aid guzzlers, and their reaction, particularly exemplified by Ingraham's grilling of Acuna on her radio show on the irrelevant point of whether Gianforte picked up Jacobs by the skin of his neck, as if justification hinged on whether it was neck skin, or Jacobs's shirt.

But why is Brent Bozell lending his full-throated defense of this? His whole career has been spent struggling against the coarsening of our culture, and if a Congressional candidate thrusting a reporter to the ground and screaming at him doesn't qualify as a coarsening occurrence, what does?

Now, as to the Left, I have no patience with its howls. Not when Middlebury College is going to drop its inquiry into the violent harassment of American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray when he attempted to speak on that campus. Not when UC Berkeley similarly handles the rioters among its student body with kid gloves. Not when The University of Missouri changes presidents in response to the demands of its student jackboots.

This situation drives home what a hair-trigger state post-American society is in. How long did we think it was going to take for the shrill invective that characterizes most social-media polemical exchanges to boil over into physical altercations?

What can be done to dial it back?

What occurs to me offhand is an insistence on clarity and keeping discourse on the level of ideas and principles.

Acquiesce to no one in your defense of those, but resist, however challenging it might be, the urge to take it to the levels at which it becomes a mere bar fight.

And here's praying that Gianforte understands all this and will display exemplary behavior without fail when seated in the post-American House of Representatives.

Trump's big chance to make good on a campaign pledge

You can't beat Chris Horner for incisive analysis of developments on the environment-and-energy front.

First, he's unmitigatedly principled. Second, he has his facts down cold.

The latest example is his look at tomorrow's G-7 summit, and how Trump ought to handle a certain subject that will be coming up:

President Trump will attend the G7 Summit in Italy on Friday. This meeting of foreign leaders reportedly will pressure Trump to reverse his decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, as Trump repeatedly promised American votershe would do, recently comparing it to the Iran deal.

For Trump, staying in the Paris Climate Agreement presents two big problems. First, this would break a promise to millions of voters who want Trump to stop former President Barack Obama's march toward energy poverty and a weaker economy.

Second, it would concede to a global pressure campaign to make U.S. energy policies increasingly unaccountable to Americans and beholden to the demands of foreign bureaucrats. Staying in the Paris agreement is also irreconcilable with Trump's energy agenda, which includes rolling back the Environmental Protection Agency's harmful Clean Power Plan.

The better option for Trump and millions of Americans would be to keep his promise and send the Paris Climate Agreement to the Senate to die. This is a critical step in unraveling Obama's war on affordable energy and maintaining self-governance on U.S. economic and energy issues. 

Horner then puts numbers on how Europe's Kool-Aid-swallowing nations have encumbered themselves with economic malaise:

To even achieve the first U.S. commitment under the Paris Agreement would require multiple Clean Power Plan mandates to significantly reduce oil, coal and natural gas use. These reductions would raise energy prices and devastate many state economies.

All of this pain would be in exchange for, as economist Bjorn Lomborg explains, an undetectable climate impact of 0.05 degrees Celsius by 2100, even under the rosiest assumptions.

Unfortunately, some White House advisers are supporting "green jobs" schemes like the Paris agreement, ignoring how these policies caused huge job losses, drastically increased energy prices and resulted in energy poverty in Europe.

In 2014, Spanish unemployment reached 25 percent, while Spain's reliance on green energy programs threatened to bankrupt the country. Spain's energy prices have spiked as much as 50 percent since 2006 and more than 4 million are unable to properly heat their homes, according to Spain's National Statistics Institute.

Electricity has become "a luxury good" in Germany, disproportionately burdening the poor, according to a leading German magazine. The country's electricity rates are approximately triple U.S. rates. 

Yes, pulling the US out of this idiotic agreement will rankle a good many of our allies, but maybe, as they see how things start shaking out, they'll be compelled to follow suit.

At least US laws and regulations won't be shaped by the ephemeral jitters and "clean" energy visions of a bunch of foreign bureaucrats who manage woefully underperforming economies.

Wednesday roundup

Looks like Squirrel-Hair is going to take the bait with regard to the perennial Israel-Palestinian conundrum. The temptation to apply his self-perceived dealmaking skills is apparently too great to resist. And isn't the use of the term "losers" to describe jihadists just the perfect S-H-esque touch?


I have never liked Sean Hannity. This goes back way before the emergence of Trump as a focus of punditry. I just thought his polemical chops were abysmal. Jabbing his finger in the air and shouting, "Why don't you and your liberal friends ever . . . " I remember when he grieved over the passing of his dog of many years on his radio show, and his mentioning the dog's name. I thought to myself, he's the kind of guy who would name his dog Snowball. But he's really exposed the full extent of his third-tier-at-best approach with this pursuit of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, despite opposition not only from Rich's family, but from Fox News as well.

The Manchester Ariana Grande concert bombing was probably not a lone wolf operation.

The two money paragraphs from Kevin Williamson's NRO piece on the Mulvaney budget proposal:

Here’s the situation: About 80 percent of federal spending is consumed by five things: 1. National defense; 2. Social Security; 3. Medicare; 4. Medicaid and other related health-care benefits; 5. Interest on the debt. President Trump wants to increase spending on defense by about 10 percent while shielding Social Security and Medicare from cuts. Short of a default, he doesn’t have any choice but to pay the interest on the debt. So that leaves things pretty tight.

And:

In the real world, we need genuine tax reform that is something close to revenue-neutral, significant entitlement reforms that will be politically unpopular, and defense spending that is flat or slightly lower. Nobody wants that eat-your-spinach budget, but the sooner we get serious about fiscal responsibility, the less painful reform will be. Incompetence

Incompetent or agenda-driven? CNN publishes a story about a magnanimous taxi driver giving people free rides away from the above-mentioned Manchester terror-attack scene. Only problem: the headline describes him as a Muslim, but the dude was a Sikh.

Wiping out any vestige of individual identity and human nature itself in post-America

It's come to this:

You. Yes, you. You're a bigot.

Are you a straight man who only wants to have sex with women? Are you a gay man who only wants to have sex with men? Are you a bisexual man who wants to have sex with people of both sexes but only if they are good-looking? Are you asexual?

You're a bigot.

According to Samantha Allen of The Daily Beast, it is deeply "disappointing but unsurprising" that under 20 percent of Americans in a recent survey said they would be open to having sex with a transgender person. That's because, she says, "Cultural acceptance has tended to lag behind formal recognition." 

It turns out that according to the left, all sexual behavior is malleable and based largely on social structures that have been implemented by the patriarchy. Men and women don't exist but for their self-perception -- we know that a man can be a woman and a woman can be a man, regardless of biology. That's why Caitlyn Jenner isn't just a man with a mental disorder and some plastic surgery and hormone injections; Caitlyn Jenner is as much of a woman as Michelle Obama. The left reasons that if a man can be a woman, then a man who only wants to have sex with biological women must be a bigot -- his desires have been wrongly defined by a society that restricted the definition of womanhood to, you know, women. If only men had been exposed to the deeper truth of gender earlier. If only they'd known that some women have male genitalia. Then, perhaps they'd be willing to have sex with biological men who are actually women.

The same holds true with regard to homosexuals, of course. If a woman is a lesbian, it's discriminatory of her to not want to have sex with a man who identifies as a woman. Her desires have also been shaped by her environment. And her environment has drawn a stark but wrong -- oh, ever so wrong! -- line between biological men and biological women.

If all of this sounds insane, that's because it is.

For years, I perceived the Left as basically consisting of two tiers: the tofu-and-sprouts / peace-fellowship / coffee-hour-at-the-Unitarian-church / human-rights-council types who earnestly believed in the collective perfectability of humankind on the one hand, and the cynical, power-mad overlords exploiting the first group's innocence on the other. My model was flexible enough to allow for cases in which someone from the first group morphed into someone from the second. In fact, cases of this phenomenon abound. It could be argued that Barack Obama, the Most Equal Comrade, is an example.

But we really are into some uncharted territory now. We have people assuming an air of great self-righteousness in their proclamation that we all ought to become fungible beings with no reason to find each other attractive in any natural sense, yet still craving the stimulation that we'd experienced in each other's company back when we were still boys and girls - and had some dignity and common sense. Just automatons existing for gratification and to perform whatever technocratic task the state deems us fit for.

In other words, guys like Mao and Castro at least wanted to get laid - and by good-looking women. Now, we are forbidden to have any such socially unjust impulses - and so are those who would deign to be our dictators.

I like to think that this whole enterprise is going to collapse of its own inherent unnaturalness. But I'm not certain of that. With the major cultural institutions - schools, the entertainment industry, corporate human-resource departments, journalism, even the left side of the religion spectrum - under the control of those who think this way, the task of permanently fending off the Day of the New Creature is going to be unprecedentedly daunting.

Prayer, keen wits, and fostering of community with those who remember a world in which dignity, common sense and natural sexuality were assumed to characterize daily life are our primary tools.

But that things have gotten this far ought to keep us sober about the magnitude of the effort.