Friday afternoon roundup

If you're looking for a singularly evocative, grotesque and heartbreaking instance of the inhumanity of statism and central planning - either generally or in health care - the case of Baby Charlie is it:

On June 27, the parents of 10-month-old Charlie Gard lost their final appeal to travel to the United States to have him treated for a rare brain disorder. The European Court of Human Rights (EHCR) denied the appeal of London parents Chris Gard and Connie Yates, which means that his life support will be removed and, at some point, he will be allowed to die.

Charlie's parents raised over £1.4million in private donations via GoFundme to pay for the treatment and their travel expenses. Charlie Gard suffers from a mitochondrial disease that causes muscle weakness and brain damage. His parents wanted to bring him to the United States for experimental nucleoside treatment, but the administrators and doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children denied the request. Their alternative? Withdraw life support, administer palliative care, and let Charlie "die with dignity."

Let that sink in a minute: This treatment would have come at no cost to the hospital or the National Health Service (NHS), and would have been covered completely by private donations. They denied the parents their right to determine care for their own child.

And the Vatican's response is extremely disturbing:

Against the backdrop of this barbaric abuse of judicial authority, the Catholic Church—the world’s greatest defender of the right to life, and long a moral bulwark against state intrusion into the rights of the family sphere—has decided that the courts in this case are basically right.

These are difficult times for orthodox Catholics, beset by a pope who often appears inclined to dismiss centuries of church teaching and a fair number of bishops who are apparently determined to follow him. Catechetical esoterica regarding Eucharistic doctrine, of course, can seem hopelessly complex for even the lay Catholic these days.

But the Catholic Church’s position on the sanctity of life is unmistakable to anyone, and has been for several thousand years. Its stance on the authority of the family has also long been clear. We should assume that the Vatican would be more than happy to condemn and rebuke in no uncertain terms an idiot juridical decision that condemns a little baby boy to die rather than allowing his parents to fight for his once chance to survive.

You would be wrong. The Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life yesterday released a statement that waffles between limp-wristed equivocations and outright willful ignorance of church teaching. If this is where the Vatican now makes its stand, then the most vulnerable members of society—which is to say all of us, at some point—are in trouble.

The academy attempts to explain away the courts’ decision by citing “the complexity of the situation, the heartrending pain of the parents, and the efforts of so many to determine what is best for Charlie,” acknowledging that “we do, sometimes…have to recognize the limitations of what can be done” in modern medicine.

This is preposterous nonsense, what, growing up, my family called “mental babble.” The situation is not at all “complex”: Charlie’s parents want to attempt to save his life, and the courts have made it illegal for them to do so, in direct contravention of their parental authority. The “heartrending pain of the parents” is now primarily a feature not of their dying child (whom they are trying to save) but of the soft-tyrannical decision of the British courts (which are preventing them from doing so). As for “what is best for Charlie,” the obvious fact is clear: his parents have decided that for him. 

Nature-denial indoctrination among the periodicals aimed at adolescents: Teen Vogue Digital is on an overt campaign to "banish heteronormativity from its content." And Seventeen magazine has posted a video on why pronouns are important to transgendered young persons.

AEI scholar James Pethokoukis interviews Notre Dame professor of political thought Patrick J. Deneen on the question of whether there's a true conservative tradition in America:

I want as much growth and innovation and technological progress as possible. But am I wrong?

Maybe those are really good things, but maybe they also come at the price of what we’re calling conservatism. Or a kind of moral society grounded in a certain kind of way of life, a certain kind of culture, a certain set of beliefs that are passed down from one generation to the next. In other words it may be that that’s exactly what American civilization is, and maybe we shouldn’t be surprised then that we’re not conserving a lot. That a kind of a society defined increasingly by the inability of especially the middle class to form families, to pass on tradition, to forge and create religious belief — that one of the results of a society dedicated to restlessness, constant technological innovation, globalization, et cetera is that it’s not going to be a very conservative society. And if that’s what we want that’s fine. But conservatives should fess up. They should acknowledge that that’s going to be a cost. And that seems to me what American conservatism has failed to do, and why, in many ways, if we look at the landscape of American life today — social, cultural, political, religious life — why we have actually conserved very little.

Jonah Goldberg's G-File at NRO this week puts the entire sad Squirrel-Hair phenomenon in a - well, here comes a pun of such a low-hanging fruit variety that even small tree-dwellers with large fluffy tales may wince - nutshell:

The president of the United States really just isn’t a very good person. There is no definition of good character that he can meet. You certainly can’t say he’s a man of good character when it comes to sexual behavior. His adulterous past is well-documented. You can’t say he models decency in the way he talks. He’s not honest (you can look it up). He brags about whining his way to winning. He boasts of double-crossing business partners. If you want to say he’s charitable, you should read up on how he used his “charities” as leverage or for publicity stunts. I think we can all agree he’s not humble or self-sacrificing. When asked what sacrifices he’s made, in the context of his spat with the Kahn family, he couldn’t name anything save for the fact that he worked very hard to get rich and that he employs people (presumably because it profits him to do so). I don’t know how anyone could absolve him of the charge of vanity or greed. He’s certainly not pious by any conventional definition.

Some argue that he’s loyal, and there’s some evidence of that. But the loyalty he shows is instrumental and self-serving. In The Art of the Deal, there’s a fairly moving passage about Roy Cohn, Trump’s mentor, and loyalty. “The thing that’s most important to me is loyalty,” Trump says. “You can’t hire loyalty. I’ve had people over the years who I swore were loyal to me, and it turned out that they weren’t. Then I’ve had people that I didn’t have the same confidence in and turned out to be extremely loyal. So you never really know.”

He added: “The thing I really look for though, over the longer term, is loyalty.” Trump then said this about Cohn:

He was a truly loyal guy — it was a matter of honor with him — and because he was also very smart, he was a great guy to have on your side. You could count on him to go to bat for you, even if he privately disagreed with your view, and even if defending you wasn’t necessarily the best thing for him. He was never two-faced. Just compare that with all the hundreds of “respectable” guys who make careers boasting about their uncompromising integrity and have absolutely no loyalty. They think about what’s best for them and don’t think twice about stabbing a friend in the back if the friend becomes a problem. . . .  Roy was the sort of guy who’d be there at your hospital bed, long after everyone else had bailed out, literally standing by you to the death.

But when Cohn got HIV, Trump severed his ties with Cohn. “Donald found out about it and just dropped him like a hot potato,” Susan Bell, Cohn’s longtime secretary, said. “It was like night and day.”

I could go on. But you get the point. I am truly open to the argument that there’s some morally and intellectually serious definition of good character that Trump meets. I’ve just never heard it. And that’s why the tweets are ultimately just a symptom.

Conservatives for most of my life argued that character matters. That went by the wayside for many people in 2016.

The question now is what conservatives should do about it. I agree with Ramesh and Charlie entirely. Conservatives should condemn the bad behavior. But we shouldn’t fall into the liberal trap of saying that because Trump isn’t a gentleman, we should therefore abandon a conservative agenda. Being ungentlemanly is not an impeachable offense. At the same time, however, we should not follow the path of his worst enablers who insist that his bad behavior is admirable or that the bad behavior of others is a justification for his. That’s Alinsky-envying bunk. “Let the lie come into the world,” Solzhenitsyn said, “let it even triumph. But not through me.”

One for the good-move side of the ledger:

President Donald Trump’s Department of Labor (DOL) announced that it would not defend an Obama-era rule that has doubled the salary threshold at which employers must provide overtime compensation to employees.

The rule, championed by former President Barack Obama’s DOL, would have raised the salary threshold for workers to qualify as exempt from overtime pay from $455 to $913 per week (or from $23,660 to $47,476 per year). The rulewas set to go into effect Dec. 1, 2016, before a federal judge issued a temporary injunction.

U.S. District Court Judge Amos Mazzant questioned the DOL’s authority to raise the minimum salary threshold. In his opinion, Mazzant said that the DOL “exceeded its delegated authority and ignored Congress’s intent by issuing the rule.”

The DOL said Friday that it would not appeal Mazzant’s temporary injunction, meaning that Obama’s overtime rule is likely dead.

Peter Heck at The Resurgent says that one important reason Ted Cruz has earned hero status is his fierce defense of free speech, and he provides video of a thunderous pronouncement at a Senate Judicial Committee hearing to prove it.

 

Wy it was wrong for Pubs to nominate and elect DJT instead of an actual conservative - today's edition

So this morning's tweets from the - ahem - president about the MSNBC Morning Joe co-hosts are consuming the oxygen that should go for health care, tax reform, Syria and North Korea. It was signature Trump. Seventh-grade adjectives ("low IQ Crazy Mika," "psycho Joe"), a dubious anecdote from out of nowhere ("bleeding badly from a face lift"), portrayal of adversaries as idolizing him and wanting to bask in his presence ("came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row . . . and insisted on joining me"), and portrayal of a media outlet as having dismal prospects ("poorly rated Morning Joe"). It's not a very long pair of blurting, but he packs it all in.

And again, all parties, in Pavlovian fashion, are responding as they are conditioned to. The White House press shop, in the person of Sarah Huckabee, talks about hitting back twice as hard. Rush Limbaugh make it all about the reaction of the left-leaning media, when there are plenty of outraged conservatives (Ben Sasse, Jay Caruso, Peter Heck, Ben Shapiro, David French). The comment-thread slavish devotees set up the straw-man argument that a less infantile style of engaging hostile forces did nothing to help previous Republican leaders quash said forces. Laura Ingraham exhorting the White House to exert more "message discipline." (When is she going to grow weary to the breaking point of putting herself in the position of ranting about what the Trump team ought to be doing?) And, of course, a leftism-drenched "mainstream media" having a field day with it, particularly given the cover it provides in the wake of some recent self-immolation.

Damn it, this is exactly what the "Against Trump" issue of National Review was all about. This is what Charlie Sykes's mighty swim against the talk-radio tide was all about. It's what the last-minute implorings here at LITD were all about.

And it's exactly what those figures who chose for all intents and purposes immediately upon DJT's descent of the Trump Tower escalator to become his full-throated zealots and and render their previous conservative bona fides counterfeit are responsible for imposing on us. They willfully glossed over the implications of his lack of character and maturity, setting up a false dichotomy between the Clinton and Bush dynasties, even as the Republican field brimmed with an abundance of brilliance, maturity and principle.

The left-leaning media is held in low regard by most of the American public, but it's so ubiquitous that its conflation of this garbage with the good moves by this administration makes its way into the recesses of the public consciousness.

Donald Trump has not made it easier to advance conservative policy. He's made it infuriatingly harder.

Why it was wrong for Pubs to nominate and elect DJT instead of an actual conservative - today's edition

The current Exhibit A is a doozy:

Here’s a transcript of what Trump said:

So we’re going to talk and we’re going to see what we can do. We’re getting very close. But, for the country, we have to have healthcare and it can’t be Obamacare which is melting down. The other side is saying all sorts of things before they even knew what the bill was. This will be great if we get it done and if we don’t get it done it’s just going to be something that we’re not going to like and that’s ok and I understand that very well. But I think we have a chance to do something very very important for the public, very very important for the people of our country that we love.

It is like Trump learned how to talk about healthcare from his experience with the Miss Teen USA pageant. This sort of language is what students use to pad out an essay when they haven’t done the required reading. It’s embarrassing. It’s worse than President Obama mispronouncing “corpsman” or saying “57 states” in an exhausted stupor. This isn’t just a clumsily worded statement. It’s an admission that he has no vision whatsoever for America’s healthcare system and he’s delegated it to the woefully inadequate GOP leadership in congress.

Some will say this is taken out of context, but this sort of incoherent word salad is typical for Trump when discussing healthcare going all the way back to the campaign. He has no real opinion on perhaps the most important issue people sent him to Washington to deal with. He always speaks in vague generalities. Obamacare bad. Health care good. We’ll provide great health care. You’re going to love it. Trust me.

Since he has no idea why a free-market approach is the only alternative to the "A"CA and the single-payer arrangement that the "A"CA's collapse is going to lead to , he has no idea how to support and expand the core of Republican Senators who understand that. Instead, what his little pow-wow and the above blurt from it wind up doing is perpetuating the moral cowardice to which a great many other Senators are falling prey.

Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Carly Fiorina or Bobby Jindal would have proceeded from an insistence on a free-market approach. Any of them would also have been proactive about conveying that - via television, social media, in-person appearances, all the venues Trump likes to use - to the American public, and would not have become mired in snits with dinosaur-media outlets.

We've been fair here at LITD. When developments for the good-move side of the ledger have occurred, they've been duly noted and applauded. But this is perhaps the biggest issue of all. It was one thing for Squirrel-Hair to rant (accurately) about the "A"CA's failure during the campaign season, but it's ringing a little hollow at this late date, since all he's doing about it is facilitating disarray.

And this is the juiciest opening the Freedom-Haters could ask for. They can make single payer look like the obvious way to proceed, since Pubs, even when political manna is served to them on a silver platter, don't seem to be able to hit their backsides with a yardstick.

Dancing all around the essential question rather than squarely facing it

There comes a moment in one's faith walk - perhaps early on for most people; I continued to look for loopholes until I'd exhausted them all - when one can no longer discuss Christianity's place in the marketplace of ideas as just another belief system. In other words, a point after which one no longer prefaces statements of truth with, "Well, I believe . . . "

Here is an exquisitely poignant illustration of how it goes for someone who willfully lets his opportunity to say yes to Christ run out.


From The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis:

A Bishop from Hell Meets a Friend from Heaven

I saw another of the Bright People in conversation with a ghost. It was that fat ghost with the cultured voice...and it seemed to be wearing gaiters.

'My dear boy, I'm delighted to see you', it was saying to the Spirit, who was naked and almost blindingly white. 'I was talking to your poor father the other day and wondering where you were.'

'You didn't bring him?' said the other.

'Well, no. He lives a long way from the bus, and, to be quite frank, he's been getting a little eccentric lately....Ah, Dick, I shall never forget some of our talks. I expect you've changed your views a bit since then. You became rather narrow-minded towards the end of your life: but no doubt you've broadened out again.'

'How do you mean?'

'Well, it's obvious by now, isn't it, that you weren't quite right. Why, my dear boy, you were coming to believe in a literal Heaven and Hell!'

'But wasn't I right?'

'Oh, in a spiritual sense, to be sure. I still believe in them in that way. I am still, my dear boy, looking for the Kingdom. But nothing superstitious or mythological...'

'Excuse me. Where do you imagine you've been?'

'Ah, I see. You mean that the grey town with its continual hope of morning (we must all live by hope, must we not?), with its field for indefinite progress, is, in a sense, Heaven, if only we have eyes to see it? That is a beautiful idea.'

'I didn't mean that at all. Is it possible you don't know where you've been?'

'Now that you mention it, I don't think we ever do give it a name. What do you call it?'

'We call it Hell.'

'There is no need to be profane, my dear boy. I may not be very orthodox, in your sense of that word, but I do feel that these matters ought to be discussed simply, and seriously, and reverently.'

'Discuss Hell reverently?....You have been in Hell: though if you don't go back you may call it Purgatory.'

The Bishop Questions His Friend

'Go on, my dear boy...No doubt you'll tell me why I was sent there.'

'But you don't know? You went there because you were an apostate.' . . .

'Dick, this is unworthy of you. What are you suggesting?'

'Friend, I am not suggesting at all. You see, I know now. Let us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful.... When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment's real resistance to the loss of our faith?'

'If this is meant to be a sketch of the genesis of liberal theology in general, I reply that it is a mere libel. Do you suggest that men like...'

'I have nothing to do with any generality. Nor with any man but you and me... You know that you and I were playing with loaded dice. We didn't want the other to be true. We were afraid of crude salvationism, afraid of a breach with the spirit of the age, afraid or ridicule, afraid (above all) of real spiritual fears and hopes.'

'I'm far from denying that young men may make mistakes. They may well be influenced by current fashions of thought. But it's not a question of how opinions are formed. The point is that they were my honest opinions, sincerely expressed.'

'Of course. Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, unpraying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires, we reached a point where we no longer believed the Faith. Just in the same way, a jealous man, drifting and unresisting, reaches a point at which he believes lies about his best friend: a drunkard reaches a point at which (for a moment) he actually believes that another glass will do him no harm. The beliefs are sincere in the sense that they do occur as psychological events in the man's mind. If that's what you mean by sincerity they are sincere, and so were ours. But errors which are sincere in that sense are not innocent.'

The Bishop is Urged to Come to Heaven

'Well, that is a plan. I am perfectly ready to consider it. Of course I should require some assurances.... I should want a guarantee that you are taking me to a place where I shall find a wider sphere of usefulness - and scope for the talents that God has given me - and an atmosphere of free inquiry - in short, all that one means by civilization and - er - spiritual life.'

'No,' said the other. 'I can promise you none of these things. No sphere of usefulness: you are not needed there at all. No scope for your talents: only forgiveness for having perverted them. No atmosphere for inquiry, for I will bring you to the land not of questions but of answers, and you shall see the face of God.'

'Ah, but we must all interpret those beautiful words in our own way! For me there is no such thing as a final answer. The free wind of inquiry must always continue to blow through the mind, must it not? "Prove all things"... to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.'

'If that were true, and known to be true, how could anyone travel hopefully? There would be nothing to hope for.'...

'The suggestion that I should return at my age to the mere factual inquisitiveness of boyhood strikes me as preposterous. In any case, that question-and-answer conception of thought only applies to matters of fact. Religious and speculative questions are surely on a different level.'...

'Do you not even believe that He exists?'

'Exists? What does Existence mean? You will keep on implying some sort of static, ready-made reality which is so to speak, "there", and to which our minds have simply to conform. These great mysteries cannot be approached in that way. If there were such a thing (there is no need to interrupt, my dear boy), quite frankly, I should not be interested in it. It would be of no religious significance. God, for me, is something purely spiritual. The spirit of sweetness and light and tolerance - and, er, Dick, service. We mustn't forget that, you know.'

The Bishop Makes Up His Mind

'Happiness, my dear Dick,' said the Ghost placidly, 'happiness, as you will come to see when you are older, lies in the path of duty. Which reminds me...Bless my soul, I'd nearly forgotten. Of course I can't come with you. I have to be back next Friday to read a paper. We have a little Theological Society down there. Oh, yes! there is plenty of intellectual life. Not of a very high quality, perhaps. One notices a certain lack of grip - a certain confusion of mind. That is where I can be of some use to them. There are even regrettable jealousies....I don't know why, but tempers seem less controlled than they used to be. Still, one mustn't expect too much of human nature. I feel I can do a great work among them. But you've never asked me what my paper is about! I'm taking the text about growing up to the measure of the stature of Christ and working out an idea which I feel sure you'll be interested in. I'm going to point out how people always forget that Jesus [here the ghost bowed] was a comparatively young man when he died. He would have outgrown some of his earlier views, you know, if he lived. As he might have done, with a little more tact and patience. I am going to ask my audience to consider what his mature views would have been. A profoundly interesting question. What a different Christianity we might have had if only the Founder had reached his full stature! I shall end up by pointing out how this deepens the signficance of the Crucifixion. One feels for the first time what a disaster it was: what a tragic waste...so much promise cut short. Oh, must you be going? Well, so must I. Goodbye, my dear boy. It has been a great pleasure. Most stimulating and provocative...'

The Ghost nodded its head and beamed on the Spirit with a bright clerical smile - or with the best approach to it which such unsubstantial lips could manage - and then turned away humming softly to itself 'City of God, how broad and how far'.

Democrat intransigence in two midwestern states

In one case, it's a Republican governor getting served notice by a Freedom-Hater legislature that his ideas about reviving the state from flatline status don't mean diddly, and in the other, it's the opposite: a F-Her governor pulling the rug out from under a Pub legislature.

Longtime LITD readers know that my term for Republican go-along-get-along-ism is Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, as in the mindset the assumes those across the aisle are just nice folks with different ideas about how to get to the common goals embraced by all.

Well, in Illinois, which is the American heartland's Venezuela, the House Speaker has declared that this mindset is more important than finding an actual path back to solvency:

House Speaker Michael Madigan said Democrats plan to unveil their budget proposal on Tuesday amid a new round of negotiations to end the state's historic budget impasse, suggesting that "a settlement" is possible if Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner "is reasonable."

Even before Madigan spoke, Republicans were raising concerns that Democrats appeared poised to water down proposals the governor has made conditions to a deal, including changes to the state's workers' compensation system and a temporary statewide freeze on property tax increases.

The continued political positioning amid a lack of trust comes as a Friday deadline looms to avoid entering a third straight year without a full budget. Credit agencies are threatening to slash the state's credit rating to junk status, road projects face possible suspension, school districts are raising concerns about how long they would be able to operate without state funds and Illinois gamblers could lose access to the Powerball and Mega Millions games.

Then there's Minnesota, where the F-Her is seated in the governor's mansion, and he's singing, "You knew darn well I was a snake before you took me in":

I wrote about the ongoing cage match between Minnesota Democratic Governor Mark Dayton and Minnesota’s majority-Republican House and Senate here. Governor Dayton really doesn’t play well with others of the opposing party. We have all learned to tread lightly in his vicinity. His feathers are easily ruffled.

At the end of this year’s slightly extended legislative session Dayton signed all tax and budget bills. He could have vetoed any of them. Even though he professed extreme unhappiness with certain items, he signed the bills The package of budget, tax and state government bills that finally passed reflected compromises on the part of all participants including Dayton and his commissioners. 

As a result of his unhappiness with certain items, however, Governor Dayton exercised his authority to veto budgetary line items to wipe out the funding of the legislative branch. The legislature’s current funding expires on July 1. After that it can run for a while on fumes (i.e., reserves on hand). Dayton explained himself in the letter posted here.

Dayton demanded that Republicans revisit selected issues on his terms after they had already given ground elsewhere to arrive at the bills that were sent to him for his signature and adjourned. Unlike some other Republicans I can think of on the national scene, they weren’t inclined to make fools of themselves.

The legislature was not inclined to just endure the snake bite, however:

The governor can’t do that, can he?

In search of the answer, the legislature took Governor Dayton to court. In asking a judge to weigh in on the issue of whether one branch can wipe out another, the thought is likely to occur that the judiciary might be next. It’s an obvious point and one that did not escapeRamsey County Judge John Guthmann, to whom the case has been assigned. Next stop, Mark Dayton rules the world!

Now Judge Guthmann has ruled that the Minnesota Constitution is not friendly to one-man government. “If the legislative branch is not funded, it cannot carry out its core functions, which include those functions necessary to draft, debate, publish, vote on and enact legislation,” Judge Guthmann wrote in an opinion issued shortly after attorneys left the courtroom yesterday. Judge Guthmann has ordered continued funding on an interim basis through October 1. The Pioneer Press’s Rachel Stassen-Berger reports on the ruling in her story along with which she has embedded a copy of the decision. I think it bodes poorly for the governor’s position in the case.

Governor Dayton has a high tolerance for embarrassment and Judge Guthmann has yet to render a final ruling in the case. Dayton can carry it on for a while. At some point before too long, however, I should think that embarrassment might deter Dayton from protracting an ordeal that highlights the weakest and most offensive features of his public character. 

F-Hers talk a good game about a more equitable and gentle world, but when they get any degree of power, the gloves come off.

On CNN getting busted for its obsession with a non-story

Some bad karma at The Most Trusted Name in News.

There is the resignation of three staffers over the single-unnamed-source story:

Three CNN employees have handed in their resignations over a retracted story linking President Trump to Russia, the network announced Monday.

The article was removed from CNN.com on Friday after the network decided it could no longer stand by its reporting.

“In the aftermath of the retraction of a story published on CNN.com, CNN has accepted the resignation of the employees involved in the story’s publication,” a network spokesperson told TheWrap in a statement.

On Thursday, CNN investigative reporter Thomas Frank published a story involving an investigation into a Russian investment fund with possible ties to several Trump associates.

According to the network, an internal investigation found that “some standard editorial processes were not followed when the article was published.”

Citing a single unnamed source, the story reported that Congress was investigating a “Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials.” 

The story, which only appeared on the network’s site, was quickly disputed on Friday, as one Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci — who was mentioned in the story — pushed back on  Frank’s reporting, insisting he “did nothing wrong.”

“Once it was determined that editorial processes were not followed, CNN deleted the story from CNN.com,” the network said Friday on its site. “Soon thereafter, the story was officially retracted and replaced with an editor’s note.”

The piece “did not meet CNN’s editorial standards and has been retracted,” the note said. “Links to the story have been disabled.” 

CNN blamed the mistake on a “breakdown in editorial workflow,” explaining that that “these types of stories” did not go through the usual departments such as fact-checkers, journalism standards experts and lawyers.

The gaffe cost three employees their jobs: Frank, who wrote the story, Eric Lichtblau, a unit editor, and the person in charge of the unit, Lex Haris.

The network’s investigative unit was told during a meeting on Monday that the retraction did not necessarily mean the facts of the story were wrong. But, rather, “the story wasn’t solid enough to publish as-is,” according CNN.com. 

Alas, it appears a culture of obsession with trying to find something of substance tying Trump to Russia has permeated the atmosphere at the House That Ted Built:

Project Veritas has released a video of CNN Producer John Bonifield who was caught on hidden-camera admitting that there is no proof to CNN's Russia narrative. 

"I mean, it's mostly bullshit right now," Bonifield says. "Like, we don't have any giant proof."

He confirms that the driving factor at CNN is ratings:

"It's a business, people are like the media has an ethical phssssss... All the nice cutesy little ethics that used to get talked about in journalism school you're just like, that's adorable. That's adorable. This is a business."

According to the CNN Producer, business is booming. "Trump is good for business right now," he concluded.

Bonifield further goes on to explain that the instructions come straight from the top, citing the CEO, Jeff Zucker:

"Just to give you some context, President Trump pulled out of the climate accords and for a day and a half we covered the climate accords. And the CEO of CNN (Jeff Zucker) said in our internal meeting, he said good job everybody covering the climate accords, but we're done with that, let's get back to Russia."

Bonifield also acknowledged: "I haven't seen any good enough evidence to show that the President committed a crime." He continues: 

"I just feel like they don't really have it but they want to keep digging. And so I think the President is probably right to say, like, look you are witch hunting me. You have no smoking gun, you have no real proof."

The Trump-Russia obsession exemplifies the difference between conservative wariness of Trump (of the sort found here at LITD as well as Red State, and the writings of Ben Shapiro, Kevin Williamson, Jonah Goldberg, and Brittany Pounders, to name a few) and the Trump Derangement Syndrome that is a phenomenon of the Left. TDS types can't be bothered to spend more than a token amount of time engaging actual policy and personnel developments of the current administration. So white-hot is their hate that they pounce on anything that looks like a fast track to impeachment. They just want him gone, and now.

And while I find Trump's Twitter habit cringe-inducing for the way it puts his boneheadedness on full display, I have to say I got a little tickled at his response this morning to the troubles at CNN. Yes, "fake news!" is blunt to the point of boorishness, but here's an instance when the subject at hand is exactly that.

Another distinction between wary-of-Trump types on the Right and get-him-removed-right-now types on the Left is that the former see DJT as getting in the way of a coherent ideological message that ought to be coming through in this day of Republican dominance of federal and state government, while the latter has no message and no program beyond a dark nihilism, the demonstrable failure of redistribution, and infantile identity politics to offer the American people. If they didn't have Trump to hate and encourage the general public to hate, they would have nothing anybody besides their ate-up base wants to hear.

Maybe that goes a way toward explaining the extent of the cultural rot. Maybe there's been a silent majority consistently since the term was coined circa 1970 and its resilience engenders ever-greater frenzy on the part of those who cannot stand the thought of millions of citizens living like normal people.

And the thought of many of them being fine with DJT, boneheaded tweets and all, clouds the judgement of the deranged to the point of proving him correct in his use of the term "fake news!"

SCOTUS gets a couple right

National security decisions are back in the hands of the executive branch following the ruling in Donald J. Trump, President of the United States et al v. International Refugee Assistance Project el al:

Today, in a per curiam ruling, the Supreme Court restored the vast majority of the Trump administration’s temporary travel ban — including the temporary ban on refugee entry. The lower courts’ injunctions remain only in the narrowest of categories — where the person seeking entry has a “bona fide relationships with a person or entity in the United States.”

And what is a “bona fide relationship?” The court’s guidelines were strict:

For individuals, a close familial relationship is required. A foreign national who wishes to enter the United States to live with or visit a family member, like Doe’s wife or Dr. Elshikh’s mother-in-law, clearly has such a relationship. As for entities, the relationship must be formal, documented, and formed in the ordinary course, rather than for the purpose of evading EO–2.

In other words, SCOTUS made short work of the claim that a person’s desire to bring their mother-in-law to the U.S. (or a university’s desire to admit a few students or have a lecturer travel for a seminar) granted them the ability to stand in for every single citizen of every affected country:

Denying entry to such [an unconnected] national does not burden any American party by reason of that party’s relationship with the foreign national. And the courts below did not conclude that exclusion in such circumstances would impose any legally relevant hardship on the foreign national himself.

More:

At the same time, the Government’s interest in enforcing §2(c), and the Executive’s authority to do so, are un- doubtedly at their peak when there is no tie between the foreign national and the United States. Indeed, EO–2 itself distinguishes between foreign nationals who have some connection to this country, and foreign nationals who do not, by establishing a case-by-case waiver system primarily for the benefit of individuals in the former category . . . The interest in preserving national security is “an urgent objective of the highest order.” Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, 561 U. S. 1, 28 (2010). To prevent the Government from pursuing that objective by enforcing §2(c) against foreign nationals unconnected to the United States would appreciably injure its interests, without alleviating obvious hardship to anyone else. 

Even the court's lefties saw the Constitutionality of it. In fact, the dissent came from three righties who wanted a more sweeping decision:

Moreover, the only dissenters from the opinion (justices Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas) wanted the injunctions vacated in their entirety. They are correct that the court’s ruling will invite further litigation as litigants test the boundaries of the “bona fide relationships,” but the difference between the dissenters and the six remaining justices was only over the proper extent of Trump’s legal victory. For now, the constitutional and statutory primacy of the executive and legislative branches over national security and immigration has been restored.

The judges in the courts below have been celebrated as heroic resistance figures. Yet now even the Supreme Court’s most liberal justices have rejected the lower courts’ overreach. 

In Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer, the court made an important point about the free exercise of religion:

the Supreme Court released a ruling by a 7-2 margin finding that states cannot prohibit public funding to churches simply because they are churches. The case itself surrounds a playground at the Trinity Lutheran Church Child Learning Center; the Center sought public funding for a rubber surface. The Department of Natural Resources denied the petition, citing a blanket rule that it would not fund churches. The Court rightly found that “denying a generally available benefit solely on account of religious identity imposes a penalty on the free exercise of religion.”

The ruling was 7-2. In this case, it was lefties who dissented. Here's their rationale, such as it is:

Then we get to the dissent, penned by Justice Sotomayor (and joined by Justice Ginsburg.)  In her dissent, Sotomayor opined that:

“The Court today profoundly changes [the relationship between church and state] by holding, for the first time, that the Constitution requires the government to provide public funds directly to a church.”

I haven’t yet had the opportunity to read the entire dissent, but I question Sotomayor’s characterization of the decision. Disallowing the exclusion of a religious organization from a public benefit solely because it is a church profoundly changes the church-state dynamic?!

Shortly after it was handed down, I had the opportunity to speak with Carrie Severino, chief counsel and policy director of the Judicial Crisis Network, and inquired as to her take on Sotomayor’s contention.  She called it “nonsense,” and pointed out that Sotomayor’s own opinion makes it clear that historically, there have been far greater instances of involvement between church and state which have been upheld.

Next up on the free-exercise front is a case of the sort that has been such a threat to our civilizational foundation.

Sunday morning roundup

A while back, I did a post about Young Pioneers, the tour company with which Otto Warmbier visited North Korea, and how the guides and organizers in its employ pretty clearly put partying above keeping track of its clients. Isaac Stone Fish at Politico has a fascinating account of the details of the particular trip Warmbier was on, as well as what does and doesn't get a Westerner in trouble in the Hermit Kingdom.

Here's one incident:

Warmbier had taken the tour “for the same reason everybody else was there,” an American who was on the tour, and who asked to remain anonymous, told me. “He wanted to have an interesting adventure.” Ria Westergaard Pedersen, a Dutch journalist who was on that tour, recalls standing with Warmbier in front of the Mansu Hill Grand Monument, where gargantuan statues of founding leader Kim Il Sung and his son, the country’s second leader Kim Jong Il, loom over the city. Like other Western tourists to North Korea, the guides had warned them not to take photos of the military. “We really wanted just a few photos of all those uniforms,” Pedersen told a Dutch TV station. The participant and Warmbier would take turns standing next to the officials, pretending to photograph each other when in reality they were surreptitiously photographing soldiers. “We were like, ‘Oh, we’re doing a bad thing,’” Pedersen said. “He was so nervous about it! This feels so tiny compared to what were accused of, and he was nervous about it!” Interviews with six of the people who joined Warmbier on the tour paint a fuller picture of the atmosphere in the days leading up to his detention – and help answer the question of what, if any, responsibility the Western tour guides shoulder for Warmbier’s death. “I don’t know if Otto did what he was supposed to have done, or if his detention was a result of poor tour guide guidance,” the second participant told me. “But all of the tour guides were young people who get very drunk. It was sort of like there were few or no adults around.”

Consider these two incidents, the first of which has not been previously reported. The tourists celebrated New Year’s Eve by carousing in Kim Il Sung Square, a major public space in Pyongyang. The participants described it as a very pleasant evening, and a rare occasion to interact with North Koreans. “It was quite playful,” said a third participant said, who also asked to speak anonymously. The evening was “really special,” Ben Johnson, an Australian who was on the tour, told me.

But then something “fucking crazy” happened, the American told me. Danny Gratton, a Brit in his mid-forties, “takes a balloon on a string from some kid, waves the balloon up and down, and, like the Pied Piper, a bunch of North Koreans start following him,” says the American, who says he was the only foreigner who joined along. The two men, engaging with the North Koreans, happy and laughing, strolled around the area for roughly half an hour. The American than decided to turn back and rejoin the group. But

Gratton kept walking, and found himself on a dark street, alone.
In any other part of the world, this would not be noteworthy. But North Korea is the world’s most closed country, and guides tightly monitor Western tourists. This kind of vanishing act is extremely rare. Over the last decade, I’ve spoken with dozens of Western tourists who have visited North Korea, and I have never heard of anything like this happening. 

“The North Korean guides were panicked. They were so scared, asking us, ‘Have you seen him, have you seen him?’ and we, including the Western guides, were too drunk to realize the seriousness of the situation,” the first participant told me. “Danny got separated from the group,” Ben Johnson, who now works with Young Pioneer as a guide, confirmed. “There was really thick fog that night.”

The American remembers the North Korean guides concerned and angry. They asked him, “Where’s Danny? Is he drunk? What do you mean he’s gone?” The tourists waited in the square for hours, until their guides eventually returned them to the hotel. Gratton took several taxis and made it back sometime early in the morning, according to the American, who says he saw him walk back into the hotel. 

And here's the tale of how Young Pioneers lost track of Warmbier, leaving him behind as there rest of the group went back to China, some by train and some by plane:

While her colleague was taking some of the tourists out of the country on the train, the guide Charlotte Guttridge, who was responsible for Warmbier, took a plane back to Beijing. “When it became clear that [Warmbier] wasn’t coming, I had to board the flight before it departed,” Guttridge told Reuters in January 2016. “I was the last to board the flight.”

And yet, two of the tour participants dispute this. It was “this kind of Home Alone moment, when people realized Otto wasn’t on the plane,” the second participant said. “The plane is pulling off, and everyone is saying, ‘Holy shit, where is Otto?’ the second participant added. “If you had to point your finger at something [the tour company did wrong] besides the drinking – if I were running a tour I would be the last one on the plane, to make sure everyone gets on the flight!” The first participant said. “She [Guttridge] was on the plane, before everyone was on the plane, and she didn’t notice before someone said, ‘Hey, where’s Otto?’” According to what Gratton told The Washington Post, in the airport two North Korean security officials took Warmbier to a private room. Gratton claims he was the only person to see Warmbier detained. Gratton then boarded the flight to Beijing. 

California Freedom-Haters talked a good utopian game about instituting universal health care in that state, but, after coming out of committee, the bill for getting it done is getting shelved for the time being:

Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon put the brakes on a sweeping plan to overhaul the health care market in California Friday, calling the bill “woefully incomplete.”

Rendon announced plans to park the bill to create a government-run universal health care system in Assembly Rules Committee “until further notice” and give senators time to fill in holes that the bill does not currently address.

“Even senators who voted for Senate Bill 562 noted there are potentially fatal flaws in the bill, including the fact it does not address many serious issues, such as financing, delivery of care, cost controls, or the realities of needed action by the Trump administration and voters to make SB 562 a genuine piece of legislation,” Rendon said.

"Financing, delivery of care and cost controls" . . . um, just what aspects of this grand undertaking were ready for rollout?

The great Charles Koch is currently meeting with donors and associates in Colorado Springs and they have weighed in on the Senate health-care bill:

The Koch network is working with conservative allies behind the scenes to make changes to the Senate health-care bill that was unveiled this week, declining to endorse the measure as it stands.

As hundreds of donors gathered Saturday for a three-day seminar organized by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, leaders from the constellation of groups that support his agenda outlined concerns about the draft bill.

“In all candor, we’ve been disappointed that movement is not more dramatic toward a full repeal or rollback (of the Affordable Care Act). But we’re not walking away,” said Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity. “We still think this can get done, but the Senate bill needs to get better.”

AFP has spent years mobilizing against Obamacare and battling against Medicaid expansion at the state level. The group came out against the first version of the House health-care bill this winter and helped push for some of the amendments that were added before it ultimately passed last month.

Phillips said the subject came up on Friday night during a 45-minute meeting here between Koch and Vice President Pence. Phillips said no specific “ask” was made of the vice president during the sit-down, which also covered tax reform. “We’ve had productive discussions with them to try getting to the right place,” Phillips said.

Several key players in the ongoing Senate negotiations are at The Broadmoor resort for the network’s twice-annual gathering, including two of the five GOP holdouts: Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Mike Lee (Utah). The No. 2 in GOP leadership, John Cornyn (Tex.), is also here, along with Cory Gardner (Colo.), Jeff Flake (Ariz.) and Ben Sasse (Neb.).

Some conservatives who could determine whether anything that passes the Senate would subsequently clear the House are coming to the Koch conference, including Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (N.C.), Jim Jordan (Ohio), Dave Brat (Va.) and Justin Amash (Mich.). 

Personal side note: My sole one-on-one conversation with Tim Phillips occurred when we were occupying side-by-side urinals in the convention center men's room in Columbus, Ohio at an AFP Defending the American Dream Summit a few years ago.

Rank-and-file Freedom-Haters are pushing party leaders to taper off on the Russia-Trump narrative.

Speaking of Squirrel-Hair, there's a good piece at Red State today making clear that #NeverTrump-ism is an entirely different critter from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article157974029.html#storylink=cpy

The current health care / insurance juncture and the larger question of why we have government

You'll recall yesterday's post inviting you to compare and contrast Avik Roy's favorable take on the Senate health-care bill and the thumbs-down it got from the editors at NRO.

Roy, whether he's fully aware of it or not, is making a point Charles Krauthammer has been making some time, a point echoed by Jazz Shaw today at Hot Air (which I'll link to and excerpt from momentarily). I say "whether he's fully aware of it or not" because I don't detect any tone of resignation in his summation of why he's big on the Senate bill:

Full repeal was never going to be possible in a Senate where Republicans did not control 60 votes. And furthermore, we have learned that moderate Republicans in both the House and the Senate have no appetite to fully deregulate Obamacare at the federal level.

Jazz Shaw at Hot Air puts it this way:

So is the fight to repeal Obamacare pretty much over? Let me take a saw to the limb I’m currently sitting on and say… yes. But really, the fight was over shortly after the original Affordable Care Act was passed. There’s an old maxim in American politics which tells us that any entitlement program or other initiative which gives away goodies to the public, once in place, is pretty much there forever. There have been a few rare exceptions, but for the most part this is a tradition which is written in stone.

We’ve got Senators from the more conservative side saying that this new bill isn’t going to do anything to reduce costs and premiums. Of course it won’t, because the government is entirely incapable of doing that through mandates and executive orders. Even if we ignore the fact that our bloated bureaucracy composed of career politicians was never exactly suited to manage something the size and complexity of the nation’s health insurance system, any effort to institute top-down socialization of something as inherently capitalist in nature as the health insurance industry was doomed to blow up in your face.

But that’s not even the core fault in our stars here. You see, even if the GOP manages to remove Obamacare, all they’ll be able to do is take out the parts which most conservatives hate (such as the mandates). Taking out the goodies is not only harder, but likely impossible. Obamacare was structured brilliantly in that the things everyone was going to like (mandatory coverage for preexisting conditions, parents keeping their kids on their plans longer) kicked in fast. It took years for the really ugly features to fully come on line (higher penalties for not having insurance, additional mandates driving up premiums). That means that people were already used to the candy being handed out before the flaws in the system ensured that it would begin to implode.

So who wants to be the one to take away those goodies now? Nobody. And this leaves the GOP in the position of trying to make it look like they can still play Santa and hand out all the sugar without the slug of bitter medicine to follow. In order to “fix” this system and make it solvent we would have to deliver bad news which is the political equivalent of blowing out the pilot light in your oven and sticking your head in.

“But wait,” I can hear some of you saying. “If this doesn’t work, can’t we just go back to plan B and let Obamacare implode on it’s own?” Not really. Whoever is in charge will take the blame no matter whether they supported it originally or not. We now basically have a new entitlement theory in which more than 60% of American voters think that affordable health insurance (not Health Care, which is a critical distinction the media generally tries to ignore) is a human right and it’s the government’s job to make sure they get it. But the cost of health insurance isn’t dictated by the government… not for long, anyway. It’s dictated by the cost of actual health care and Washington still hasn’t the beginning of a clue as to how to bring that down.

So what’s the only solution left to keep delivering bread and circuses to the masses? Probably a completely top-down, socialist single payer program, which will rapidly bankrupt the entire system. (California is already finding that out the hard way.) You can expect to eventually see some Republicans going along with that line of thinking too, believe it or not. It’s that or the aforementioned head-in-the-oven scenario.

Now, there's some resignation for you. As I say, Krauthammer has been asserting this for some time.  He, like Shaw, says that the "A"CA, even though it polls dismally, has been in place long enough that the mindset positing that health care and / or health insurance is some kind of right has permeated society and is not going to go away.

I hate resignation.

I will not stand for it when the truth is obscured thereby - and especially when that obscuration leads to bankruptcy. If I wanted to live in Venezuela-like conditions, that's where I'd move.

So I was glad to see David French at NRO take on the leftist smears on the Senate bill with this reasoning:

Here’s the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson with an odd attack on Republican health care plans:

The “health-care bill” that Republicans are trying to pass in the Senate, like the one approved by the GOP majority in the House, isn’t really about health care at all. It’s the first step in a massive redistribution of wealth from struggling wage-earners to the rich — a theft of historic proportions.

Not to be too pedantic about this, but the government isn’t “redistributing” wealth when it lets a citizen keep more of his money, and it isn’t “stealing” from the poor when it cuts benefits they didn’t actually own. Welfare programs like Medicaid represent a forcible transfer wealth. Welfare is the redistribution. And if there’s any actual argument for “theft,” it’s the theft of money from the private citizen by the government.

But that would be hyperbole. In civilized societies, people understand that a certain degree of taxation is necessary for a nation to function. Safety nets are compassionate and prudent. But it is dangerous and wrong to get confused about who owns what. I own the money I earn. America’s less fortunate citizens don’t own Medicaid. It’s a privilege, not a right — a privilege that is subject to the same budgetary and fiscal concerns inherent in any other government program, including national defense. 

Entitlement culture plagues this nation, and it plagues America’s poorest communities. So let’s speak accurately about ownership and redistribution. Medicaid is a program, not property, and it’s not theft to attempt to moderate its enormous financial cost. 

Or let me put it in my own words. There is no right to health care. It is impossible by definition. How did people in the year 1300 exercise their "right" to a triple bypass? My point being that caring for health is a human activity borne of human volition. The only reason it exists is because someone wants to do it. One cannot have a right to the activity of one's fellow human beings. Down that slippery slope lies the s-word. 

At the very least, the likes of Roy and Krauthammer could preface their observation that, hey, the populace has bought into this and it's just where we're inevitably headed with the assertion that we'll be plunging headlong into policy based on utter falsehood.

Damn it, when does somebody besides four Senators say what is plain? We can't even begin to counteract the it's-a-right notion if everybody is worried about votes, viewership and readership.

And I really bristle when the notion is put forth that getting government the hell out of health care, and the insurance coverage thereof, is somehow a mere conservative wish list, something conservatives may get part of but will probably have to live with the compromise attendant to the art of the possible.

No.

We are talking about an individual's freedom to keep what is his or hers.

It's the current battle line in the twilight struggle over the proper scope and function of government.

Government should not be in the business of providing services. James Madison made that quite clear.

Refuse to be resigned to a service-providing government as a done deal. Refuse to acquiesce to that notion prevailing. There is nothing radical about the pre-Progressive-era understanding of what government was for.

And someone, somewhere, invite Roy and Krauthammer to a picnic, a car race, a jam session - anything, anywhere outside the damn Beltway.

Friday evening roundup

Compare and contrast: The National Review Online editorial that gives a big thumbs-down to the Senate version of a new health-care bill. and Avik Roy's enthusiastic take at Forbes.

For LITD's money, after all the wonkery has been duly digested, the essential difference in the takes comes down to this:

NRO's summary:

he Senate Republican health-care bill would not repeal and replace Obamacare. The federal government would remain the chief regulator of health insurance. No state would be allowed to experiment with different models for protecting people with pre-existing conditions. Federal policy would continue to push people away from inexpensive catastrophic coverage. 

Roy's rationale for getting behind the Senate bill:

Full repeal was never going to be possible in a Senate where Republicans did not control 60 votes. And furthermore, we have learned that moderate Republicans in both the House and the Senate have no appetite to fully deregulate Obamacare at the federal level.

Are you surprised to learn that LITD finds Roy's position lame? Damn it, that's exactly why you forthrightly and cogently make the case for real repeal and for a free market approach, as Sen. Paul has done.  If a big brain like Roy would contribute his voice to the simple, pro-freedom approach, it would be a real boon to the cause. I guess he's swallowed just a little too much Beltway Kool-Aid.

Why we still call wind and solar play-like energy forms: The world still gets 85 percent of its energy from oil, gas and coal, and 2 percent from the play-like forms.

Excellent essay at Big Questions Online entitled "Can We Live Without Enchantment?" by historians Wilfred McClay and Donald Yerxa. In the course of exploring the connection between humankind's sense of wonder and its drive to know, they look at the contributions to that question made by folks ranging from Aristotle to Frederic Jackson Turner.

Those wacky fetal-American-exterminators: Planned Parenthood says that the victory by a woman in Georgia's 6th-district race was a blow in the "fight for women."

Mona Charen at Townhall says that post-America has developed a glaring cultural blind spot: revulsion at  the Muslim practice of female genital mutilation, even as it lets little kids start taking puberty-supression drugs if they start showing signs of resenting the equipment - including DNA - they were born with.

The most harmful element in the Republican Party

Wow. Talk about a water-carrier:

Geez, Trump loyalists are so angry! It must be all the “winning.”

The chairman of Iowa’s GOP, Jeff Kaufmann was set to introduce Trump at his rally in Cedar Rapids on Wednesday night. As he took the podium, instead of just saying, “Trump is so super-cool, MAGA!” or whatever it is that people still stuck in the trance-like campaign mode of Trumpism are saying these days to deny reality, Kaufmann chose to go after a fellow Republican, Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse.

Sasse was firmly against a Trump candidacy, before the election, but has since taken a more pragmatic turn. While I don’t think anyone is calling him a fan, neither is he in full flame mode, in regards to the president.

Apparently, that’s not good enough.

From Politico:

Stepping to the podium inside U.S. Cellular Arena as a warm-up act for the president, a visibly chafed Kaufmann announced that he needed to get some things off his chest and proceeded to spend most of his time berating the president’s critics in the media and on the left. It was in a brief rebuke of the so-called Never-Trumpers, however, that the Iowa GOP chairman singled out Sasse.

“We had Sen. Ben Sasse from Nebraska, he crosses the Missouri River, and in that sanctimonious tone talks about what he doesn’t like about Donald Trump,” Kaufmann said. “You know what, Sen. Sasse? I really don’t care what you like. We love Donald Trump. And if you don’t love him, I suggest you stay on your side of the Missouri River.”

Wow, buddy. I’m going to suggest decaf and deprogramming therapy. The election is over. Let it rest.

This could be uncomfortable, as Sasse is scheduled to appear in Iowa in two weeks, as keynote speaker for a local GOP dinner.

In an interview after Trump’s speech, Kaufmann acknowledged that his anger with Sasse had been bottled up since the pre-caucus period last year and said the senator had done nothing specific recently to aggravate him. That said, Kaufmann repeatedly cited Sasse’s “tone”—that of an intellectually superior Republican, he said, who treats Trump voters with “condescension”—as the source of his animus toward the senator.

“He’s an arrogant academic,” Kaufmann said of Sasse, a former college president. “He’s sanctimonious. His statements are geared toward what can help him. He’s arrogant. And he’s not a team player, when in reality the only reason he’s got any clout at all in the Senate is because the Republican Party has the majority.”

A water-carrier and a bonehead to boot. This is the kind of all-caps mentality one sees in the comment threads under pieces by Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson. I recall a couple of comments under a piece by Michael Barone about a week ago - a piece having to do with the current ratcheted-up level of violence coming from the Left, in which he mentions in passing that Trump has "repeatedly transgressed longstanding political etiquette" (and does indeed show once again that maybe he's not the astute tea-leaf-reader that makes for his reputation, saying that the then-still-to-be-held Georgia 6th district race could go the Dem way due to Trump's demeanor; of course that didn't happen). For that, he was called a doormat, and more to the point, a leftist. A leftist! In reaction to a piece calling out the left for its violence!

This Kaufmann character in Iowa obviously knows nothing of Sasse beyond Sasse's position on Trump. For that matter, he obviously has never given a microsecond of thought to the three pillars of conservatism. He might spend an evening soon with Sasse's new book on how to make an adult.

But this is what you get from slavish Squirrel-Hair devotees.

And nearly as harmful are the talk-radio barkers and third-tier columnists who put down those of us who take the full measure of Squirrel-Hair, using the derisive term "muh principles."

No, thanks. I'm not interested in an American politics driven by raw tribalism.