Apparently, there's trouble in populist paradise

Now, mind you, various passages in this article, which, if all details are substantiated, is quite a bombshell, have a hit-piece-y feel to them. But bear in mind two of the three authors have pretty impeccable conservative bona fides. Betsy Woodruff is a Hillsdale College graduate who, prior to her current gig at the Daily Beast, worked at National Review and the Washington Examiner.  Lachlan Markay reports for the Washington Free Beacon and formerly worked at the Heritage Foundation. It's true that the third author, Asawin Suebsaeng, used to write for Mother Jones. 

And it's so jam-packed with oh-my-word allegations that there is sure to be some pushback from somewhere - although a check of the front page at LifeZette at 10:45 a.m. didn't turn up any reference to it.

But check it out:

LifeZette, the politics and culture website founded by prominent ally of President Donald Trump and longtime talk radio host Laura Ingraham, is in trouble.

Traffic to the site—billed as the right’s answer to the massive HuffPost when it was founded in 2015—is minuscule, with an average of little more than 10,000 unique visitors per day in July, according to data from ComScore. LifeZette is also the target of a labor complaint aimed at its payroll practices from a former employee who says paychecks came sporadically and with little official documentation, according to documents provided to The Daily Beast.

Most seriously, according to seven sources currently and formerly employed by LifeZette, the organization has become a deeply uncomfortable place for women to work, with a top company official repeatedly making sexually suggestive comments about female employees—sometimes within earshot of those female staffers. 

Byron Martinez, LifeZette’s former broadcast engineer and IT administrator, recalled Peter Anthony, the site’s chief executive, “talking about other women’s boobs, butts… how he would desire sexual activities with [female colleagues] and stuff like that… All kinds of inappropriate talk about women in the office.”

Six other sources also singled out Anthony by name as the chief culprit. Anthony, a longtime friend and business partner of Ingraham’s, co-founded the D.C.-based site with her and oversees its day-to-day operations.

With the exception of Martinez, all sources spoke to The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity because they feared reprisal from Ingraham and Anthony.

Apparently the organizational culture has a strong party element:

LifeZette sources say Anthony not only frequently made sexually inappropriate comments about female employees, but also aggressively and profanely pressured staffers into taking liquor shots at company happy hours.

 

Joseph Curl's attempt to dismiss his status as a witness to some of this stuff is underwhelming:

Multiple sources described Anthony’s habit of gossiping audibly in the office—including to former senior editor Joseph Curl—about how a twentysomething female colleague must be “doing yoga because her ass was so good,” among other crude observations targeting specific female reporters.

In response to an email from The Daily Beast, Curl replied by writing, “So, Houston is under water, North Korea's firing missiles over Japan, the cost of health care has tripled under Obamacare, and you’re writing about -- LifeZette happy hours? No wonder so many Americans despise the media. Your ‘story’ is less than fake news—it’s utter bullshit.”

(The Daily Beast did not bring up happy hours with Curl in the prior email exchange, suggesting Curl had been in contact with someone else The Daily Beast had reached for this story. Anthony claims that he wasn’t in contact with Curl regarding the statement above.)

 

 

Apparently the lecher talk is just one aspect of an overall crazy environment:

Another succinctly described Ingraham and Anthony’s operation as “a kooky work environment” defined largely by “management by chaos,” with all seven sources echoing sentiments of poor management. 

 

Martinez says LifeZette operates in a pretty loosey-goosey fashion where money is concerned, too:

After Martinez resigned from the company this year, he lodged a complaint with District of Columbia employment regulators alleging that he was not paid in a timely manner, and not provided with pay stubs. According to documentation that Martinez provided to The Daily Beast, LifeZette received that complaint—and denied its allegations—this month.

Anthony reiterated that denial in an emailed statement. “Mr. Martinez was paid every two weeks and any issue with Mr. Martinez being unable to receive direct deposit or failure to pick up his paycheck should be directed to Mr. Martinez,” he wrote. “As I have already stated,” he said in another email, “these unattributed allegations are false.”
But not all of the allegations are unattributed, as his response to Martinez’s complaint indicates.

Martinez said that the company provided no meaningful recourse to address the alleged payment discrepancies. “I communicated this to our quote-unquote HR department, but that just didn’t seem to help because two to three weeks went by and I never got a response,” he said. “So I went directly to Pete and said ‘hey, what’s going on.’ He sent in the payment, but it continued month after month.”

Martinez oversaw the construction of a broadcast studio in the company’s offices. In that capacity, he said, he witnessed contractors go months without receiving their promised compensation. Separately, another former vendor told The Daily Beast that the site had reneged on a five-figure video contract, and that repeated efforts to elicit an explanation or a resolution from LifeZette leadership went unanswered. The contractor, who provided The Daily Beast with emails showing their repeated attempts to collect more than $15,000 in unpaid fees, asked to remain anonymous to avoid damaging other professional relationships.

Three LifeZette sources, including Martinez, say they never felt that internal complaints led to any meaningful resolution for either bookkeeping issues or what they describe as Anthony’s routine denigration of women in the office.

Martinez said he tried with little success to enlist an off-site human resources staffer to resolve his payroll problems, but that those problems continued.

“There were times that I was getting paid whenever Pete felt like paying me,” Martinez continued. “That went on for months... I gave them time, but then I began to see a pattern where I’m not getting paid on time.”

How about Ingraham herself? It seems detachment is the most appropriate characterization of her role:

A former employee who recalled multiple instances of inappropriate conduct by Anthony described Ingraham as “pretty harmless,” suggesting she was generally unaware of that misconduct. Aside from the occasional executive decision with respect to the site’s content, she wasn’t deeply involved as a manager, sources say.

“She would be in the office,” a former employee recalled. “For periods of time she’d come in, do the radio show, she might stay in her studio for another hour working with her producers, and then she would go leave to write her book.”

Now, something I've noticed about her, even going back to before the Trump phenomenon, is that, on television and radio, she always seemed like she was in a hurry, very high-strung. The ultimate Type A personality. That's probably why she has such an undeniably go-getter resume.

But she's an odd duck. A convert to Catholicism well into her adulthood. A thin record where relationships are concerned. (She was engaged once, but that ended just about the time she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Those are just the facts; I don't aim to speculate on the whys and wherefores given that I don't know her at all.) She's adopted three children, two from Guatemala and one from Russia, and pretty clearly relishes her role as a mother.

And LifeZette's editorial content reflects the lifestyle kinds of stuff she gets into on her radio show: how the way kids dress for school reflects our culture's decay and the like.

Some of LifeZette’s top content has included “What to Do If Your Teenager Is Promiscuous” on the “MomZette” vertical, “Why So Many Women Don’t Like the ‘F-Word,’” and controversial and since deleted posts promoting Clinton “body count” conspiracy theories. One such article was promoted under the banner of: “Could crossing the Clintons kill you?”

But then there is the way she has given Trump a total pass for being - well, what he is. There is the very, very - did I say very? - strange way she looked right past every one of the other sixteen GOP presidential candidates in 2016, including the obvious conservative choice (do I need to spell that out? Ted Cruz.) Well, she did take a few moments to deal with a couple of them early on. She actually made a strangely big deal out of Jeb Bush, on the basis of the big donors behind him and his family name, even though his polling was always dismal, thereby setting up a false dichotomy: "Your choice is between Jeb and Trump!") And Marco Rubio came onto her radar screen for a little while, because she found his Gang of Six involvement permanently unforgivable, which is in keeping with the outsized role she gives immigration among the issues on the nation's plate.

She digs the self-promotion aspect of her career, too. Book signing tours, opportunities to appear on Fox News as often as possible.

I don't claim to know what drives her at her core. I don't have to know to conclude that she has, over the last couple of years, morphed into something reprehensible.

In any event, she might want to chill a bit, take a deep breath, look into the culture at her company, and humbly examine what she's become.

 

 

This needs to be looked into

Talk about blatant appeasement:

The Obama administration likely hid information about Iran illicitly ferrying militants into Syria on commercial aircraft in order to promote the landmark nuclear deal and foster multi-billion dollar business deals with Tehran's state-controlled airline sector, according to lawmakers and other sources familiar with the matter.

The Washington Free Beacon first disclosed last week that congressional leaders are calling for an investigation into Iran for using its state-controlled air carrier, Iran Air, to ferry militant fighters into Syria, where they are taking up arms in defense of embattled President Bashar al-Assad.

Photographs provided to Congress show Iran using Iran Air to ferry these soldiers between 2016 and 2017, in part when the Obama administration removed sanctions on Iran Air and promoted multi-billion dollars sales between the carrier and aircraft manufacturer Boeing, which is seeking to provide Iran Air with a fleet of new planes that many suspect will be used to carry terrorist fighters and weapons into regional hotspots.

This behavior violates international laws governing the nuclear deal and has now led lawmakers and others to accuse the Obama administration of downplaying Iran's illicit activity in order to promote the nuclear deal and ensure Tehran receives a new commercial fleet.

Multiple senior Obama administration officials, including former secretary of state John Kerry, traveled the globe to promote trade with Iranian companies, including Iran Air, at the same time Iran was found to be ferrying militants into Syria. Lawmakers and others suspect the Obama administration either hid or downplayed this information in order to preserve the nuclear deal.

"The Obama administration lifted sanctions against Iran Air as a political concession during nuclear negotiations with Iran, not because of any change in its activity," Rep. Peter Roskam (R., Ill.), one of the lawmakers calling for an investigation into Iran's use of commercial aircraft for military purposes, told the Free Beacon.

"Using social media and public flight tracking websites, any person with a computer can document Iranian military transports to Syria on commercial jets," Roskam said. "The Obama administration undoubtedly knew Iranian airliners were being used to fuel Assad's atrocities in Syria, but the administration officials who were globetrotting as Tehran's chamber of commerce trying to shore up the nuclear deal didn't care."

"Iran Air continues to support the Iran-Assad war machine to this day, and the Trump administration must hold the airline accountable and work to stop them," the lawmaker said.

Roskam and a delegation of other Republican congressmen petitioned the Trump Treasury Department last week to investigate photographic evidence showing Iran using Iran Air to ferry militants into Syria.

Such a sick desire for legacies as "visionaries" did Secretary Global-Test and the Most Equal Comrade have that they would willingly look the other way as Iran's presence in Syria was greatly enhanced.

 

Within hours, the Christianity-hating response begins

Today, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood released a document called The Nashville Statement. It consists of a preamble and fourteen articles. Its signatories include Albert Mohler, Marvin Olasky, Wayne Grudem, R.C. Sproul and James Dobson. And me, as of a few minutes ago. It's a fresh affirmation of scriptural truths about the nature of manhood, womanhood, sexuality and marriage.

Already, over at Patheos, this take on it is up:

Here’s a brief (paraphrased) rundown of what the 14 articles say, along with what they really mean.

• Marriage is only between one man and one woman.
The Christians oppose “homosexual, polygamous, or polyamorous” relationships and deny the (religious) legitimacy of any same-sex marriage.
• You must be celibate outside of marriage; you must be monogamous during marriage.
No sex before marriage. If your spouse dies, no sex for you until your next marriage. If you’re gay, since you can’t be married in their eyes, you must be celibate for life.
• Adam and Eve were literally the first man and woman.
Ignore all scientific evidence that contradicts what we say.
• Men and women have different, distinct roles.
Women should be housewives and babymakers. Men should work. Feminine men and masculine women are oxymorons. Stick to your lanes, people.
• Men have penises and women have vaginas.
Transgender people are out of luck and on their own. You don’t fit anywhere in this Christian worldview.
• Don’t have a properly functioning penis or vagina? That’s fine.
A broken anatomy doesn’t negate what was written above. If your dick doesn’t work, you’re still a man. If you have your uterus removed, you’re still a woman. Transgender people? Still screwed.
• If you’re a man, be a man. If you’re a woman, be a woman.
That means marrying someone of the opposite sex. Transgender people: Why are you still here?
• We don’t hate gay people.
But if you ever have sex with someone of the same gender, you’re going against the will of God.
• Sin leads to sexual immorality.
The only kind of sex that’s acceptable is between a man and his wife. (And only in missionary position, you perverts.)
• Anyone who supports LGBTQ rights is a bad Christian.
There’s no moral ambiguity here. “Faithful Christians” must condemn “homosexual immorality” and “transgenderism.” Take that, progressive Christians and everyone under the age of 30.
• We must keep talking about this.
We don’t care if it makes us look bad.
• If you loved God, you wouldn’t sin.
If you’ve ever had homosexual desires, it’s not too late to repent.
• Transgender people can change.
Hey, trans people, does your gender identity not match up with your biological sex? Well… stop thinking that way. God doesn’t want you to be trans. And God would never make you trans.
• Jesus. Jesus Jesus. Jesus.

I really was on the fence about whether to post something so toxic, so spiritually rotten, to this blog.

Almighty God, bring your hand to bear in this person's life and heart so that this person can know the safety and comfort and redemption of your infinite grace.

The mayor of Nashville has decided to weigh in:

Nashville Mayor Megan Barry, who as a Metro councilwoman officiated some of the city's first same-sex marriages when it became legal in Tennessee, took issue with the statement's moniker. She called it "poorly named" in a Tuesday morning Tweet and said it "does not represent the inclusive values of the city (and) people of Nashville."

LITD will keep you posted as further reaction emerges.

Tuesday roundup

Mike Adams is a national treasure. He's a criminology professor at UNC-Wilmington and he's demonstrated extraordinary courage over his career standing up to a rabidly leftwing administration there. The point of his column today, though, is more about national politics. It's entitled "Why I Left the GOP." It recounts his break with the radical leftism he embraced until the early 1990s, and then his disappointment with the party that was supposed to embody his new-found conservatism:

Since joining the GOP in 1999, I can safely say that they have failed to nominate a single conservative over the span of five presidential election cycles. Three of those nominees have been particularly problematic with the last finally driving me over the edge and making me re-register as an independent. 

Kathy Griffin is no longer sorry for the bloody Trump head stunt.

North Korea's latest ballistic missile test had a flight path right over Japan.

Pray intensely for Houston:

The Addicks Reservoir, located about 19 miles west of downtown, will spill over for the first time in history by daylight Tuesday, threatening immediate surrounding subdivisions, an official told Fox News.

Tyler Stone at The Federalist debunks the notion that Soviet Communism was somehow anti-fascist.

Harvey is still hovering over the Texas coast and already the climate-fiction-pushers are stoking their agenda

Thankfully, Bill Read isn't taking the bait:

This was inevitable, folks. It was only a matter of time before the liberal media started suggesting climate change was to blame for Hurricane Harvey. Friday morning’s CNN Newsroom went there as co-host John Berman wondered aloud to a guest if the potentially-devastating rainfall predictions are do to climate change.

“Is there a why to this? Why there is so much water associated with this storm? One of the things we heard is that climate change does impact the intensity of many of the storms that the that we see,” Berman stated in a question to former National Hurricane Center (NHC) director Bill Read.

Thankfully, Read was quite dubious of this claim and pushed back that he “probably wouldn't attribute what we're looking at here” seeing as how “[t]his is not an uncommon occurrence to see storms grow and intensify rapidly in the western Gulf of Mexico.” 

“That is as long as we've been tracking them, that has occurred. The why for the big rain is the stationarity. The fact that the storm is going to come inland and not move. That's — that’s while it has happened in some cases, had a really big storm come and stall I guess is really rare,” Read added. 

Some recommended reading for you today: an Investors Business Daily editorial titled "Hurricane Harvey Brings Out the Madness." 

The post-American university: where the notion that certain ways of living enhance people's lives gets villainized

Heather MacDonald at NRO recounts the chilling tale of an op-ed on basic human virtue and the vile, tyrannical reaction to it:

ere you planning to instruct your child about the value of hard work and civility? Not so fast! According to a current uproar at the University of Pennsylvania, advocacy of such bourgeois virtues is “hate speech.” The controversy, sparked by an op-ed written by two law professors, illustrates the rapidly shrinking boundaries of acceptable thought on college campuses and the use of racial victimology to police those boundaries. 

On August 9, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax and University of San Diego law professor Larry Alexander published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer calling for a revival of the bourgeois values that characterized mid-century American life, including child-rearing within marriage, hard work, self-discipline on and off the job, and respect for authority. The late 1960s took aim at the bourgeois ethic, they say, encouraging an “antiauthoritarian, adolescent, wish-fulfillment ideal [of] sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll that was unworthy of, and unworkable for, a mature, prosperous adult society.”

Today, the consequences of that cultural revolution are all around us: lagging education levels, the lowest male work-force participation rate since the Great Depression, opioid abuse, and high illegitimacy rates. Wax and Alexander catalogue the self-defeating behaviors that leave too many Americans idle, addicted, or in prison: “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.”

Throwing caution to the winds, they challenge the core tenet of multiculturalism: “All cultures are not equal,” they write. “Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.” Unless America’s elites again promote personal responsibility and other bourgeois virtues, the country’s economic and social problems will only worsen, they conclude.

The University of Pennsylvania’s student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, spotted a scandal in the making. The day after the op-ed was published, it came out with a story headlined “‘Not All Cultures Are Equal’ Says Penn Law Professor in Op-Ed.” Naturally, the paper placed Wax and Alexander’s op-ed in the context of Wax’s other affronts to left-wing dogma. It quoted a Middlebury College sociology professor who claimed that Middlebury’s “students of color were being attacked and felt attacked” by a lecture Wax gave at Middlebury College in 2013 on black-family breakdown. It noted that Penn’s Black Law Students Association had criticized her for a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2005 on black self-help.

But the centerpiece of the Daily Pennsylvanian story was its interview with Wax. Wax (whom I consider a friend) is the most courageous truth-teller on American colleges today. Initially trained as a neurologist at Harvard Medical School, she possesses fearsome intelligence and debating skills. True to form, she stuck by her thesis. “I don’t shrink from the word, ‘superior’” with regard to Anglo-Protestant cultural norms, she told the paper. “Everyone wants to come to the countries that exemplify” these values. “Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.” Western governments have undoubtedly committed crimes, she said, but it would be a mistake to reject what is good in those countries because of their historical flaws.

The fuse was lit. The rules of the game were the following: Ignore what Wax and Alexander had actually said; avoid providing any counterevidence; and play the race card to the hilt as a substitute for engaging with their arguments. 

First out of the gate was the Penn graduate students’ union, GET-UP. On August 11, a day after the Daily Pennsylvanian article, GET-UP issued a “Statement about Wax Op-Ed,” condemning the “presence of toxic racist, sexist, homophobic attitudes on campus.” The “superiority of one race over others is not an academic debate we have in the 21st century,” GET-UP wrote. “It is racism masquerading as science.”

But the Wax-Alexander op-ed and the Wax interview said nothing about racial superiority (much less about sex or homosexuality). It argued for a set of behavioral norms that are available to all peoples but that had found their strongest expression over the course of a particular culture. As the Daily Pennsylvanian itself acknowledged, Wax had emphasized to them that she was not implying the superiority of whites. “Bourgeois values aren’t just for white people,” she had said. “The irony is: Bourgeois values can help minorities get ahead.” 

The jackboots on the post-American university campus - generally students, but with an ample number of teachers and administrators - has entrenched the notion that any talk of superior cultures is "code" for bigotry and racism. This, of course, means they have seen themselves up as the arbiters of how far one can and can't go before polemical discourse becomes "code."

I've asked this question before, and it grows more relevant by the day: Given that our society is still going to need people to be educated to be leaders of various sorts, people of keen discernment, people capable of making real art, people who really understand what science is, people with a deep curiosity about, and interest in cultivating, humane living, and given that the post-American higher-learning institution is not, for the most part, educating anyone thusly, what is going to replace that arrangement?

If the answer is "nothing," the descent of the final darkness is not far off at all.

In an infinite universe, a guy like this, and his appearance at this event are statistical inevitabilities

The event was the MTV Video Music Awards. Isn't that ostensibly a gathering of performers, producers and various other recording-industry types that focuses on handing out statues or plaques or whatever to acknowledge various colleagues' exceptional contributions to the furtherance of the infecting what's left of our culture with ever uglier insults to the human spirit making of cool videos and music?

Oh, get with it, will you? That's so possibly-still-America-rather-than-irreversibly-post-America.

This puke-fest is now an orgy of West-hatred with a few histrionic screeches and boneheadedly and endlessly repeated minor-pentatonic "hooks" tossed in as a nod to the purported reason for convening.

And, in that spirit, the organizers brought onstage one Robert Lee IV, a Disciples of Christ "pastor" and adjunct professor atAppalachian State University.

He was brought up to publicly flagellate himself for being related to his nineteenth-century namesake and he obliged his handlers impeccably:

The social justice sermonizing at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday took an interesting turn when the impresarios trotted out an actual descendent of Confederate general Robert E. Lee to tell America that it still has not repented of its racist "original sin."

Though we expected the LGBT flag-waving, the condemnations of President Trump, and Katy Perry being Katy Perry, the presence of Lee's descendant — Reverend Robert Lee IV — took virtue-signaling to a whole new level.

A pastor at a United Church of Christ in Winston-Salem, Robert Lee IV has been making the rounds lately to tell everyone how deeply sorry he feels for his own "white privilege" and how the events in Charlottesville made him reflect upon his heritage.

"As a white male, I knew I couldn’t do justice to what was going on," he said of his speaking out to HuffPo. "But I can begin the conversation by acknowledging my white privilege. You have to say that enough is enough. We have to be part of the solution by speaking up, instead of being part of the problem with our silence."

"We have to speak up and speak out in God’s name," he said.

The day for speaking out in God's name came for Lee this Sunday night at the VMAs. Here's what he had to say:

My name is Robert Lee, and I am a descendant of Robert E. Lee, the Civil War general whose statue was at the center of the violence in Charlottesville. We have made my ancestor an idol of white supremacy, racism, and hate. As a pastor, it is my moral duty to speak out against racism, America's original sin. Today, I call on all of us, with privilege and power to answer God's call to confront racism and white supremacy head on.

Good little West-hater that he is, he didn't stop there. Went on to shower the pussy-hat people and the BLM thugs with accolades:

"We can find inspiration in the Black Lives Matter movement, the women who marched in the Women's March in January, and especially Heather Heyer, who died fighting for her beliefs in Charlottesville," his speech concluded as he invited out Heather Heyer's mother to give her own speech announcing the creation of a non-profit in her daughter's name.

Lee did not condemn the communist Antifa that were also present on that horrific day in Charlottesville, and who have committed more than their fair share of violence in the age of Trump.

Let us unpack the hypocrisy oozing between the lines in Lee's speaking up in "God's name" here. The Black Lives Matter movement has regularly called for violence, particularly against police officers, with one of their own adherents murdering five officers in Dallas, and has promoted forms of black nationalism and segregation (see black only safe spaces). The Women's March not only featured the likes of pro-Sharia Linda Sarsour, but also that of Planned Parenthood, what is undoubtedly the most racist organization in America today, killing more black people than Robert E. Lee (or his descendants) did in all their lifetimes.

The challenge before us is to find it somehow possible to forgive this slug posing as a human being for his role in the ruination of American culture. After all, the Savior to whom he gives lip service expects it of us.

At first glance it may seem distasteful to bring politics into the Harvey situation, but it's there

Streiff at Red State points out the difference between Governor Abbott's warning and Houston mayor Sylvester Turner's, um, advice. On Friday, Abbott told Texans, "Even if an evacuation order hasn't been issued by your local official, if you're in an area between Corpus Christi and Houston, you strongly need to consider evacuating."

Then the mayor started sending out tweets about repositioning furniture, the Mayweather-McGregor fight, and a little break in the rain after 3 inches.

Streiff gets uncomfortably real at this point:

There is no nice way of putting this. Houston in a Democrat stronghold and the urge to make Greg Abbott look like an idiot was just too big of a temptation to resist. Perhaps the fiasco of the Hurricane Rita evacuation caused the leadership in Houston to miscalculate. Even so, there was no defensible reason for the mayor and his minion to go public and contradict some very sound advice and put lives at risk, both of citizens who did not evacuate and of first responders who will be called upon to try and rescue them. There were all sorts of options available to the Houston mayor short of pooh-poohing the imminent arrival of a major storm. For instance, he could have agreed with Abbott and emphasized that there was no evacuation order or he could have ordered the mandatory evacuation of areas that were known to be vulnerable to flooding.

Will there be consequences for this? Probably not. Democrats don’t vote Democrats out of office for corruption and incompetence. Take a look at any major US city you wish if you desire evidence.

What is predictable is that by Tuesday, the Houston mayor will be slamming state and federal response to the disaster and no one in the media is going to look twice at how the catastrophe happened.

Just putting this out there as something that will bring clarity to all the after-the-fact discussion.

Rex Tillerson may not be an outright appeaser like his immediate predecessors, but he sure lacks clarity

Has anyone else noticed that the public pronouncements of the president and his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson aren't always in sync?

That in itself is a bit confusing and unsettling, but what amplifies the unsettled feeling is that neither one of them seem to fully grasp the dynamics of the particular foreign-policy situations they address.


Last week, I wrote a post entitled "Afghanistan Policy Under Trump - Initial Thoughts." I'm glad I titled it thusly. I've had some time to further consider aspects of what I wrote, particularly this point:

There is validity to the argument that goes, "We've been at this longer than we've ever been at any other war, and we're still facing the same basic problem. Doesn't that tell us that our basic approach is not getting us desired results?" But, given that Afghanistan is about as failed a state as there can be, the argument that bad actors rush into power vacuums holds greater sway, it seems to me.

Andrew McCarthy, writing at NRO, has a piece this morning that, taken as a whole, invites us to not be overly compelled by the bad-actors-rushing-into-power-vacuums argument. His main point is that because the Taliban's basic strategy has always been to outlast the West and because, as McCarthy points out . . .

So virulently anti-American is their totalitarian ideology that the Taliban are making common cause with their Shiite counterparts in Iran to persevere in their jihad against American forces . . . 

that there will be no decisive US / West victory over them.

But McCarthy makes a number of important subsidiary points along the way that launched my train of thought about the Tillerson - Trump divergence.

There's this:

By the time the secretary was done tinkering with the president’s “plan for victory,” one couldn’t be sure if the Taliban was an enemy, a terrorist organization, or a “peace partner.” Indeed, not content to leave pathetic enough alone, Tillerson contemplated “political legitimacy” for the mullahs, proclaiming that the Trump administration “stand[s] ready to support peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban without precondition.” You read that right: without precondition — not even the condition that they abandon their alliance with al-Qaeda (you know, the reason we went to Afghanistan in the first place). As the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes observed, this is “the same kind of diplomatic tail-chasing that was a priority of the Obama administration’s failed approach.” 

The band’s got new players. The pitch is a bit higher. But the song remains the same. 

Ultimately, Tillerson elaborated, “it is going to be up to the Afghan government and the representatives of the Taliban to work through a reconciliation process.” Sound familiar? Yeah . . . just like Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, during an April 2016 trip to Kabul, expressing “support for the government of Afghanistan’s efforts to end the conflict in Afghanistan through a peace and reconciliation process with the Taliban.”

A little later in the piece, he spells out what is glaringly wrong with Tillerson's take:

To be fair, there are no good answers about what to do in that awful country. But it is hard to imagine a worse answer than trying to reconcile the Taliban to the regime.

He concludes that  . . .

We should not inch up our forces in Afghanistan. We should strip down to the minimum assets needed to carry out and support counterterrorism strikes. And we should have as little to do with this region as our vital interests allow.

What I want to come back to, though, is Tillerson's role in this. His tone regarding Afghanistan is disturbingly similar to that he's taken with North Korea:

Tillerson, speaking at the State Department press briefing, stressed that the US was not seeking regime change or looking to send its military "north of the 38th parallel" that divides North and South Korea. But he emphasized that the danger posed by Pyongyang, which test fired two intercontinental ballistic missiles in July, was unacceptable. 

"We do not seek regime change. We do not seek an accelerated reunification of the peninsula. We do not seek an excuse to send our military north of the 38th parallel," Tillerson said during a surprise visit to the agency's briefing room on Tuesday. 

"We are not your enemy, we are not your threat, but you are presenting an unacceptable threat to us and we have to respond," Tillerson said, speaking to North Korea directly. "We would like to sit and have a dialogue about the future." 

Mr. Secretary, it seems to me that  North Korea has already determined that we are its enemy. And that's not just a matter of differing viewpoints or easy-to-dismiss bluster characteristic of rogue regime. When a nation-state makes such a bold claim about another nation-state, attention must be paid.

We do seek regime change and reunification, or at least we ought to. Does Tillerson understand this? And if so, isn't he concerned that, if things develop certain way going forward, he may come to look like a liar?

We are, after all, currently involved in drills with South Korea that involve decapitation-of-top-leadership scenarios.

When Tillerson assumed his post, there was much talk about how he would root out the State Department's entrenched bureaucracy and bring clarity and consistency to its mission.

That hasn't happened.

The Arpaio pardon and the eclipsing of principle by attitude

Sheriff Joe Arpaio is an example of an outrageous figure who comes along to fill a vacuum that should have been filled by principle-driven policy. (Sort of like a certain currently sitting president.) When he first emerged on the national radar screen. illegal aliens were pouring across the southern border with impunity. Far too many US businesses were hiring them with impunity. The public was becoming aware of just how prominently illegal immigration figured into the nation's crime statistics. The underlying issues, basic rule of law and cultural cohesion, had come to the fore.

So, like many a right-of-center hothead, he found a cheering section. Those less inclined to think through what ought to happen on a broad policy-implementation level found gratification in his practices.

But we can now see that the way he went about addressing the issue was immensely harmful to the ability to persuade the general public that strong but humane measures needed to be taken.

Charlie Sykes at The Contrarian Conservative lays out the specifics:

Good cops loathe Arpaio, regarding him as a clownish fraud who defames the profession. Imagine being a cop who respects the rule of law, who has worked to convince the community that they should trust law enforcement not to engage in racial profiling or brutality. What has Trump just said to that cop? And the people he is sworn to protect?

Here are some things you need to know about Joe Arpaio, via the Phoenix New Times: 

          He ran a jail that he described as a ‘concentration camp.”

Prisoners there died at an alarming rate. Close to 160 people have died in Arpaio's jails.

Prisoners hanged themselves in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's jails at a rate that dwarfed other county lockups.

One of his jailers nearly broke the neck of a paraplegic guy who had the temerity to ask for a catheter.

One time, as a publicity stunt, he marched Latino prisoners into a segregated area with electric fencing.

He arrested New Times reporters for covering him. They won a $3.75 million settlement.

Under him, the sheriff’s department failed to investigate hundreds of sex abuse cases, many of which involved children.

But he somehow found time and money to send a deputy to Hawaii to look for Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

In 2013, a federal judge confirmed what literally everyone in Phoenix knew: he’s been racially profiling Latinos.

By 2015, his fondness for racial profiling had cost county taxpayers more than $44 million. On top of the lives he had ruined.

I’ll leave it to another time to ask how someone as bizarre and unstable could become a hero to the Right. (Obviously, it’s no mystery why Trump would admire him so much.)

How is Trump-world responding to this move?

Well, here's Kurt Schlichter's tweet about it:

The main reason for President Trump to pardon Sheriff Joe was fuck you, leftists. 

The new rules, bitches 

It's getting to where you can intuit significant things about people on social media by what they repost from figures they obviously admire. You may start out, after following or becoming friends with someone, feeling that you've found a kindred spirit. But I learned some time ago that if they start posting the rants of the likes of Tomi Lahren or Jim Hoft that you are dealing with a bonehead.

Charles U. Zug, writing at the Claremont Review of Books, spells out just how thoroughly hell-yeah tribalism has eclipsed sound, principle-based thought, distilled in the course of civil polemical exchange, in the present moment:

Flourishing democratic politics depends on modesty and curiosity: “If I am unable to persuade you, then perhaps my own position is weaker than I initially thought. At the least, I have a duty to persuade those whom I disagree with, and to examine my own arguments if they fail.” The duty to persuade forces us to seek weaknesses in our own logic, and, by the same token, to seek hidden virtue in the perspectives we oppose.

Accordingly, politics in a world without the duty of persuasion ceases to be democratic, and quickly becomes despotic and tyrannical. As ordinary experience confirms, someone who enters a conversation convinced that the political opposition is unpersuadable has no incentive to deliberate: their only incentive is to use animal passions to humiliate the intractable opposition, and then to act.

The danger that such a transformation in incentives poses should be obvious. Tyrants have killed millions in part because they did not believe their respective political situations could be ameliorated through rational deliberation. The only alternative left, they felt, was to act: “triumph of the will”—and the death of reason.

Deliberation will be an important part of our society only so long as we collectively retain a sense of proportion in politics, discerning that our grasp of the political fundamentals is incomplete, and that we always have something to learn from one another. As the deliberation-based founding of our own country proved over two centuries ago, it is precisely our incompleteness and neediness as human beings, not our brazenness and bluster, that can give rise to the most admirable and valuable political undertakings.

I really like his phrase "the duty of persuasion." Now, a Trump water-carrier might say, "Hey, we've been good and persuaded. No question he's our guy!"  But such people weren't  persuaded so much as attitudinally revved.

This pardon is yet another example of how difficult the Trump phenomenon has made things for those of us who do indeed have the better argument on a given issue. It's wrong for people from other countries to come here illegally, but gratuitously making examples of those who get caught does not bolster defense of that truth. Rather, it provides easy fodder to those who want to obscure the whole matter with charges of bigotry and authority run amok.

We have leapt off the precipice

Two news items for you to consider in their sum total.

A couple of days ago, LITD posted about Bill de Blasio's request for a 90-day review of "symbols of hate" around NYC.

How long did you think it was going to take for this landmark to get included?

It now looks possible that de Blasio may consider one of Manhattan’s most famous statues as such a symbol.

As reported by CBS News, the mayor said during last night’s Democratic mayor debate that the statue is under review, stating that “[w]e have to look at everything here.”

Earlier in the week, one of de Blasio’s key allies in the city council spoke out against the statue, calling Columbus a “controversial figure” for many.

“I will wait for the commission, as I said Christopher Columbus is a controversial figure to many of us particularly in the Caribbean and I think that that has to be looked at, when you have to look at history we have to look at it thoroughly and clearly,” City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said during a rally calling for another statue to be taken down.

And then this development from the other coast:

California may see itself as a leader on criminal-justice reform, but it is on its way to creating a whole new class of criminals: citizens who use “him” to refer to a man and “her” for a woman.

The “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Long-Term Care Facility Resident’s Bill of Rights” has already been passed by California’s state senate and unanimously recommended by its state assembly’s judiciary committee. It would impose left-wing dogma by force of law if it gets much further.

For now it is limited to nursing homes and intermediate-care facilities, but there is no reason for it to stop there. According to First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh, it is “pretty unlikely that, if this law is enacted, such prohibitions would be limited just to this [nursing home] scenario.” The focus on nursing homes, one suspects, was chosen not because there is an epidemic of elderly transgender people being “misgendered” by their caretakers, but simply because the elderly make for a particularly sympathetic test case.

However, our sympathy should also extend to the caretakers. If one of their residents wants to be called “ze” and “zir” — or really anything else, according to the law — they had better think twice before refusing. While New York City threatens all employers and landlords with large fines for refusing to use an individual’s preferred pronouns, California’s politicians are going further — they want jail time for dissenters.

How to speak meaningfully about our current juncture is an increasingly vexing challenge. Is there a way to frame it that doesn't come off as trite? "Ten years ago all this would have been met with derisive laughter!" Well, yes, but clearly something very insidious was working steadily past all and any assumptions about basic normalcy, and allowed to metastasize until ready for its surprise attack.

The fact that government, with its monopoly on the use of legitimate force, is being brought into it, passing laws that force us to untether ourselves from all that our common sense confirms, is perhaps not as grim in its implications as the backing this madness has from powerful cultural institutions: professional sports leagues, manufacturing and technology companies, universities. That it's all now being made the stuff of legal code is just kind of the final, inevitable step in the process.

Yes, polls show that the majority of post-Americans don't want all these statues coming down, and, while I haven't specifically looked into it at this point, I daresay that sentiment regarding "ze" and "sir" nonsense runs in a similar fashion.

But something pivotal has occurred that renders that moot. The Great Leveling Project will move forward, and what you and I think about it matters not.

The problem is that this Project will at some point so irrefutably run into the basic architecture of this universe - also known as hard reality - that failure of basic societal functions will be the norm. It will be an utterly unforgiving moment.

I suppose, like medieval monks, the handful of Christians and Jews who actually put the doctrine of their faith before worldly concerns can provide a safe haven for those who refuse the Kool-Aid and look for refuge somewhere in the ruins. But most post-Americans are going to wear their badge of preference - "Trump is great and the fake-news media and Congressional squishes are all that prevent him from blessing this country with his agenda!", "Trump overtly enables bigotry!", "Trans people are being excluded from the larger movement for black liberation!", "If we can get GDP growth above 4 percent, everything will be great!" "I just want to be left alone to amuse myself!" - and thereby become less and less equipped to see the final ruin.

Another day, another hope that perhaps the name of this blog will be rendered obsolete dashed.

More substantiation for what I said this morning

Another poll, this one focused on Squirrel-Hair's demeanor and behavior:

According to the recent George Washington University Battleground Poll, there is a fair amount of concern among voters regarding Trump’s behavior, emphasis mine.

 The survey, taken August 13-17, found a large majority of voters — 71 percent — agreed his “behavior is not what I expect from a president” (27 percent disagreed), and 68 percent agreed his “words and actions could get us accidentally involved in an international conflict” (29 percent disagreed).

Almost two-thirds (63 percent) of the registered voters polled said the country is on the wrong track, and a majority (56 percent) had an unfavorable view of President Trump(41 percent favorable). A similar number disapproved of the job he’s doing as president (55 percent), while 42 percent approved, and 56 percent also said he has not been effective as the president, while 39 percent said he has been effective.

“The Battleground Poll data show that more Americans object to President Trump’s character than his agenda,” said GW Associate Professor of Political Management Michael Cornfield. “If there is anything approaching a consensus in today’s sharply divided America, it’s that Trump speaks and behaves inappropriately given the office he holds.”

To be sure, Trump’s character is questionable, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out. Before and during the campaign, and already during his brief stint in the Oval Office, he could never be confused with someone who is presidential. Yes, he’s the president, but his antics, attitudes, and words chip away at the decorum of the office.

Spin this, Laura Ingraham, Kurt Schlichter, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, Conrad Black and Wayne Allen Root.

Squirrel-Hair: in trouble or doing just fine?

The Trump phenomenon has served metaphorically as a sifting device for the conservative movement, with the silt of the converts to populism-nationalism slipping through the tiny holes to form little piles on the countertop, while nuggets of real principle remain behind, glistening in the light of objective fact. The two categories are pretty much entirely distinct now, and see the world in completely different ways.

Kurt Schlichter, for instance, in his latest Townhall column (titled "Does Anybody Understand What These Never Trump Republicans Think They're Achieving?"), makes a token gesture at acknowledging the basic problem most of us have with Trump:

Some of them are truly shocked and upset by Trump's rough edges. He's not your grandfather’s Republican. He's more like your grandfather's buddy who got Pops drunk and took him to a brothel long before he ever met grandma. Trump’s rude and crude, and that rubs a lot of Republicans the wrong way. His cheerful vulgarity and vindictiveness, which many find his most attractive qualities, offends some people because they're decent people of moral character who just can’t go there. It rubs others the wrong way because they're hopeless wusses who would rather be loved by the WaPo than kick liberals in their Harry Reids.

Nice touch, that "some." You see, he then goes on to enumerate another type of Republican who doesn't much care for Trump, the legislators, staffers and wonks who bristle at the thought of their DC power base being threatened.

It's pretty clear that Schlichter wants to portray the second group as being bigger and more important than the first group.

It must be acknowledged that he is pointing out a legitimate issue regarding the entrenched Beltway types protective of their turf: They have done nothing to achieve the aims they promised voters they'd pursue vigorously and successfully. He's not wrong that that led to the Tea Party movement, and that the inert squishes in Washington still didn't listen. I'm not sure that that fact adequately explains the rise of Trump and Trumpism. He is such a different animal, and any positions he's spoken of that could get conservatives enthused are contradictions of positions he's had on those issues in the past.

But then Schlichter goes full Trump-is-an-alpha-male-deal-with-it, acknowledging that Trump behaves more boorishly the more power he gets, and that that's just how it is:

But what's the end game? What are they thinking is going to happen? Do they think that one morning Trump is going to wake up and think “Gosh, all these people telling me I'm wrong and mean and crude and tweet too darn much must be right. I'll change, because I always take the advice of people who I've already broken and humiliated.”

Unlikely, because Trump doesn't respect you. And he doesn't respect you because he's already beaten you. He's not a gracious winner, but to be fair, you've hardly been gracious losers. Oh, how it must gall you to be so utterly defeated by someone you consider your moral and intellectual inferior.

So if you're not going to change Trump, what do you think you're going to do? Do you think you're going to somehow drive Trump out of office? 

He goes on to say that, even if that were achieved, it would just further fire up the "normals," as he calls the group he identifies with, and they'd take further measures, such as primarying every politician in the land who had a disparaging remark about Trump on his record.

It's a disgusting attitude, and it makes me think back to pre-Trump times and wonder how many signs there were that Schlichter was a law-of-the-jungle bonehead.

And then there's the omission of what is plain to see, such as the unnecessary damage Trump has done to relationships with an increasing number of legislators, the focus of a Red State piece by Susan Wright this morning:

In the couple of weeks John Kelly has been chief of staff, he’s attempted to exert some control over Trump’s unscheduled interactions with lawmakers. The president is said to have a habit of seeing a senator on television, getting a wild hair, and then having an assistant call that senator up.

Kelly has asked that there be a senior White House aide present whenever Trump make these calls, and that Trump be briefed on the topic he’s planning to call about.

That sure speaks volumes.

Embarrassing, cringe-worthy volumes.

The president needs to understand that he’s likely never going to get the approval of Democrats for anything he’s hoping to push. He needs the Republicans. He needs actual allies in Washington, and not just clingers.

He’s really not off to a good start.

And for all this bluster from the likes of Schlichter about fed-up "normals," the fact is that, as of yesterday, Squirrel-Hair's approval numbers were decisively headed south and disapproval numbers headed upward.  He's losing support among independents.

So the idea that S-H is the embodiment of an unprecedented groundswell doesn't seem to jibe with the actual facts.

Yes, there is and has been for some time a very real pent-up frustration in America, but the water-carriers' idol is no addressing it.

They keep telling us it's time to admit that it's a new day and our reliance on some core principles is an obsolete premise from which to proceed.

It would seem that they are the ones who need to take another look at the real lay of the land in 2017 post-America.

Donald Trump isn't leading us anywhere. He's tweeting and holding incendiary rallies and making counterproductive phone calls.

So far, the balance sheet for the Squirrel-Hair era looks pretty dismal.

 

 

 

His slobbering devotees are still calling these rallies big successes

All the ingredients in our recipe for national rot are present in last night's Phoenix rally and its aftermath:

• Squirrel-Hair's stream-of-consciousness bluster.
• Squirrel-Hair's pettiness and persecution complex. He had plenty of time to rant at length about "fake news" and the awful people who dispense it, but not one word about the presumably dead sailors from the USS John McCain or condolences for their families.
• The predictable response from the mainstream media complex that does indeed merit scorn and contempt for the way it has completely abandoned any sense of journalistic or editorial responsibility.
• The far-left crowd outside the venue making sure that no Squirrel-Hair appearance lacks an accompanying public disturbance.
• The rave reviews from his increasingly pathetic-sounding water-carriers.

That last ingredient particularly continues to make my teeth grind. These spittle-besotted fools suffer from the same particular form of immaturity as their idol. They look everywhere for scapegoats. Congress, big-city newspapers and TV networks, conservatives who don't convert to populism. They continue to insist that some vaguely-defined set of economic measures is going to solve national problems that are clearly spiritual at their root.

Their denial of the reality in front of them is as bad as that of leftists, who insist that gender is fluid and that the global climate is in trouble in spite of plain evidence to the contrary. The Squirrel-Hair devotees deny the ample evidence of their idol's narcissism, bombast, incoherence, and lack of loyalty. His dismal poll numbers are, in their estimation, a result of those who ought to be getting on board not doing so, and thereby not bringing along those they influence.

Sorry, you guys, but the dismal poll numbers are a result of more citizens taking a look at the man and drawing their own negative conclusions than showing up at rallies in MAGA hats.

The hollowness of what sets your hearts astir is different in kind from the hollowness of the leftist "vision," but it is hollowness nonetheless.

There is nothing to get behind.

ESPN and the obliteration of humanity

The first news item I come across this morning is this:

Last night, it was reported that ESPN would be switching out a reporter during a University of Virginia game because of… his name.

Robert Lee will, instead, be covering a different game. One not near Charlottesville, Virginia. Robert Lee, in case you did not know, is an Asian American reporter. No one is going to take him for a Confederate or a white nationalist. Yet, ESPN was really concerned that this would be an issue, so they pulled him.

Of course, this is the ridiculous face of the destroy-history impulse that's gaining ground, or at least media coverage, around post-America. The ugly face can be seen in such incidents as the vandalizing of the Christopher Columbus statue in Baltimore. 

I'm generally not real big on letting my punditry be driven by intuition, but sometimes that which is in the air is so palpable that it warrants a place in the discussion. And you can feel it. There's been a recent sharp uptick in the decades-long guilt chic that afflicts a lamentably large swath of the post-American populace.

We now have such a distorted sense of virtue and of what a basic concept like consideration is all about that we smash all our connections to history with glee and relief, as if what occurred amongst our forebears in the same time and space we occupy is a burden we can and must cast off.

The end of this process is the presumption that we mortal, fallen beings can define love, which is, of course the exact reverse of how the universe actually works, wherein love defines us.

We are tossing out our very humanity. The new arbiters of virtue have determined there is no need to study the life of the likes of Robert E. Lee (the Confederate general), his long Virginia roots, his work as an Army engineer, his distinguished service in the Mexican-American War, his stint as president of Washington College.

We're well on our way to the names of historical figures serving as shorthand for our half-baked presumptions.

And that is going to lead to not only our thinking that we can define love, but that we can define truth itself. Which, of course, leads to the question, who is the "we" that is going to get to do the defining?

In post-America, the evil permeates the kindergarten level

This "teacher" is one evil being:

Transgenderism is being loudly promoted in seemingly every area of society, including the education system.

It has been obvious for a while that those in the transgender movement want their cause to be the next big diversity issue thrust upon society. You don’t agree with them? You’re obviously a bigot. You teach your children something different at home? You’re clearly intolerant of others. How transphobic of you.

What parents teach in their own home is one thing. What a school teacher chooses to not only actively promote, but parade in front of their young students is quite another.

At the Rocklin Academy, a charter school in Rocklin, California, a kindergarten teacher decided to not only discuss transgenderism with FIVE and SIX-year-old children but allowed a transgender child to reveal their “true” identity in front of the class.

As expected, many parents are not too happy.

CBS News reports:

At Monday night’s board meeting, the teacher at the center of the controversy spoke out. With emotions high, she addressed a packed house.

“I’m so proud of my students, it was never my intent to harm any students but to help them through a difficult situation,” she said.

The teacher defended her decision to read two children’s books about transgenderism including one titled “I am Jazz.” She says the books were given to her by a transgender child going through a transition.

“The kindergartners came home very confused, about whether or not you can pick your gender, whether or not they really were a boy or a girl,” said England.

Parents say besides the books, the transgender student at some point during class also changed clothes and was revealed as her true gender.

And many parents say they feel betrayed and blindsided.

“I want her to hear from me as a parent what her gender identity means to her and our family, not from a book that may be controversial,” a parent said.

“My daughter came home crying and shaking so afraid she could turn into a boy,” another parent said.

And why shouldn’t those children have reacted in horror? They are a handful of years old and at school to learn letters of the alphabet, not whether little Johnny believes he should have always been a Jennifer and wants his penis removed from his body. These kids haven’t the slightest clue about sexuality and the hormones that will rage within them in less than a decade.

And this happened at a damn charter school. No family is safe as long as the taint of government is involved in the "education" of its children.

Afghanistan policy under Trump - initial thoughts

1.) The emphasis on civilian Washington taking its cue from the generals is reassuring. Micromanaging far-away conflicts from the White House doesn't work. H.R. McMaster wrote a book about how it snatched away victory in the Vietnam situation.

2.) Ditto the assertion that this isn't about nation-building. We can help Afghanistan build a better army than it's accustomed to having, because that will serve our national interest, but the culture of tribalism and misogyny is something Afghans are going to have to squarely face and deal with themselves.

3.) Mention of Pakistan's role as, at best, a disappointing partner in the search for regional stability is also good. It does Pakistan no good to claim that it hosts no jihadist training camps. We know better.

4.) Given that Trump's isolationist tendencies were a major part of his appeal to the former conservatives who suddenly decided, in 2015, to be nationalist / populists, what does this do to their public support for him?

5.) There is validity to the argument that goes, "We've been at this longer than we've ever been at any other war, and we're still facing the same basic problem. Doesn't that tell us that our basic approach is not getting us desired results?" But, given that Afghanistan is about as failed a state as there can be, the argument that bad actors rush into power vacuums holds greater sway, it seems to me.

6.) This will require a serious and constant look at our resources, given that it's far from the world's only hot spot.

Monday roundup

Seems to be a lot of focus on looking for hate and bigotry in today's roundup:

Bill deBlasio, the NYC mayor who spent his honeymoon in Havana, says that as a result of the recent conflagration in Charlottesville, his city will conduct a 90-day review of "symbols of hate" around Gotham.

Emily Jashinsky at the Washington Examiner says that the branding of mainstream conservative and Christian groups is just the latest evidence that the Southern Poverty Law Center is a toxic force in post-America.

Even inanimate objects that precede the appearance of human beings by billions of years don't escape suspicion of their motives:

The Atlantic, a once-great magazine, has determined that the total eclipse of the sun due to occur on Monday will fail to affect enough black people.

The Atlantic’s very lengthy essay on the failure of the eclipse to occur where a sufficient number of black people reside is entitled “American Blackout.” It clocks in at a remarkable 4,544 words and does not appear to be satire.

Concerning “the Great American Eclipse,” Brooklyn Law School professor Alice Ristroph writes in the rapidly deteriorating magazine, “there live almost no black people” “along most of its path.”

The Atlantic’s longwinded law professor assures readers that “implicit bias of the solar system” is “presumably” not the cause of eclipse’s failure to affect enough black people. 

“Still, an eclipse chaser is always tempted to believe that the skies are relaying a message.”

Oregon, where the eclipse will first appear in the continental United States, “is almost entirely white.” “There are very few black Oregonians, and this is not an accident.” It’s totally on purpose in 2017, The Atlantic claims, because the Pacific Northwest state had a “racial exclusion” clause in its original 1857 constitution.

This Lindy West is a real piece of work:

A contributing opinion writer covering feminism and popular culture, West has written eight articles for the Times, including six since July. I think the best way to describe her is as the unrestrained id of the Democratic party. She is convinced, as if by impulse, that conservatives are terrible people, and will say so at every opportunity. I can see no evidence of any self-regulating mechanism in her work.

No, the author of Shrill: Notes from a Loud Women, lets it all out. On Wednesday, West called Republicans every name in the book. She started off relatively mild: Republicans — aside from Trump — pretend to be “on the side of goodness and rationality and respect. Do not let them off the hook so easy,” she wrote. Apparently, we right-wingers are all on the side of badness, irrationality, and so forth.

For West, this was only the beginning. “Sure, pre-Trump Republicans traded more in dog-whistles and plausible deniability than overt Nazi sloganeering,” she wrote. “But the goal was the same: white men in charge, white women at their elbows. Systematically enforced poverty turning millionaires into billionaires. Bigots may have swapped subtext for the Jumbotron, but what is the substantive difference?”

In her eyes, there is no “substantive difference” between normal, pre-Trump Republican rhetoric and “overt Nazi sloganeering.” Further, what Republicans want, she claims, is to keep women and minorities down, and to perpetuate systemic poverty. That is the goal, she believes, of half the country. That is their vision of success in politics.

Unfortunately, the article would descend further into the mud. After pulling a Gore Vidal — all but calling Republicans crypto-Nazis — she doubled down, rebuking the conservatives who criticized Trump’s comments on Charlottesville. “It is easy to denounce Nazis. Republican lawmakers, if you truly repudiate this march and this violence, then repudiate . . . ,” she wrote, before launching into a list of 18 things that Republicans must disavow — including opposition to abortion, environmental regulations, gun control, reparations for African Americans, Obamacare, and transgender rights — in order to “truly” oppose Nazism.

This is kind of a gloomy theme, isn't it? Let's end with an item that is at least a tiny move toward something a little sunnier (nice eclipse-day imagery, don't you think?). Missouris State Senator Maria Chapelle-Nadal issues an actual  apology for calling for Squirrel-Hair to be assassinated.