This entire story is the perfect storm of an aggressive and devious foreign regime, a Republican nominee of low character surrounded by inept and naively cynical amateur advisers, and a Democratic nominee who was heedlessly reckless with national security out of partisan paranoia. Secretary Clinton exposed herself to what amounted to easy Russian blackmail, and everything else that happened followed from that.
And, given the state of our culture, we probably shouldn't expect a better choice next time.
Kurt Schlichter has a Townhall column today - look it up yourself; I don't link to Kurt Schlichter columns - in which he recounts some of his latest Twitter exchanges with people who (taking the LITD position) assert without reservation that Ben Sasse is an exemplary conservative and utterly undeserving of Schlichter's contempt. Actually, the larger point Schlichter is making is that federal legislators ought to show loyalty to those who voted for them. He tries to appear reasonable, going so far as to say that there's nothing wrong with criticizing Trump - including aspects such as character and demeanor - but that it must be done in a way that does not indicate disloyalty to what the voters are clearly expressing they want. He does a woefully inadequate job of detailing just what it is that thos voters want, leaving it on the level of a general discontent with elitism, as Trump defenders generally do.
This is a rather rich position for someone like Schlichter to take, given the derision he heaps on those of us who insist on a consistent body of principles (that include personally conducting oneself with at least a modicum of dignified bearing). As we've said many times, there is no consistent body of principles that amounts to Trumpism.
Anyway, the whole things gets one to thinking about how hardcore Trumpists (I doubt if Schlichter considers himself in this category; I would imagine he acknowledges his place in the abrupt-turn-to-fandom-after-Cruz-dropped-out camp) view this matter of loyalty.
Former White House chief strategist and Breitbart captain Steve Bannon is running his scorched earth strategy against not just those Republican politicians that he feels are insufficiently worshipful of Trump, but GOP donors, as well.
How is that supposed to work, if he takes out everybody that might otherwise support Trump, or at least, not attempt to impeach him?
Anyway, his latest target is billionaire hedge fund guy, and big league GOP donor, Paul Singer.
On a Friday night call to the president, Bannon reportedly told Trump that he was going to unleash on Singer.
So what has Singer done so wrong?
Well, he opposed Trump during the primaries, but eventually came around, mending fences, and even donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. He’s also cut some serious checks to fund outside groups that are helping to push Trump’s tax reform moves.
He’s not an enemy of Trump, per se. According to a recent Axios report, however, that’s not stopping Bannon.
Trump agreed with Bannon that it needed to be done, according to two sources familiar with the conversation. (Though I’m also told that Trump has since told at least one other person that Singer is “on the team” — suggesting that maybe he’s telling everyone what they want to hear.)
Trump has no ideological mooring, nor does he have the intellectual capacity to understand what he’s saying or who is friend or foe. No, Singer’s crime is that he funds the Washington Free Beacon, the outlet that recently outed itself as the conservative source of initial funding to Fusion GPS, in its research of candidate Trump. What began with the Free Beacon was picked up by Democrats later, and was eventually turned into the Russia dossier that suggested there were ties to Russia that could be used to blackmail Trump, should he win the presidency.
A source close to Singer said the billionaire had no idea who Fusion GPS was until they became a subject of news reports related to Trump and Russia. Though the source added that of course Singer generally knew — and it was public knowledge — that the website he funds, the Washington Free Beacon, paid for opposition research.
I wouldn’t call this an offense to attack, but to Bannon, and I’m sure to his alt-right marauders, this will be seen as reason enough to bring Singer down.
In their Friday phone call, Bannon told Trump he had been looking for a long time “to set things right with Singer and his entire crew,” according to a source familiar with the conversation.
Since the NYT story broke, Bannon’s right-wing media outlet, Breitbart News, has been relentlessly attacking Singer and calling on politicians who’ve taken money from him to return the donations.
Yeah. Why would they do that? First of all, they need those donations. Second of all, he didn’t do anything wrong.
Bannon is actively working to cut off the lifeline to the Republican party with his attacks that serve a dual purpose: alienate the big money donors, causing them to pull their support, and alienate the average voter, losing their support, as well.
How he figures this helps the president, I have no idea.
Bannon has long despised Singer. In Bannon’s worldview, Singer belongs to a “globalist” cabal that favors open borders and includes other bogeymen and bogeywomen such as George Soros and Hillary Clinton. It’s also helpful to Bannon that Singer has close ties Mitch McConnell — the Senate GOP leader whom Bannon is obsessed with destroying.
This is the kind of "loyalty" inner-circle Trumpists insist on. Kurt, are you cool with it?
I'm sitting here thinking about a Kevin Williamson essay I just read. The official thrust of it is the implications of a possible Senate-seat run by Mitt Romney. But along the way he makes some points I agree with, and some I don't.
A point I agree with is his assessment that the Republican Party has
become . . . whatever it is the grotesque and stunted political corporation still pretending to be the Party of Lincoln has become.
And this:
Trump’s substitution of sneering for analysis, his shallow anti-“elitism,” his attacks on free trade and on freedom of the press, his adolescent social-media habit: Republicans have not rallied behind him in spite of these things, but because of them.
Where I think he gets off-track is in pooh-poohing the notion of a cultural civil war. I can see why he embraces that formulation. He is, quite properly, trying to note how the goalpost for conservative purity has been moved from the end zone clear out to the back forty of the stadium parking lot. When you have Sean Hannity - and those ordinary citizens who find him a worthy observer of the national scene - trying to banish the likes of Ben Sasse, who clearly has more smarts and principles than Hannity could ever dream of posessing, we can say with certainty that Russell Kirk is dead.
Layer upon layer of cacophony has prevented us from making the kinds of distinctions we sorely need at this moment. The comment threads of opinion sites and social media are full of asinine blurtings such as that Paul Ryan is a leftist traitor. Again, Paul Ryan's understanding of free-market principles, Constitutional principles, the essentiality of a Judeo-Christian foundation for the nation's socio-political fabric, and the arcana of tax and budget policy completely eludes the cretins who think their dismissals of him are harbingers of a glorious turn in the history of our civilization.
It's litmus-test conclusion-drawing on steroids. And we're seeing it lead to such neurotic standards of purity that people who would otherwise recognize that they are in alignment become foes based on their takes on one particular public figure.
Williamson remains one of my top, I'd say, five most admired pundits on the scene today, and he is exactly right about how tragic the Trump phenomenon has been for the Republican Party, but he really needs to address why he does not regard the tide exemplified by the above-cited developments as anything less than frontal attacks on the most basic level of what America is about.
How much of a pig is Harvey Weinstein? This much: When having dinner with women to, um, discuss projects, he would overrule the woman's beverage request if to wasn't for an alcoholic beverage. He'd just tell the server, "Bring her what I'm telling you to bring her." One particular LA-area restaurant's management told its wait staff to do whatever Mr. Weinstein requested.
Let's take a break from the toxic stuff and check out something ennobling. This piece at NRO by Bruce Buff and Robert Spitzer, on how we ought to take a moment at Halloween time to reflect on the fact that we have souls, has two big takeaways:
1.) No configuration of matter, however sophisticated, can explain what makes the human being unique among the world's living things, and
2.) We live forever, which means our moment-to-moment choices have eternal consequences.
Megan McArdle at Bloomberg says that during this year's open enrollment period, a lot of healthy folks are going to look at the jump in plan premiums and decide to opt out of the "A"CA.
Simon Constable at PJ Mediasays that one big reason Catalonia has declared its independence from Spain is that it is faring relatively well compared to Spain overall, which was in such bad shape a few years ago it instituted an austerity program, to which Catalonia has said, "no thanks." Several other EU countries have similar situations. Regions within them harbor a rising sentiment along the lines of, "Why should we have to kowtow to Brussels's demands? We're doing okay." Upshot: There could well be more such declarations of independence.
And Joe Cunningham at Red State, no fan of Trump, says, "Love Him or Hate Him, Trumps Economics Seem To Be Working."
A common thread among the assessments over whether it's a good or bad thing is that the Republican Party is now Trump's party.
Ready for LITD's take?
It's that that is probably true, but it's not on balance a good thing, the greatly improved economy, the defanged EPA, the return to seriousness in foreign policy and great judicial appointments notwithstanding.
Why? Because we would have achieved these things with an actually conservative president, without the cult of personality which, coming on the heels of the cult of personality surrounding the previous president, probably insinuates that feature into the nation's political landscape so that it will be a given in races into the foreseeable future. And now that it's been established that the politically motivated populace chooses as figures to surround with such cults men lacking character in one way or another, our chances for getting choices between really exemplary public servants will not get better.
The argument that goes, "What is there to argue with? We're getting the results we wanted" leaves out the cultural level, which, as you know LITD insists drives the political, economic and national security levels. The country's educational apparatus, its entertainment industry (including sports and highbrow arts), what's left of its journalism, and a great deal of its corporate world, most definitely including the big social-media companies, are still in the hands of people who, as we warned, are able to conflate Trump's cringe-inducing behavior (which never abates for more than a few minutes) with actual conservatism. (Then there is the related thorny matter of the different kinds of Republican opposition to Trump. Let's not stand for any conflating of Sasse and Cruz style opposition with that of shaky-at-best-and-often-downright-squishy opposition from the likes of Flake, Corker and McCain.)
Yes, I'd say Piers Morgan is probably right that Trump is on track to win a second term. But he'll do so with incredibly high disapproval ratings. The public discourse will continue to be one big snarl-fest, with no doubt annual scream-at-the-sky events every November.
We seem to have settled for getting what we want policy-wise by dragging it over the finish line at the expense of any improvement in the state of our culture.
And I daresay it won't be long at all until Trump pulls yet another policy-level stunt that will have his slavish devotees swallowing hard and actual conservatives saying, "WTF?"
Again I say, there is no training program in the world that is going to put a stop to this.
It has to begin with recognizing the architecture of this universe, with forthrightly acknowledging that there is a male nature and a female nature, and that acting as if the workplace is some kind of zone where that fact doesn't apply is engaging in reality-denial.
Then, there has to be respect for what He who did the designing instructed us regarding how to exist in accordance with these distinct and unchanging natures.
I remember when I was a teenager in the 1970s, and a girl in our neighborhood who was drinking the second-wave feminist Kool-Aid, and who was also attractive, made a point of wearing tube tops and then telling the neighborhood boys that they were sexist pigs for gawking at her. She had not thought the entire matter out well enough to realize that she was demanding the impossible, I'm quite sure. She hadn't gone any deeper with it than the level of copping an attitude.
But that, writ large, is what is being insisted on today.
Mind you, this is not to say that the behavior of Savino, Halperin, Weinstein, O'Reilly, Bolling, Ailes et al is acceptable. It's just to say that all of us dealing with this like grownups means acknowledging the tension implicit in professional interactions between a male of any age or shape and an attractive female.
This tension had always been acknowledged, and celebrated for the delightful spice it added to life in general in the Hollywood romantic comedies of yore, in the lyrics of popular music prior to the last 30 years, and in the sonnets and other poems of past centuries. But this denial of the the dualistic way human nature is designed necessitated rules and training programs that were cold and sad. It also, like water finding the path of least resistance, made for an ever-more-tawdry and even threatening expression of basic male energy.
I suppose the shorthand version of what's required - that guys ought to grow up and conduct themselves around women in a respectful manner - works well enough, but it seems to me that ultimately, the recognition that God deemed these things to be the way they are is going to have to enter the picture. For one thing, the assurance of grace is going to be needed for those inevitable situations where guys cross the line to even a subtle degree.
The bottom line, when you put together the fact that Marc Elias represented both the Clinton campaign and the DNC, and was clearly used, by virtue of being the one to pay for the Fusion GPS opposition research, as cover for Dem dirt-digging that would evade proper scrutiny by mainstream media outlets (even though it was so salacious as to invite disbelief without further, proper investigation), is that the Clinton machine enlisted the help of a hostile foreign government in discrediting a duly elected US president.
It seems to be a story distinct from the Uranium One tangled web, but it seems that Dems were banking on trying to foment some kind of Trump-Russia collusion story to deflect from their own deep Russia involvement.
And the common element is the endangerment of US national security.
I can't stand Donald Trump, but we clearly dodged a bullet when the author of What Happened lost the presidential election last year.
A math education professor at the University of Illinois says the ability to solve geometry and algebra problems and teaching such subjects perpetuates so-called white privilege.
“School mathematics curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean Theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans," she says, according to Campus Reform.
She also says that addressing equity in mathematics education will come when teachers can understand and negotiate the politics outside the classroom.
“On many levels, mathematics itself operates as whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as white,” she writes.
Further, she says mathematics operates with unearned privilege in society, “just like whiteness.”
An advertisement for a Kent State University event asked if the phrase “You Need Jesus” is a form of “hate speech” or “free speech” — and a Christian student leader wants an apology.
The Twitter announcement for last week’s forum sponsored by the Ohio school’s Center for Student Involvement included an image of figures holding various signs: Three read “No More Gays,” “Women Need To Serve Their Man” and “Build a Wall” — the fourth read “You Need Jesus.”
Let's start with the particular poisonousness of each.
In the case of the U of I professor, we are looking at a frontal assault on objective truth. The answer to a given math equation is immutable, and depends not a whit on whether anyone is "capable" of arriving at it, much less anyone's demographic designation. And speaking of objective truth, the professor is actually correct that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans.
Those Europeans gave a gift to the world, a gift that has catalyzed human advancement that was unimaginable beforehand. Has she considered that she is actually calling for denying that gift to the swath of humanity that falls into some category other than "white"?
A highly credentialed scholar is basically extolling hatred for the accumulation of knowledge.
In the case of this Center for Student Involvement ad, it requires no special level of sharpness to see what's being implied. There's the obvious message conveyed by the grouping of the Jesus sign with the others: that Christian faith is predicated on bigotry. Then there are the intended implications of the other signs. In whose fevered imagination is a "no more gays" message a societal commonplace? The way that sign reads, some societal element with influence worth noting is calling for total eradication of homosexuals. Do you know of any such element? The grammatical sour note struck by the next sign aside, "Women Need To Serve Their Man," utterly divorced from the corresponding message that would be included in at least a Christian conveyance, the message that men need to serve their women as well, is not a mainstream view by any stretch. Then there's "Build a Wall," which, if we cut to the chase, is intended to impress upon the sign-reader the notion that concern for national sovereignty is an attempt to legitimize bigotry.
Then there is the overarching level, on which these stories, when taken together, reinforce the message that is inescapable on today's university campus: that white Christian males are a malevolent force in society.
This is not a call for responding to such a toxic assumption with any kind of "pride" in falling into any or all of those categories. Indeed, pride for having a certain kind of pigmentation or DNA diminishes the whole notion that achievement is the proper antecedent to self-regard. That's why it ought to have no place in the world view of a black person or a woman. And, as we know, pride is the antithesis of what a Christian strives for. Ultimately, as Christians understand, a sense that one is inherently okay comes from God's grace alone.
My sense, and I'm going on intuition here - although recent poll data regarding the worth of a college education backs me up - is that it's too late for a backlash that is going to restore the Western university to the stature it deservedly enjoyed prior to the last 40 years.
And given that the university has been the repository of the knowledge humankind has accumulated over the last six-plus millennia, the prospects for our civilization to be able to even tread water, much less continue advancing, are dire indeed.
Oh poor Jeff Flake. Jeff Flake got bullied out of Washington by Trumpism. Flake is such a nice guy and there is no room for nice guys in the GOP any more. I am seeing all this all over social media and it is such horse crap.
Jeff Flake is leaving the Senate because he is a crappy politician who built his brand as one thing, used it to get to the Senate, then betrayed that brand once there.
I have covered this before, but Washington Conventional Wisdom would prefer you think this is about Jeff Flake vs. Donald Trump. The reality is that Flake could have stood up authentically to Donald Trump and been supported by his voters if Flake wasn’t such a bullsh…crap politician who essentially lied his way into the Senate.
The Club For Growth’s scorecard is the one Jeff Flake used to recruit donors and national support. Going all the way back to 2005, Flake had a consistently conservative record on fiscal issues. He was one of the very few congressmen supported by the Club with a lifetime 100% score. He literally was the candidate people pointed to as the model Club For Growth candidate.
But once in the Senate he gave all the fiscal conservatives the middle finger.
Compares Flake to Ben Sasse, who is certainly going to stay and who has higher scores from conservative groups.
It appears that the main thing going on here is that he's been keeping up on the numbers, and has concluded that his reelection prospects were not so solid.
That op-ed he wrote a while back that was culled from his new book, in which he extolled Bob Dole as an exemplary Republican, told me all I needed to know.
The poor fellow just came down with a terminal case of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.
Which makes him a poor example of opposition to Trump. We have Sasse - and, by the way, Erick Erickson.
I just read Victor Davis Hanson's lastest NRO piece and it has me thinking. His overall point is this: That Trump is just a symptom of a larger phenomenon. And he goes on to say that the good stuff coming out of the administration, initiatives any conservative can applaud - defanging the EPA, pulling out of the Paris Accord, Gorsuch and lower-court appointments, forthright support for Israel, sharp criticism of the JCPOA - would probably be the fruits of any actual conservative we could have elected. So far, so good, but consider Hanson's last paragraph: "Meanwhile, the administrative state expands, the debt is headed for $21 trillion, crass identity politics tear the nation apart, the effort to restore deterrence abroad grows ever more dangerous, and the campuses, Hollywood, the NFL, and the media are reminding us that progressive politics are now our culture’s orthodoxy, vital for success in nearly all fields. And dealing with all that is the only conservative fight that counts." We're still disastrously deep in debt, and the cultural rot continues unabated. A guy with no consistent set of principles is ill-equipped to address that. And, if Trump is just a symptom of a much broader and deeper frustration, why has this cult of personality sprung up around him? "GO TRUMP!" and all of that. Why do his slavish devotees in the pundit class - Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Wayne Allen Root, Bill Mitchell, Conrad Black - personally thank him for the stock market numbers? That's the kind of adulation we saw among lefties for Obama. Then I read Jim Jamitis's latest at Red State and he, too, uses the word "symptom," but in a somewhat different way:
Like Obama before him, Trump is just a symptom, not the underlying pathology which is, in part, the human tendency to outsource their thinking to the loudest person in the room.
His specific substantiation for what he's talking about is well-expressed:
Their limited, binary view of the political landscape seems to equate criticism of Trump with support for the dead wood Republicans in Congress or even the Democrats. That the whole thing is a train wreck isn’t on their list of possibilities.
He says that Trumpist tribalists engage in the same kind of horn-tooting that Obama's water-carriers made their stock in trade:
When Obama claimed success based on the performance of the stock market, analysts on the right explained how that wasn’t a good measure of overall economic health. Trump routinely touts the stock market as an indicator of his success and the same pundits applaud.
Unemployment numbers under Obama were always rightly treated with skepticism by conservatives because of the terrible state of the overall labor participation rate. The labor force hasn’t grown significantly since Trump’s inauguration but pundits on the right seldom mention it when Trump claims responsibility for reducing the unemployment rate.
I saw a tweet yesterday from Laura Ingraham thanking DJT for the current stock market numbers. It perfectly makes Jamitis's point.
This is kind of a digression, but I found this paragraph humbling. It was a bracing call for us opinion-mongers to put our activity in perspective:
To people who think this way, I say: Calm down, Sparky, you write for a website most of America doesn’t read, or you talk on a radio show most of America doesn’t listen to. And that applies to even the top people in the political commentary business. We work in a bubble for people who are entertained by political discussion. It’s not a large bubble. Get over yourselves.
The main point here is the one that the post immediately under this one also makes. (I first saw the HuffPost piece linked in a Facebook post by a big-time lefty - a political-science professor at a large university. He felt compelled to call out his own side for reckless banner-carrying.) Raw tribalism has infected every nook and cranny of our public discourse.
That's why I repeat the Three Pillars of Conservatism so often here at LITD. I hope doesn't become tiresome. But if one doesn't have a polestar, one is merely adrift, and no amount of attempted self-convincing otherwise is going to make it so.
It was a vintage Rachel Maddow stemwinder. A deft, 25-minute weaving of carefully curated sound bites, screenshots of news reports, slick maps and graphics, all strung together to make the case that something fishy is afoot. It’s a style Maddow has perfected, and it has propelled her to the top of the ratings heap. There was just one problem. Maddow’s theory was so flimsy that it could be debunked by a quick glance at a map, let alone a phone call with an expert. Janet Malcolm of The New Yorker recently described Maddow’s show as “a piece of sleight of hand presented as a cable news show. It is TV entertainment at its finest. It permits liberals to enjoy themselves during what may be the most thoroughly unenjoyable time of their political lives.” Thursday night’s entertainment came as an attempt to pin the ambush that killed four Green Berets in Niger earlier this month on President Donald Trump’s newest proposed travel ban, which was scheduled to go into effect this week but was struck down in federal court. Maddow seized on the revised ban’s inclusion of Chad, one of Niger’s neighbors and a U.S. partner in counterterrorism efforts in Africa.
An expert, Maddow noted, warned that the decision “could put Americans in harm’s way.” Last week, when the Chadian government announced that it had completed the two-week process of pulling out all of its troops from Niger, the move was viewed as related to the travel ban, she claimed. An uptick in extremist attacks has ensued, Maddow added, which “might explain why we have just had these four absolutely unbelievable gut-wrenching emotional days in American politics and in D.C. in particular.” Maddow’s segment was designed to strongly suggest, without outright stating, that Trump’s addition of Chad in his latest travel ban prompted the country to remove its troops from Niger, leading to an increase in extremist attacks and ultimately claiming the lives of four U.S. soldiers. Chad’s pullout from Niger “had an immediate effect in emboldening ISIS attacks,” Maddow said. That appears to be false. According to the Council on Foreign Relations and accounts from local residents, the attacks that have increased can be traced back to militant group Boko Haram, which is based just across the border in Nigeria. A group of Boko Haram militants broke away and formed the Islamic State West Africa, Laura Seay, an assistant professor in Colby College’s Department of Government, told HuffPost. But they are separate from the so-called Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, the group that reportedly carried out the ambush (although no group has claimed responsibility for the attack).
Chadian troops were present in Niger specifically to ward off the Boko Haram threat ― they had nothing to do with Islamic State in the Greater Sahara. They were also based almost 800 miles away, in an area called Diffa that’s long been battling the group, Seay said.
Any expert asked about Chadian troops battling ISIS in Niger would have said “No, that’s crazy,” Seay added. ”Everybody that I know is appalled by this. I would like to think that Maddow’s researchers are more responsible.” Plus, the pullout of Chadian troops isn’t necessarily related to the travel ban, as Maddow implied. “It may have already been planned and [the travel ban] was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Seay said. “Chadians didn’t want to keep their forces there forever and were at least looking to scale down. If we do see the travel ban lifted I’m not sure you’d see the Chadians go back in.”
Maddow referred to the ambush as “absolutely baffling.” But an attack of this nature was “almost inevitable,” Seay added, seeing as American special forces teams are operating in remote areas in an “advise-and-assist” capacity, training military personnel across the region. Army Green Berets, for example, have gone to the Mali-Niger border 29 times in the last six months. And even though they’re technically in an advisory capacity, it’s not uncommon for these troops to end up in the line of fire, she noted. “They go on patrol with local military so they’re technically not fighting. But really they’re right there together.”
“There has been an increase of violence in this area and nearby areas for more than a year, and the overall security situation has been getting worse,” said Andrew Lebovich, a visiting fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations. The Rachel Maddow Show declined to comment to HuffPost.
Frej goes on to compare Maddow's tactics to those of Sean Hannity and Alex Jones. Ouch.
Rev. Robert Jeffress is one of those religious leaders who badly compromised his status as a champion of integrity by getting on the Trump train. Erick Erickson at The Resurgent reports on the latest development in that sad situation. Jeffress got into a Twitter snit with Senator Ben Sasse (who ranks high on LITD's list of contemporary good guys) and accused him of doing nothing to advance the 20-week abortion ban bill. Sasse is a cosponsor of it.
I quit availing myself of most contemporary "entertainment" years ago. I rarely listen to music in any genre that was made after about 1980. I have darkened the door of a movie theater maybe once a year for the last couple of decades. I'm not the most intuitive person in the world, but I just sensed an odor wafting off Hollywood that indicated a rot that went beyond the ideology one hears prattled about at awards shows. Now that the cat is out of the bag about what a putrid industry movie-making is, it appears many post-Amercans are drawing a similar conclusion. Or maybe it's just a matter of growing weary of special-effects dazzle-dazzle, milking of franchises, sequels and remakes way beyond their shelf life, and the hard, mean feel of most Tinseltown fare. In any event, it's experiencing a box-office nightmare.
Speaking of the public eschewing morally rotten forms of entertainment, NFL stadiums had seats going begging this past weekend.
Turkey's Erdogan is using Diyanet, a government agency set up by Ataturk in the early days of modern Turkey to see to religious affairs, to turn his country into an Islamist police state.
University of Oregon president Michael Schill, who got his first taste of campus jackbootery after mere weeks in office back in 2015, when he couldn't finish his state-of-the-school address because hard-left thugs shouted him down, has proven himself to be a pathetic wimp.
Daren Jonescu offers a fresh way of arguing a point that we stress here at LITD repeatedly. He puts it thusly: "free men without virtue will also be the undoing of freedom."
This is worth noting as the US explores the extent to which it can persuade China to wield influence over North Korea:
Chinese and North Korean forces once fought side by side on the battlefield, but ties have since frayed, possibly beyond repair.
China has a complicated relationship with North Korea, which simultaneously serves as both a strategic asset and a liability. However, it has become more the latter than the former in recent years. North Korea’s frequent provocations frustrate Beijing, and China’s decisions to pressure North Korea in concert with the U.S. greatly angers Pyongyang. China and North Korea’s top leaders absolutely despise one another, according to individuals close to the respective governments.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping took power five years ago, he presented a grand vision for China known as the “Chinese Dream,” an ambitious plan to restore China’s great power status and make the country a responsible and respected global leader. Since North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un took control following the death of his father, the young ruler has advanced the country’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs at an accelerated rate, creating instability on China’s doorstep with frequent tests, drills, and intentionally aggressive and hostile provocations.
The only time former U.S. Ambassador to China Max Baucus has ever heard the professional Chinese president use “undiplomatic language” was when he was talking about Kim, Baucus revealed to the British Broadcasting Network.
“I’ve only heard President Xi speak derogatorily about a person once, and when he did so, it was in fairly strong terms. That was when he was quite critical, a couple of years ago, of Kim Jong-un,” Baucus explained, adding: “He does not like Kim Jong-un. That is very clear.”
Xi was said to be “boiling with fury” after North Korea decided to ruin an important international summit hosted in China last year by firing off multiple missiles. Shortly after the event’s close, the rogue regime conducted its fifth nuclear test.
North Korea’s sixth nuclear test also ruffled some feathers in China.
Beijing’s decision to restrict trade with North Korea, as well as restrict banking services and shut down North Korean businesses, is apparently not just an effort to adhere to the demands of the most recent U.N. sanctions resolutions, according to a source close to China’s government.
Some of China’s actions can be seen as a response to pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration, but other influencing factors may drive China’s efforts to rein in its nuclear neighbor.
“That was a direct response to North Korea’s nuclear provocations on the eve of the BRIC Summit China hosted. I believe China’s government got mad. China’s top leader got mad. That’s a direct a countermeasure China’s government adopted to punish North Korea,” Cheng Xiaohe, a professor at Renmin University in Beijing with ties to the Chinese government and defense, told the BBC.
The friendship between that once existed between the two communist countries has ended, the academic asserted.
Kim may overstep whatever is left of the once-special relationship"
National interests, not ideologies, determine international partnerships, and China’s national interests presently demand a “stable, non-nuclear Korean Peninsula,” Cheng explained. He suggested another provocation, such as a ballistic missile or nuclear test, could push the relationship over the edge.
So while it behooves the US to eye China with the utmost wariness, it should not assume that it has to walk on eggshells with regard to the Chinese stance on North Korea.
Which is not to say we can instantly get China to put an unprecedented squeeze on the Hermit Kingdom. It just means that pretty much no actually likes the vile Kim regime.
Scott Johnson of Power Line got in touch with Charles Hill for his view, and got a blunt response:
I wrote Yale’s Charles Hill. Professor Hill is diplomat in residence and lecturer in International Studies at Yale as well as a research fellow of the Hoover Institution.
Before he alighted at Yale, Professor Hill had an incredibly distinguished career in the State Department. In the course of his career in the government he served in Saigon during the climactic period of the Vietnam War (1971-1973). Among the roles he served was that of mission coordinator in the United States Embassy. Molly Worthen covers Professor Hill’s work in Vietnam in chapter 6 of her precocious 2005 biography, The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill.
Professor Hill watched the documentary with intense attention. I asked Professor Hill if he would comment on the documentary, however briefly. He responded:
The most repulsive sub-theme starts at the very outset when a veteran says: “I was scared. I hated them. I was SO scared!” This quaking fear of American troops is repeated throughout the 18 hours, often silently with just quick photos of US soldiers with expressions of fear.
In a separate message he commented on the documentary’s depiction of the war after 1968:
When the US and South Vietnamese cause turned the war on the ground in a sharply different direction and began actually to win it (I was there), the cultural elite of Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock, promoted by the media, simply stopped reporting on the war so that the astonishing South Vietnamese victories over the invading North Vietnamese Army on three international fronts in 1972 was barely mentioned. Burns’s aim is to make sure the annoyingly christened (sic) “Millennials” will be locked into the leftist narrative of his own formative years -– to him, the real “Greatest Generation.”
I think we are beginning to get somewhere.
In a subsequent post, Johnson has linked to the takes of several more dissenters from the Burns narrative.
Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, was on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which, in 2010, after the FBI had amassed the goods on Mikerin, signed off on the deal to hand over 20 percent of the US uranium supply to Russia, via Rosatom purchase of Uranium One.
Robert Mueller, currently the special investigator into the Trump-collusion nothingburger, was head of the FBI at the time.
Congress was kept in the dark throughout all this.
As I've said before, I'm not big on lobbing charges of corruption at anybody, for reasons similar to those that find me unimpressed with hypocrisy. Both foibles are based on the kind of human weakness than can befall any of us with the right amount and kind of temptation. Pointing out someone's corruption usually - usually - tells us nothing about the principles at stake in a given situation.
But this is an exception. Some people, and we don't yet know exactly who, beyond this Mikerin fellow, and, of course, the Clinton crime family, were behaving corruptly, and were willing to badly compromise US national security, apparently for personal gain. Or maybe out of some ideological motivation, like hating America and thinking increasing its vulnerability would be just dandy.
And then there is most of the post-American media. What is their motivation for not covering this like the front-burner story it is?
One of the terms in the proprietary LITD lexicon is Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome. It's loosely synonymous with "squish" or "RINO," but meant to convey a bit more of the social motivations behind squishiness. The whole mindset of, "I see these people every day in the Capitol Hill mess. Our staffers play softball together. Our kids go to the same schools. I know them to be reasonable gentlemen and ladies like us. They share the same broad goals; they just have different strategies for arriving at them."
And we, out here in flyover country, know that something is badly amiss in that outlook. We know that the Democrat party has increasingly, ever since Michael Harrington et al, back in the 1970s, said, "Let's eschew in-the-streets radicalism, at least for the time being, and return to the fold. Let's go back to journalism school, law school, divinity school, even business school, and enter those realms and work our change from within those institutions."
(Of course, some Dems now feels the time is ripe for another round of in-the-streets radicalism, but many are still in suit-and-tie mode.)
The point being, Dems hate basic human freedom. They are, in fact, an enemy (along with radical Islam and Communism.)
And we know what Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome looks like. It lost Republicans the presidential elections of 1996, 2008 and 2012. It shows up in the writing of Pete Wehner, David Brooks and Jennifer Rubin.
I have long thought Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell comes in for too much ire. His ACU ratings have always been fairly high, and he as is well-versed in how to wield leverage with arcane Senate rules as they come.
But you have to ask, why doesn't more get done, with such a guy at the helm?
Mollie Hemingway at The Federalistlooks into this, from the standpoint of the friendly little meeting and presser McConnell had with Trump the other day:
On Monday, President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell held a press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House. One reporter asked about Steve Bannon’s plan to primary Republican senators. McConnell responded:
LEADER MCCONNELL: Look, you know, the goal here is to win elections in November. Back in 2010 and 2012, we nominated several candidates — Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock. They’re not in the Senate. And the reason for that was that they were not able to appeal to a broader electorate in the general election.
My goal as the leader of the Republican Party in the Senate is to keep us in the majority. The way you do that is not complicated. You have to have nominate people who can actually win, because winners make policy and losers go home. We changed the business model in 2014; we nominated people who could win everywhere. We took the majority in the Senate. We had one skirmish in 2016; we kept the majority in the Senate. So our operating approach will be to support our incumbents and, in open seats, to seek to help nominate people who can actually win in November. That’s my approach and that’s the way you keep a governing majority.
On the one hand, that’s absolutely true. Having “better” or “more conservative” nominees doesn’t mean much if they all lose in the general election. But has the McConnell-led establishment really done such a good job of weighing in on Republican primaries? They always like to bring up Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Todd Akin, and Richard Mourdock, who defeated more establishment opponents in early contests. But they leave out a lot of other information.
A key component of that other information is McConnell's role in the elections of the Senate's current true heroes:
. . . there are plenty of senators McConnell opposed who made it to the Senate despite his best efforts. As it happens, these are some of the most conservative men in the Senate. McConnell strenuously fought some of these candidates, including Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Ben Sasse. Had the establishment been more open to the base of the party, they would be in a much better situation now.
Hemingway goes on to talk about more recent sides McConnell has taken in legislative races, but the above is enough for me.
This must be remembered when taking fresh assessments of McConnell. The guy must be watched closely.
Sessions justified the firing of Director Comey during his testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and asserted that the errors Comey made in the Clinton case were far more devastating than people realize.
“Sen. [Dianne] Feinstein, I don’t think it’s been fully understood the significance of the error that Mr. Comey made on the Clinton matter,” Sessions said. “I don’t think I’ve heard of a situation in which a major case in which Department of Justice prosecutors were involved in an investigation that the investigative agency announces the closure of the investigation.”
“And then a few weeks before this happened, he was testifying before the Congress … and he said he thought he did the right thing and would do it again,” Sessions recalled. “So the Deputy Attorney General [Rod] Rosenstein … said that was a usurpation of the position of the Department of Justice.”
“Particularly, we were concerned that he had reaffirmed that he would do it again,” he declared. “I think that was a basis call that we needed a fresh start at the FBI.”
I think in particular about the July 2016 presser, at which he spent the better part of fifteen minutes laying out the case for her indictment, and then concluded by tersely declining to do so.
I don't get the guy. There's nothing cocky about his demeanor. He's actually kind of mild-mannered. No less a paragon of principle and legal erudition than Andrew McCarthy considers him a friend.
I still think the likeliest explanation is that he was leaned on.
I actually think that's true of Loretta Lynch as well.
Predatory sexual behavior by powerful men has been a prominent cultural theme so far in 2017, has it not? Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly and Eric Boling at Fox News were all brought low, as was Harvey Weinstein and now Roy Price of Amazon Studios. We've had, in the course of discussions about these figures, opportunity to review the transgressions of previously exposed (excuse the pun) practitioners of socio-sexual leverage such as Anthony Weiner, Roman Polanski and Bill Clinton. Donald Trump's remarks to Billy Bush and Howard Stern have resurfaced in this context.
You've no doubt seen that it has led to a hashtag-me-too response on social media that, like the hashtag-bring-back-our-girls effort a few years back in response to Boko Haram's kidnapping of 200 schoolgirls in Nigeria, is a feeble attempt at a sense of moving the needle, "making a difference," in the face of plain and brutal facts.
Charges of hypocrisy are ripe for the picking on both sides of the ideological spectrum. The Fox News personalities made themselves easy targets for those who wanted to point out the hollow nature of these men's public championing of traditionally understood virtue. The leftist - "progressive" - ne'er-do-wells of the film industry and Democrat politics set back any claims of their party's sincerity in carrying the banner of gender equality and "empowerment" of women immeasurably.
The two phenomena of the mid-twentieth century that upheaved the traditional understanding of distinct gender traits and family formation were the founding of Playboy in 1953 and the radical wave of feminism that held sway throughout the 1970s. The stark opposition in which these two developments stood to each other was absolute for several years, but, alas, along came a day when the lines became blurred.
Playboy was the expression of Hugh Hefner's hopelessly unrealistic belief that men and women could each regard casual sex as enjoyable and innocuous as did the other. What was required to have this work merely in theory, though, let alone practice, was for all other aspects of gender difference to remain in place, since that was the basis for the appeal of each to the other. Men were expected to have the builds, voices, and more importantly, dispositions that men had always had, and women were expected to have the physical curviness, softness to the touch, fragrance and daintiness that the traditional romantic impulse had celebrated in poem and song (by male writers).
The problem was that changing the sexual dynamic without changing anything about the surrounding context showed up the same old power dynamic that existed prior to the Playboy era.
If one tries to play the thought game of imagining the mirror opposite of the Playboy phenomenon - a female publishing magnate who had built her empire on a magazine featuring nude photos of males, as well as a string of nightclubs featuring male servers dressed as bunnies - it falls flat. It quickly becomes a thing of preposterous impossibility.
Then there was the radical feminism of the 1970s, the heyday of Robin Morgan, Germaine Greer, Kate Millett and Susan Brownmiller. It jarred society, like no previous wave of feminism, into challenging some of humankind's bedrock assumptions. Why should a woman take a man's last name upon getting married? Why do women wear cosmetics and jewelry? Why is chivalry considered a social good?
Questions worth asking, since the case could be made for the inherent unfairness of these norms.
The conclusion that it was indeed unfair, expressed in burnt bras, the eschewing of makeup, two-surname marriages and unshaved legs, did not, as a cursory look at cultural history of recent decades indicates, catch on. The beauty and fashion industries forged ahead as strong as ever, and the unadorned look was relegated to women's music festivals, which were largely attended by lesbians.
Then came the 1980s and a notion that oddly combined the Hefnerian wish for randiness to be found in the same kind and degree in both genders with the broader forms of equality sought by 1970s feminists. This was most notably embodied in the persona of the dance-pop performer Madonna, which served as the prototype for a parade of such music-industry products up to the present day.
It's worth noting that that era also gave us Prince and Michael Jackson, whose androgynous takes on maleness were pointing the way to a diminishment of universally understood masculinity.
There were forms of backlash, most notably on the male side. These took the pop-culture forms of hip-hop, thrash metal, violent video games, extreme sports, and pornography utterly devoid of even the slightest pretense of traditional seduction. The common element in these forms of diversion is gratification of an adolescent urge to shut out the larger world and turn oneself into a self-contained conduit of purposeless energy.
Still, the larger culture did try to find some kind of stage on which the new definitions for masculinity, femininity, and the interaction thereof could get played out. Hollywood turned out date flicks and cinematic treatments of Elizabethan, Bildungsroman and Victorian novels, testing out versions of the strong female protagonist and the well-meaning guy who is getting the hang of melding lives with such a person. The restaurant and hospitality industries catered to, and found a receptive consuming public in, couples keenly interested in injecting some romance into their hectic have-it-all lives.
But, as the years have gone by, there's been a growing sense that it's a jungle out there. With the traditional notions of what a gentleman is, and what a lady is, having been officially deemed hopelessly antiquated, everyone was on his own or her own in defining the ancient art of coming together.
It got very cold on college campuses. Consent forms and safe-dating seminars became commonplace.
Finally, dating pretty much went out of vogue.
Meanwhile, the slippery slope from ridding state legal codes of sodomy laws to transgender bathrooms was a factor in our "evolution."
A lot of trends and splinterings-off therefrom have come along in the past seventy years, some contradictory and some just plain strange.
What didn't change was the underlying intrinsic traits that make for male nature and female nature. That's because no manifesto, no music festival, not even genital-mangling surgical procedures, can alter the DNA in every cell of a male or a female body.
Thus, while certain trappings of the Harvey Weinstein saga, such as fundraisers for abortion advocacy, are relatively new, the underlying dynamic has been around as long as humans have been organized into societies. Some ambitious, aggressive guys amass a lot of power and look for ways to manipulate pretty young women into serving as their playthings.
Male energy, not channeled according to the way it was designed to be channeled, will come out in ugly ways.
We opened Pandora's box. We ate of the tree by which we now know evil.
There's only one recourse, and it's not fun from a pop-culture standpoint. We must all become cognizant of the necessity for self-restraint.
Both masculinity and femininity are powerful forces, and must be channeled with extreme care. To unleash in wholesale fashion either or both of them is to invite first widespread distrust, then societal brittleness, and then complete chaos.
For women to take precautions, such as being mindful of their attire, being mindful of safe walking routes, and, yes, carrying a gun, and, more generally, comporting themselves with unmistakable self-respect, is not self-relegation to disadvantaged status. It's merely recognizing the world as it is actually constructed.
For men to acknowledge their inherent rowdiness, as well as their ability to objectify and depersonalize any and all aspects of this world, including the women they encounter, and to make a point of riding herd over these traits, is not to surrender any power. In fact, it is the harnessing of a formidably concentrated form of that power, a form that can build quarter-mile-high office towers, invent ever-faster forms of transportation, and hone the ability to find diplomatic resolution to the world's thorniest International problems.
We must relearn being ladies and gentlemen. It's the only way out of the jungle.
There are two stories up at Red State right now that really make me glad I didn't vote for Squirrel-Hair.
How's this for sensitive handling of the deaths of the four Green Berets killed in Niger:
Reporters asked Trump on Monday why he had not spoken or tweeted publicly about the four men — Army Sgt. La David Johnson, Staff Sgt. Bryan Black, Staff Sgt. Dustin Wright, and Staff Sgt. Jeremiah Johnson — who gave their lives for their country in Niger on October 4.
Trump could have offered his condolences to the families of the fallen and left it at that. But because our president is”Showman” Trump, the issue quickly turned political. Trump said he had not yet called the families of the fallen soldiers, and defended his failure to do so after two weeks.
“President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls … I call when it’s appropriate,” Trump said, adding, “I will at some point during the period of time call the parents.”
And it's going to come across as so genuine when he does.
Then there's his response to McCain's remarks about nationalism:
The war of words between President Trump and Senator John McCain rolls on.
I’d say it began when candidate Trump hit at McCain during the primaries, suggesting McCain was a “hero” only because he was captured, and that he preferred those who didn’t get captured.
It’s been a back and forth ride, since then. Last night, however, Senator McCain gave a speech that some felt was a not-so-thinly-veiled swipe at Trump.
“To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of Earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history,” McCain said at the National Constitution Center, where he was awarded the Liberty Medal.
It certainly sounds like Trump.
The president, thin-skinned and intensely sensitive to even the slightest perceived criticism, fired back in a radio broadcast earlier today.
“People have to careful, because at some point I fight back,” Trump told WMAL radio host Chris Plante. “I’m being very nice. I’m being very, very nice. But at some point I fight back, and it won’t be pretty.”
