The narrow way of refusing to compromise principle

There are two disturbing points of view being put forth on conservative - respectable conservative - websites today. Challenging them is a daunting task, because they offer compelling reasons to sign on.

The first is Patrick Poole's piece at PJ Media on how the UK is indeed rotten with jihadists, and how that is the main point, not Trump's retweets of videos first put up by Britain First. He only takes three paragraphs to dispense with Theresa May's outrage at the retweets (in the course of which he acknowledges that one of the three videos is indeed not of a Muslim youth beating up a handicapped person), and then launches into admittedly exhaustive documentation of the sheer numbers involved in the influx, as well as some recent terrorist activity - as if most PJ Media readers didn't already know and feel alarm about the jihadist flood. They do. But May's point - and the point of others in Parliament, as well as stateside opinion outlets, including this blog - is indeed the main point. Trump used material generated by an organization that "conducts “Christian Patrols” of neighborhoods, [and that] send[s] groups of thugs to invade mosques."
He used the most inflammatory way to get across the point that Britain is imperiled by a jihadist influx, and it damaged what credibility and goodwill there was extended to him by the current British government.

Of course, Trump's blindly devoted base has shown up immediately in the comment threads of columns and blog posts about this, saying that we finally have a real fighter unafraid of political correctness and effete British sensibilities. As always, the base zealots are willing to bulldoze over anyone and anything with no regard to strategic considerations.

For crying out loud, even Paul Joseph Watson at Infowars suggested that Trump back away from this tactic.

The same principle can be seen in the other opinion referenced above. It is yet another attempt at justifying Alabamians' votes for Roy Moore. The author's credentials are impressive. He's a professor of philosophy at Ouachita Baptist University, and a veteran of the 82nd Airborne Division. He's writing at The Federalist. 

Tully Borland (the author) is willing to concede that Moore is a "dirtbag." Even on this point, though, he equivocates, going to the argument we've seen elsewhere, that Southern culture has traditionally looked at the pairing of grown men and teenage girls as a benign convention.

(And the drawing of a parallel to George S. Patton is a telling touch of yee-haw-ism, a nod of admiration for those who are " profane and foul-mouthed, [and] often an embarrassment to [their] more well-behaved and refined chain of command.")

But it's the even-if-all-the-allegations-are-true-it's-the-moral-thing-to-do-to-vote-for-him conclusion that contributes to the contemporary self-poisoning of the conservative movement.

Yes, Doug Jones cavalierly supports the extermination of fetal Americans, even those who are seconds away from being delivered. He's also resolutely left-of-center generally. 

But here, as with the first example (it's worth it to retweet material from a hate group in order to make the point that Britain's jihadist problem requires a sense of urgency), we are back to the binary-choice argument that delivered so many formerly admirable opinion leaders on the right into the camp of Trump during last year's campaign.

One argument that the binary-choice crowd trots out to justify its position is that scripture is full of examples of God using decidedly flawed people for grand missions. King David is usually among those cited. 

What must be remembered is that it was God doing the choosing, not human beings. It's also worth noting that figures so selected by God began to show some humility and awe about what was planned for them. You get none of that from the likes of Trump or Moore.

So what does one do in these cases?

You keep a steady-as-she-goes perspective. You do not sign on to anything that you will acknowledge is morally flawed. You just don't. 

In the first case, you keep making the clear distinction between the use of a toxic source for the argument that Britain has a jihad crisis, and the jihad crisis itself. And you refuse to be cowed by those who would say that you're making too much of the matter. 

In the second case, if you are an Alabama voter, you stay home on Election Day. And if you are a citizen of some other locale, you keep your mouth shut about matters in which the truth is not unmistakably clear. Everyone agrees there are crucial facts we do not know, so everyone needs to zip it. (Although, at the very least, there is the pretty well established fact that he liked to date teens when he was in his thirties.)

It's a steep and narrow path, but that makes it all the more imperative not to be sloppy about embarking on it. 

If you want to talk about a binary choice, at every moment, each of us is faced with one. One decision furthers the advance of God's kingdom, and the other maintains the brokenness and confusion of this world.

Someone please take his phone away - today's edition

It's confirmed that North Korea can hit anyplace in the US mainland with an ICBM tipped with a nuclear payload.

Meanwhile, our president is retweeting tweets first put up by a deputy leader of Britain First, which was founded in 2011 by neo-fascists. The deputy leader's name is Jayda Fransen, and she's up to her eyeballs in legal trouble in the UK, stemming from her incendiary speeches and literature.

By the way, the kid beating up the kid on crutches in one of the videos Fransen posted is not a Muslim.

DJT also tweeted about a situation from 2001, when MSNBC's Joe Scarborough was in the House of Representatives. A staffer died in his office, and it was quickly proven that she'd collapsed and hit her head due to a heart condition. There is no mystery surrounding it, other than in the minds of hard-left gotcha types - and, apparently, our president.

He's also now backpedaling on his concession that the Access Hollywood "grab-'em-by-the-p----" tape is real.

Allahpundit at Hot Air speaks plainly about what we can now conclude:

The president isn’t a pretend conspiracy theorist because he knows it plays well with populists. He’s a conspiracy theorist. At this point there’s a nonzero chance that he also privately thinks we don’t know the “real story” of 9/11 either. If the “deep state” keeps messing with him, perhaps we’ll find out.

His zealot base, his pundit-world water-carriers, and even the more sober-minded of those observers who constantly weigh his pros and cons (and always seem to conclude that, on balance, he's doing well) are always eager to portray those who find him unfit - those on the left, certainly, but more to the point those of us on the right - as a dwindling lot.

I ain't buyin' it. His poll numbers would be higher if that were the case.

I repeat, we could have had the good achievements without the accompanying train wreck.

Another just-wow moment in the sexual-shenanigans avalanche

NBC fires Matt Lauer. The world finds out about it as Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kobt announce it at the top of this morning's installment of Today.

Sending up a little prayer that Matt use his newfound free time to contemplate the matter of rules discussed in the post below.

You will live by some set of rules

Star Parker's latest Townhall column gets right to the point. Two paragraphs in, she offers an excerpt from George Washington's 1796 Farewell Address as the only antidote we need to the problem of sexual harassment in the public sphere:

"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. ... And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be managed without religion."

Atheists, secular agnostics and other such modern types will no doubt roll their eyes at the employment of the president's statement as contemporary guide for a healthy America.

But the fact is that we will all wind up following some set of rules:

Society, all human life, is guided by rules. The only question before us is: What are the rules that we choose to live by?

Washington's point is crucial. In a free society, one in which we want to minimize government and political control, we must maximize self-governance. Religion, and the morality that emerges from it, provides the rules by which free men and women govern their own behavior. 

Parker says that there are only two alternatives to the rules Washington endorses: trying to live without rules, which, experience shows, leads to utter chaos and the reversion of the human species into just another type of brute creature in the animal kingdom, or rules imposed by the state. The latter is bound to work out nearly as badly as the lack of rules. Human beings, being fraught with foibles and impulses that lead to arbitrary impositions of behavior control, are bound to come up with rules that no one except those with ultimate power will like. As Parker points out, such rules are already leading to the eradication of romance and even natural friendliness in our society.

I've said before that I came to my faith walk kicking and screaming. I'm an old rock and roller from the depths of the countercultural trenches. When presented with the notion that I need to submit - to God or anyone or anything - a snarl would form on my face.

But my perspective is finally widening. I'm in an eight-week Tuesday-evening discussion group based on the materials in Andy Stanley's Starting Point, a book and video series for those either new to Christian faith, or returning to it after a hiatus of whatever length. The third chapter has to do with rules; in fact, that's the title. It makes the point that rules are inherent in any relationship. That's even going to be the case in the stone-cold relationship between the individual and the leviathan state. Now, consider the opposite arrangement: rules established by God because, like a loving parent, He wants to see us do well and live joyfully.

God's rules have the added benefit of being inescapable. People can and do escape from dictatorships. It's even possible to fudge the rules in a representative democracy. But consequences for either heeding or rebelling against God's rules are unavoidable. That's because they are a product of the way the universe is arranged, an arrangement that has to include free will in order for our reciprocation of God's love to be authentic. "Don't let your behavior be driven by lust" is a rule of the same order as "always hold mommy's hand when crossing the street." It's designed to keep you out of danger.

Again, we can see that there is no substitute for Him and His design for this universe. Any other approach falls short sooner or later.

This concludes today's public safety announcement.

Tuesday roundup

David Solway at PJ Media has a piece today that is not the sunniest of reading, but is nonetheless important for us to digest. It's a big-picture take on the flatlining of Western civilization - an overarching theme here at LITD - in which he examines five fronts on which that process is most readily apparent: language, the media, the arts, education and gender.

A taste from the section on education:

The curriculum in place is one that validates programmatic stupefaction: the serial failures of socialism are glossed over, capitalism is denounced as an unmitigated scourge, America is castigated as “uniquely evil,” Islam is uniformly extolled and terrorists are excused as merely misguided. In addition, standards have been debased all across the board in admission, hiring and graduation policies. Intellectual debate has been shut down as conservative speakers are routinely ostracized or disinvited. Students are coddled in “safe spaces” where they are spared unfamiliar or disturbing ideas. When the object of the educational institution is to dumb down and indoctrinate, then it has nothing in common what we once understood as education: the acquisition of knowledge and fostering the ability to think.

From the section on the arts:

Art in the widest sense of the term—painting, sculpture, drama, poetry, fiction—has betrayed its fundamental mandate of producing meaning and beauty. It has become increasingly ugly, trivial, self-referential and devoid of both aesthetic value and authentic content, a vacuous parody of its ancestral vitality. 

A lot of good commentary out there on Trump's major gaffe at the Navajo Code Talkers ceremony yesterday. As with so many of his cringe-inducing blurtings, there is layer upon layer of consideration at play here. Warren did indeed make possible this train wreck by lying about being Cherokee in order to qualify for an affirmative-action spot when Harvard was hiring folks for a position teaching her specialty. The proper way to mock her for this would be to call her "Fauxcahontas," as has been done numerous times. By using "Pocahontas,"  the real name of a venerated historical figure, Trump gave the identity-politics hornet's next a sound thwacking and even brought out the race-card brigade. But all this is beside the main point, which Jim Jamitis at Red State describes quite tidily:

Trump is still out of line. It’s not because of racial insensitivity or slurs, but because he took an event that was intended to honor American veterans and heroes and used it as a platform for his poo-flinging monkey routine. He dishonored men who made a critical and unique contribution to the defeat of the Axis Powers during World War Two. These men fought for a country that historically didn’t treat them very well and they deserve recognition. They didn’t deserve to have their moment crapped upon by our classless lout of a president.

Erdogan is said to be pleased with how last weekend's phone call with Trump went, and Jazz Shaw at Hot Air says that that should be cause for concern:

Keep in mind that Erdogan is keeping a large number of balls in the air right now. He’s still in the midst of a spat with Germany that’s threatened to break out into a full-blown diplomatic crisis. While Turkey dances around the idea of EU membership and their position in NATO, Erdogan is forging stronger alliances with Russia, Iran and Venezuela. 

Erdogan is still holding Americans hostage, including Pastor Andrew Brunson (who has been held for more than a year now), and is crushing opposition to his regime brutally inside his country. If our own president is going to be “on the same wavelength” with him, we really should be getting something out of this deal. To date, there’s no sign of that.

Project Veritas, which did such stellar work exposing ACORN and Planned Parenthood as agents of civilizational rot, has without question jumped the shark with the attempt to fool the Washington Post into thinking it had someone making false allegations against Roy Moore on its hands. The double agent who approached the paper was exposed as lying about lying and she and O'Keefe now have egg on their faces that probably can't be wiped off.

The disarray at the CFPB is what you get when the executive branch exceeds its constitutionally specified mission

The basics of the situation are that the Bureau's head, Richard Cordray, rather abruptly announced that he'd be stepping down as of the end of the business day on Friday, and Trump appointed Mick Mulvaney to take his place on an interim basis. He'd be handling those duties in addition to continuing as budget director. Alas, Cordray's immediate underling, Leandra English sees the situation otherwise and is suing to keep Mulvaney from assuming the position.

Ronald Rubin at NRO provides the important backstory on Cordray:

Ambitious, cerebral, and socially awkward, Cordray had alternated between stints as an accomplished lawyer and a mediocre politician before he lost Ohio’s attorney-general election in 2010 and Elizabeth Warren, then a presidential assistant, hired him to lead the nascent bureau’s enforcement division. The following July, President Obama bypassed Warren and instead nominated Cordray to be the CFPB’s first director. In the marathon standoff that ensued, Republican senators filibustered the nomination, Obama installed Cordray by using an unconstitutional recess appointment, Democrats threatened to change the filibuster rules, and Republicans surrendered. On July 16, 2013, the Senate confirmed the temporary director to a five-year term.

Perhaps it was this two-year ordeal that turned Cordray into a cynical partisan mercenary. The University of Chicago Law School graduate understood the harm that anti-market policies cause consumers, but whenever newly elected Senator Warren and progressive groups pressured him to pursue their agenda, he faithfully delivered.

By 2017, there was no denying the ugly truth. Cordray cared about consumers, but he was consumed by politics. Since 2010, Republicans have argued that the CFPB’s unique structure — an independent agency whose single director the president can fire only for cause, with guaranteed funding through Federal Reserve Bank profits rather than the congressional appropriation process — is a recipe for government abuse, if not unconstitutional. Cordray proved them right.

Warren built a political battleship, and Cordray deployed it. The bureau’s powerful media division dictated policy to its regulatory professionals and relentlessly exaggerated the agency’s achievements in daily press releases and social-media posts. Political operatives used the CFPB’s super-independence to stonewall congressional subpoenas and hide unethical investigation tactics, internal discrimination problems, and other inconvenient facts. Republican critics were dismissed as Wall Street sycophants.

Meanwhile, millions of dollars were diverted from the CFPB to Democratic allies. From 2014 to 2017, the bureau paid $11 million a year to rent office space in an Obama fundraiser’s building. The Dodd-Frank Act allowed the CFPB to send the civil money penalties collected in its enforcement actions to a trustee of its choice, who, after taking a healthy cut, distributed the funds to ostensible victims in unrelated matters. The maneuver both enriched Democratic trustees and transformed fines extracted from defenseless businesses based on their deep pockets rather than actual consumer harm into “over $12 billion in damages returned to 29 million injured consumers.” To spread such propaganda, the bureau paid over $43 million to GMMB, the liberal advocacy group that created ads for the Obama and Hillary Clinton presidential campaigns.

The 2016 election almost ended Cordray’s tenure. Despite high-profile litigation and debate over what, if any, justification the new Republican president needed to fire him, the legal remedy for unwarranted removal would probably have been back pay, not reinstatement. Cordray survived only because the president’s advisers felt that making the director a martyr would help his expected Ohio gubernatorial campaign. They underestimated him.

Cordray spent the first half of 2017 quietly promoting and entrenching faithful Democratic employees to obstruct his Republican successor. On June 30, he awarded GMMB an additional $14.79 million contract. Ten days later, he delivered a gift to big Democratic donors in the plaintiff’s bar: a rule banning financial businesses from using contractual arbitration clauses to prevent consumers from joining class-action lawsuits. Cordray argued that the lawsuits were necessary to prevent deceptive practices because individuals rarely sue over improper bank fees and other small damages. Of course, the CFPB was created to prosecute such violations, but he said that limited resources prevented it from sufficiently protecting consumers. He then unveiled a video titled “CFPB’s New Arbitration Rule: Take Action Together,” an expensive GMMB creation reminiscent of Clinton’s “Stronger Together” ads. Republicans were forced to use the Congressional Review Act to block the rule; Democrats gained a talking point for the midterm elections. 

Joe Cunningham at Red State explains that such partisan hackery is now coming back to bite the Dems:

Here’s what happened, in a nutshell: The Democrats thought they had a permanent majority, and so they allowed Obama to consolidate this power. They created the CFPB as a means of allowing a Democratic president to regulate the financial sector without legislative oversight. They allowed unrestrained executive power over many U.S. agencies without a care as to what would happen if a Republican took over as President of the United States.

They thought that idea was laughable.

Well, here we are. We have President Trump with unfettered power across many executive agencies, including the CFPB. At best, we’ll get an argument about recess appointments, maybe, but Trump has the legal authority here, unless a court says different.

And, if a court does say that Trump doesn’t have the legal authority to make this appointment, then the Trump administration just has to point back to the D.C. Circuit’s opinion that the entire agency is unconstitutional anyway and ask Congress to cut its funding.

The Democrats have backed themselves into a corner here, not realizing that the Republicans could and would take the highest office in the land and use it to wield influence over the same agencies they were fine with their own president wielding influence over. 

When you take a wild-west approach to government rather than follow what the Constitution says about the specified functions of each branch, you are a fool for assuming that you'll always have an advantage over your adversaries. And the more loosey-goosey the "independent-agency" designation, the less sure you can be about things turning out as you intended.

Dueling summits and the emergence of a bipolar Middle East

You have these three countries convening in Sochi:

The trilateral meeting between Iran, Russia and Turkey in the Russian resort of Sochi this week was "a right step, at the right time" for stability in Syria, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad.

Russia's Vladimir Putin won the backing of Turkey and Iran on Wednesday to host a Syrian peace congress, taking the central role in a major diplomatic push to finally end a civil war all but won by Assad.

“Sochi summit … was a right step at the right time," Rouhani was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA on Saturday in a phone call with Tehran’s main regional ally.

He said a national congress to hold face-to-face talks between government and opposition could be "a step towards stability and security of Syria."

Iran has signed large economic contracts with Syria, reaping what appear to be lucrative rewards for helping Assad in his fight against rebel groups and Islamic State militants.

"Tehran is ready to have an active role in reconstruction of Syria," Rouhani added.

The chief commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, who has sent weapons and thousands of soldiers to Syria to prop up Assad's regime, also said on Thursday that their forces were ready to help rebuild Syria and bring about a lasting “ceasefire” there.

And these 41 countries meeting in Riyadh:

Saudi Arabia's crown prince vowed to "pursue terrorists until they are wiped from the face of the earth" as officials from 40 Muslim countries gathered Sunday in the first meeting of an Islamic counter-terrorism alliance.

"In past years, terrorism has been functioning in all of our countries... with no coordination" among national authorities, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is also Saudi defence minister, said in his keynote address to the gathering in Riyadh.

"This ends today, with this alliance."

The summit is the first meeting of defence ministers and other senior officials from the Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition, which officially counts 41 countries and identifies as a "pan-Islamic unified front" against violent extremism.

The alliance was announced in 2015 under the auspices of Prince Mohammed, whose rapid ascent since his appointment as heir to the throne in June has shaken the political scene across the region.

Sunday's meeting comes as several military coalitions, including key Saudi ally the United States, battle to push the Islamic State group from its last remaining bastions in Iraq and Syria.

The alliance groups largely, although not exclusively, Sunni-majority or Sunni-ruled countries.

It excludes Saudi Arabia's arch-rival, Shiite-dominated Iran, as well as Syria and Iraq, whose leaders have close ties to Tehran.

A player to watch in all this is Turkey. Has Erdogan decided that his bread is buttered on a particular side?

And then there's the phone conversation the other day between Trump and Erdogan, in which Trump says he would quit arming the Kurdish fighters in Syria.  How does this fit with what Mackubin Owens sees as an emerging Trump Doctrine, one built on healthy nationalism, a state-centric view of international politics, armed diplomacy, prioritizing of economic growth and leveraging the new geopolitics of energy, and a defense of (classical) liberal principles? Is it of a piece with such a doctrine, or would that be expecting too much consistency from a guy known for winging it?

And then there's the nationalist fervor within Iran that is uniting pro-regime zealots and reformists.

Is this doctrine, if it really is shaping up to be a thing, adequate for addressing that?

Someone please take away his phone - today's edition

CNN is once again the target of DJT's obstreperous engagement with social media:

.@FoxNews is MUCH more important in the United States than CNN, but outside of the U.S., CNN International is still a major source of (Fake) news, and they represent our Nation to the WORLD very poorly. The outside world does not see the truth from them!

Look, no reasonable person is going to argue anything other than that everyone here is protected by the First Amendment, including Trump. He's president, but he's also a citizen, and can say whatever he wants. But there is the strong odor here of the most powerful government official of all influencing the broadcast-media marketplace - playing favorites. There's also the point I've seen made a few places today that this ups the danger level to CNN's international correspondents. It's the same principle we saw at work in the dustup - carried out on Twitter - over the basketball players:

Does Trump's tweet not send a message to the Chinese government / Communist party along the lines of, "We want our people back in situations like this, if they genuflect before me while still in your custody. If they don't, you can have 'em"?

It applies here as well: "Those fake news peddlers don't pay me proper obeisance. You can harass then all you want."

But most of all, once again, it's just petty.

And this is the factor that the likes of Deroy Murdoch leave out of their lists of what has undeniably and laudably been steered, policy-wise in a conservative direction since mid-January. All those accomplishments are great, but, as I've said before, a pattern has been established, one of one or two great policy-level moves followed by one or two childish and reckless tweets that ruin the whole effect.

No, Mr. Murdoch, I don't thank Donald Trump for those things. I guess I thank him for listening to someone's advice and appointing people with actual consistent vision to implement those things, but your position comes dangerously close to outright Hannity-ism.

Beyond our debt, beyond being imperiled by threats such as North Korea and Iran, beyond the slant of federal courts, beyond the regulatory stranglehold now being loosened, this country's greatest problem is societal fragmenting. Polarization. And Trump not only fails to unify us, but by having assumed the face of what the Republican Party is all about, he allows conflation of his personal bombast with conservatism in the public mind. By the very nature of his repellent personality, he's in no position to sway anybody to the conservative worldview.

This seems to be fine with those who get enthused about him as a person. Yes, policies are, and will continue to be, steered in a more favorable direction, but great numbers of citizens (think the poll numbers for millennials who think well of socialism) will remain unconvinced that this is a good thing.

He's a clown show surrounded by some great statesmen. To be satisfied with the mixed bag resulting therefrom is to sign on to a paltry view of what an American revival should be.

The difference a real church can make to a fledgling Christian

I've written a few posts about my return to church.

It was indeed a return, as I was a fairly regular attendee growing up. Through, I think, fourth grade, my peer group would stay in the sanctuary through a particular portion of the service and then we'd be herded off to Sunday school, which was largely of a recreational nature. Past that point, we stayed through the entire service, and then went to a much more instructional setting, concurrent with adults convening to discuss particular Biblical books or themes. I was confirmed in the ninth grade. My Sunday-morning attendance tapered off some, but I got quite involved in the Sunday-evening senior-high fellowship. My motivation by then was chiefly social; some very appealing chicks were involved, as well as a number of my buds. There were ski trips and hayrides. There was wine and making out.

I should mention that my parents rather abruptly left that church, shortly after my confirmation. I'll come back to that. Let's just say this was the late 1960s and it involved politics.

I maintained a general spiritual curiosity even as my church-centered activities had come to have little to do with that. I found out about a Baha'i Faith fellowship in our town and started attending regularly. The idea that Jesus was among a lineage of great spiritual teachers was new to me and made sense to my seventeen-year-old mind.

Then came college and my headlong plunge into the hippie ethos. Drugs led to Beat literature which led to the sermons of the Buddha, the Bhagavad Gita and the Tao Te Ching. Even wound up visiting a commune the teachings of which I'd been following for some time.

As the years progressed, however, and the concerns attendant to earning a living, becoming civically involved, navigating a rather abrupt career change, and, most significantly, surprising myself with the ideological conversion that opened the world of conservatism to me were my preoccupations, I had to admit that I'd settled into secular agnosticism. The ultimate ontological questions had moved far down the list of my daily concerns.

I wrote recently about the next step:

. . .  then the stuff that comprises most of the content of this blog became so egregious that I could find no word that more effectively characterized it than "demonic." 1 Peter 5:8 hit me right between the eyes. I saw it as far more than metaphor. America and Western civilization generally were indeed being devoured by the Devil.

As a conservative, I knew where I stood on such developments as "peace activism" (during the last years of the Cold War, fellow travelers - friends remaining from my bohemian days - were in my face constantly), climate alarmism, the notion that homosexuals could be married, and white liberalism's turning of a blind eye to the social pathologies that were the real source of the black underclass's  morass.

I look over this enumeration of the issues from those days and it looks like child's play compared to what came next: the election of a Chicago community organizer, mentored by 1960s radicals and liberation theologians, as president, codification of this notion of homosexual "marriage" in a Supreme Court decision, a significant move in the direction of socialist health care, appeasement of rogue states sworn to the West's destruction and hell-bent on acquiring nuclear arsenals, and finally, the "normalization" of that tragic phenomenon known as transgenderism.

That's when I knew that 1 Peter 5:8 was far more than metaphor.

My wife had vague, holistic notions of life's spiritual level, and it made for a generally sunny outlook on her part. Then again, she had little interest in staying abreast of the demonic developments that were appalling me.

So I began trying out this going-to-church thing. Visited a community church a few times. As a musician, it became apparent to me that the jangling-guitars sound of the praise band wasn't something I was going to be able to handle long-term. Then I attended mass at the local Roman Catholic parish for over a year. The predictable structure and recitation of basic creed appealed to me. But I refrained from taking communion. I'd duck out as that got underway.

I could see that to continue down that path was going to lead to the question of whether to officially join, so I drifted away.

Then I had a student in the rock-and-roll history course I've taught for many years at our local community college, a recovering alcoholic who was laying the groundwork for a life of ministry. He graduated and got a gig at a rural Methodist church and I'd run into him around town, always giving lip service to coming to hear him preach. When I finally did, I quickly became a regular. I now contribute the special music about one Sunday a month, help with vacation Bible school and participate in pitch-ins and such.

One thing I find in talking to congregants there about our respective formative church experiences is that they approached their childhood phases much more seriously than I did. That church from my boyhood, you see, was a Presbyterian Church USA congregation. The minister was even the PCUSA moderator during the turbulent mid-1960s.

Here's an interesting anecdote from those days: I first heard of Saul Alinsky during a service there. A girl about four years older than me attended one of his workshops in Chicago and was invited to fill in the congregation on her experience.

The final factor in my parents' leaving, just as I'd become an official member, the straw that broke the camel's back, was the PCUSA contributing to Angela Davis's defense fund during her murder trial.

People in my current church are prone to talking about when they got saved. I had no such experience. I do sometimes recall how it was to sit and listen to the minister's sermons, and what comes back to me is how abstract it all was. Every week, it seemed, he'd offer up a different take on what the cross symbolized. "So perhaps we can see the cross as a sign of . . . " It was years before I considered what a visceral event the crucifixion was, that it involved blood and torn ligaments and thirst and flies.

One thing about being in the kind of environment I now am is that these folks are able to provide a sound kind of encouragement - steeped in doctrine, not gauzy or muddled - to me as my faith walk deepens. They've been serious about it their whole lives. It would be pointless to try to jive them about being farther along than I am.

As I've said before, what has essentially happened is that I've been backed into a corner by God. I can't even formulate skeptical questions anymore. They fade like cotton candy in my mouth. I know too much to go back. It's as if, at a certain point, God said to me, "From here on out, the direction of this journey is going to be my call."

I don't do much kicking and screaming about it anymore. I can see that chaos and misery are the fruits of rebellion, and I have no use for that at my age.

Now, the key is to look back over the clear pattern of having been led to where I am and make it the basis of my faith in continuing to be led.

It all still feels a little funny to me at times, but less and less so. What really feels funny is the grotesque state of Western civilization. The idea of normalcy has been completely obliterated. On that score, what I feel is relief that I am now asking on a regular basis how to avoid being an agent of rot.

There is no answer to that except Him. There is no alternative, none that makes any actual sense, anyway, to being an agent of His grace.

Saturday roundup

Doug Bandow has a piece at The National Interest entitled "German Politics: From Boring and Stable to Unpredictable." The main point is that the two parties that have been by far the major players since the late 1940s, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats (well, there was that 1946 - 1989 period during which the eastern portion had as its for-all-intents-and-purposes exclusive party the Socialist Unity Party) have waned markedly in influence and a number of more populist groups have been on the rise. This was really brought home in Merkel's recent failed attempt to forge a grand coalition.

Germany is one of those countries that has actually been a series of nation-states, from the days of the Holy Roman Empire through the entity known as Prussia through the North German Federation, the empire of the Kaiser days, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the side-by-side German nation-states of the above-mentioned period, and the current iteration. Memorable leaders have held sway during these periods, including Frederic the Great, The first and second Wilhelms, Bismarck, the monstrous Adolph Hitler. Since his end in a Berlin bunker, the succession of leaders has been - well, somewhat boring and stable. But through it all, there has been a readily identifiable culture, one that at times has contributed some of the greatest music and literature to the world, and seen the development of a number of social-science disciplines that have come to modern prominence.

Because of the lack of political continuity, however, the rest of Europe has always had good reason to be wary of what Germany was up to. Are we entering such a period now? Also, what effect is the recent influx of immigrants having on the cultural continuity?


Ivanka Trump is taking her own entourage to the Global Entrepreneurial Summit in India, and it doesn't include any high-level State Department people.

Yesterday, I linked to two pieces by Erick Erickson in which he talks about staying put in central Georgia rather than moving to the Acela Corridor and how it's impacted his career. David French at NRO today takes the context out a level, looking at the change in the tone of Erickson's polemics as his faith has deepened and assumed central importance in his life:

Erickson built his early reputation as a fearless conservative firebrand. His language could be lacerating, his devotion to the conservative cause seemed absolute, and he was on no one’s short list of cultural peacemakers.

But life happens. No, that’s not correct; God happens. Christians are familiar with the concepts of justification and sanctification. Justification is the moment when God — through His Son’s atoning sacrifice — declares a man righteous in His sight. Sanctification is the lifelong process of spirit battling flesh, of the redeemed man’s journey to holiness. In other words, it means that we change, and God uses many different instruments to accomplish that change.

Indeed. As I said yesterday, when God positions himself front and center in one's waking consciousness, One starts looking at the basics of how one is treating other people.

This is the question before me as an opinion writer as well: how to stand unwaveringly for principles one knows to be good, right and true without copping an attitude.


The other day, I put up a post entitled "Someone Please Take Away His Phone." The particular cringe-inducing Twitter snit Trump was engaged in at that time was with LaVar Ball. Well, no one has heeded my imploring. The national embarrassment president has now geared up for his annual Twitter tussle with Time magazine over whether he'll be named Man of the Year. Only Squirrel-Hair could have the world's most powerful position and still have the world's most fragile ego. "Probably is no good." A comprehensive archive of his he-really-tweeted-that outbursts would be quite a read.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line says that Attorney General Jeff Sessions may actually be the Trump cabinet member getting the most - and most conservative - things accomplished. Fronts on which this can be seen include voting rights, immigration and identity-politics issues.

Not again

Horror in Egypt:

The Egyptian military kicked off a hunt for the attackers of a Sufi mosque in the northern Sinai, a military source said, combing the area of Friday's assault that killed at least 235 people -- thought to be the deadliest terror attack on the country's soil.

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi vowed to respond to the attack on al Rawdah mosque with "brute force." Some 109 others were injured, Egyptian state media reported.

No one has claimed responsibility, but the strike bears the hallmarks of an attack by ISIS.

The mosque is known as the birthplace of an important Sufi cleric. Sufism is a mystical branch of Islam that some ultra-orthodox Muslims consider heretical.

Jihad is by no means eradicated from this world.

 

On making my peace with plying the pundit trade from flyover country

Erick Erickson has, in the last couple of days, published two pieces on how his decision to stay in central Georgia has affected his career. One appears at The Resurgent and one at Townhall.

Early on, he considered moving to either Washington, D.C. or New York. Although he has done well for himself staying put, he is aware of the opportunity cost of doing so:

It has taken some time for me to come to terms with the fact that my career will not be what it could have been and ideas like this probably will not happen because I refuse to move to those cities. But the more I see and hear today, the more I know I made the right decision and what might have been lost career wise has been found soul-wise among my family, friends and church.

The recent revelations about the extent of debauchery in those cities, as well as Los Angeles, has confirmed his conclusion that he decided well:

It makes me not want to be anywhere near the entertainment and news industry. There are really good people in the business. I have encountered them. But I have encountered some I thought were good people and they have turned out to be monsters in the shadows. What's worse is how the behavior seems to be widespread -- lots of people knew about it or were victimized and few people said anything. How many more stories will come out?

In mid-1955 (there's that time again; you'll recall how it figures into the post immediately beneath this one), when National Review began publishing, while it exhibited touches of wit and whimsy, it held itself to the highest standards of discernment, erudition and civility.  As the years progressed, particularly after conservatism experienced some political success, most notably Reagan, more magazines and some new think tanks came along that upheld those standards. Then came talk radio, and the potential of that medium's entertainment factor became obvious to a growing number of aspirants to a broadcasting career.

Cut to the present - the Trump era - and those peddling the advent of some kind of "populism" that looks askance at the calm exchange of ideas and an art of persuasion that presumes a certain level of refinement on the part of the average American, are arguing that such standards are a hindrance to the realization of conservative goals. If one can exhibit a brash attitude, the argument goes, one can get a wide airing, on television, radio and the Internet, and in print. And have a shot at the highest echelons of celebrity that pundits can achieve.

It's hard to see how the prospect of that kind of celebrity could not infect one's more admirable goals. Cruises hosted by magazines. Invitations to be panelists at conferences. Being called an expert in one thing or another when introduced on television shows. Maybe even lengthy profiles on oneself in mainstream magazines. Hobnobbing with a greater concentration of attractive people. Who can deny the exhilaration that would come with oneself, even more than one's ideas or principles, being considered intriguing and worthy of scads of attention?

Speaking of National Review, last August, David French (who lives in a small Tennessee community) made the noteworthy point there that the biggest venues involved in the business of of giving conservatives exposure do so from a dollars-and-cents calculation:

The problem goes well beyond this cocoon effect, into the very moral and intellectual heart of the conservative movement. Like any human enterprise, Fox is filled with a wide variety of people — some good, some bad. But it is, at heart, a commercial endeavor, rather than an intellectual or spiritual one. Its fundamental priority is to make money, not to advance a particular set of ideas or values in public life.

To be clear, one of the ways that it makes money is through a very deliberate strategy of counter-programming the mainstream media. But that is an economic determination far more than an ideological one, which means that Fox’s priorities will never exactly match the conservative movement’s.

All this resonates with me, as I am well into the middle years of my life and still plying the polemicist's trade in central Indiana. It's not the kind of place where one finds a great number of cocktail parties and conferences for right-of-center pundits, save for the occasional event in Indianapolis or some nearby university, but Erickson's peace-making with his choice is one I can relate to.

The more I see people I formerly admired sign onto nebulous Trumpism, the more I have to conclude that hunger for ratings is at least a factor. Laura Ingraham's degree of media presence has surged since she hopped on that bandwagon. Has her own show on Fox now!

And the more I see of the depravity that permeates the media world generally, the more grateful I am that my own involvement with it is leavened with daily interactions with people who work with their hands and come home every night to spouses and kids - in time to have supper with them.

Much of my writing over the last few years has been for local and regional magazines, profiling small business people (for a business periodical), farmers (for a farming publication), and people involved in enhancing life in our community (for a general-interest city magazine). Walking plant floors or fields with these people, conversing with them in their downtown shops, or the offices of the agencies for which they work, has kept me in touch with a social fabric that may not have the cultural impact it once did, but that is where real caring, real dedication and real wisdom are found.

As post-America becomes wackier, I take more frequent inventory of my motives for chronicling the process. There's an anchoring effect to maneuvering through a physical and immediate social environment that is at least relatively unpolluted by what I'm reporting on. It's easier to find places to go off and pray. My level of trust in my neighbors, my spouse, even my drinking buddies, is of the highest order.

I know myself well enough to know I wouldn't do well where daily environmental reinforcement for sane living were absent.

I'm really and truly not after being a big shot. Now, seeing my principles prevail, that is worth toiling after with all the intensity I can bring to bear.

Reflections occasioned by the death of Malcolm Young

AC/DC embodied the flattening of our culture. The whole concept was a jumble of derivations, from Angus Young's schoolboy outfit, settled on after a series of other ideas, and spurred by the over-the-top theatricality that so much of the early-1970s rock world was enamored with, to the high-registered screeching of first vocalist Bon Scott and his successor Brian Johnson to the minor-penatonic-driven guitar riffs that provided the hooks for its songs. The antecedents for each of these features had originally been done with a great deal more flair, and placed in contexts that, at least on some level, had something to do with something.

From the standpoint of cultural history, the story of the band's formation is not without its interesting qualities. There was a sizable migration out of the UK in the early 1960s to Australia, and the Young brothers - including George - naturally felt a kinship with fellow expatriates when they settled in the Sydney suburbs. George's band, The Easybeats, comprised of fellow Brits who'd wound up down under, became stars in Australia and had records chart in the UK and even the US throughout the rest of the 60s. But the songs George and his composing partner Harry Vanda wrote were pointing the way for the Young ethos that would become fully developed in AC/DC: predictable, simple chord changes and a boneheaded backbeat, generic hard rock that could have come from anywhere.

Even the name exhibits an utter lack of imagination. Angus and Malcolm Young saw a reference to electric current on their sister's sewing machine. It's clear from the logo they fashioned for it, and the names of many of the albums they inflicted on the world (High Voltage, TNT, Powerage, Ballbreaker) that the intent was to proudly convey a complete lack of any kind of subtlety. The message was, "Hey, we're a bunch of testosterone-pumped guys fresh out of our teens who make no pretense about our output being anything other than an indulgence in the most primal of impulses. We make a big bang and a big boom, and that's about the long and the short of it." Consider the number of their tunes that have as their theme nothing more grand than the power of rock and roll. If the music is indeed powerful, do we need to be sold on that fact lyrically?

With regard to the antecedents to the above features, it's obvious from a cursory listening that Led Zeppelin had been a major influence. Perhaps a completely untrained ear and mind unacquainted with any kind of cultural context would have no problem putting both acts in the same category. This would be an incorrect classification. Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, guitarist and bassist respectively for Led Zeppelin, had wide-ranging experience as British session musicians prior to forming that band. John Paul Jones was classically trained and arranged the strings on tracks by the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, the band Jimmy Page spent two years in. Page had played on records by Burt Bacharach and Brenda Lee. Yes, Led Zeppelin did employ rather simplistic riffs (for which they got some rather bad reviews for their early albums), but other things were going on as well: touches of mandolin, recorder, and synthesizer, attention-grabbing rhythmic shifts and guitar parts that went far beyond the best-known figures. Led Zeppelin album cover art could be counted on to be visually intriguing, in contrast to the portraits in snarl and attitude offered by AC/DC.

Which is not to say that a case can't be made for Led Zeppelin being overestimated. Weren't they steeped in the blues?, one might ask, and didn't they treat that heritage with a great deal of respect? Well, yes, but here I'm going to risk accusations of pop-culture sacrilege by suggesting that the primitivism that characterizes the blues has an outsized place in our estimations. The guitar, piano and vocal contributions of Charley Patton, Roosevelt Sykes, Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy occupy a  comparatively narrow musical territory. While books have been written about the stylistic intricacies of these and other blues greats, the fact is that the lack of sophistication is their main appeal.

We must say this for the blues - and blues-based rock - however: it provides us a musical launching point for broader cultural understanding. To really "get" Muddy Waters, one has to become familiar with the great migration of blacks from the ranches of Texas, the cotton farms of the Delta, and the lumber camps of Louisiana to the industrial cities of the north during the first half of the twentieth century. That, in turn, opens the window onto other cultural features of that phenomenon along with the music: food, dress, social conventions (the evolution of the barn dance from the southern days to the rent party custom practiced once these people arrived in the crowded tenements of Chicago, Detroit and other Northern cities).  There is the tension between gospel and blues that most blues performers had experience with.

But there's no such historical strain for us to tap into with AC/CD. Just four white guys from anywhere who need to rock off some excess adrenaline.

Which is why I was deeply disappointed to read a glowing tribute to Malcolm Young in Red State, of all places, by Susan Wright, of all people. She gives a cursory account of the band's history, but for the most part, it refers back to her own experience:

AC/DC and the sound created by the Young brothers was pure booze-and-blues fueled rock and roll. These songs are still played at parties, before concerts, and in clubs all over the world. You can’t even think “rock and roll” and not think about AC/DC, somewhere in your mental discography of the genre.

Every jukebox in every pizza joint when I was growing up had several AC/DC songs for play.

Even today, the hipsters are wearing vintage AC/DC t-shirts.

This was probably my first favorite hard rock band, and I’m probably not the only one reading this that can say that.

Wright is such a fine writer, and has her head on refreshingly straight regarding the train wreck that is our current sociopolitical juncture, so it was lamentable indeed to see her lapse into this kind of meaningless gushing and trotting out of banalities about pizza joints.

But I have a feeling she was born well after I was. And that leads to its own set of sticky arguments.

Oh, so you have to have been born no later than the middle of 1955 to have a truly comprehensive understanding of Western cultural dynamics?

No, but it helps.

Mid-1955 was about the time cultural observers were beginning to take note of this new - well, it wasn't exactly one genre, but rather an amalgam of genres the appeal of which to adolescents was becoming apparent to savvy marketeers - musical direction, and the general consensus was alarm. In fact, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland has some film clips from that era that are presented in such a way as to convey the message, can you believe what people back then found objectionable?

And the main elements of that first wave of rock & roll are those we find some two decades later in the music of AC/DC: the simplest of chords, crudely strung together and brutally hammered out on very loud guitars, unabashedly untrained voices, and the most repetitive of rhythms.

While rock has had its moments of truly sublime achievement, these elements are always fundamental features, drawn upon in some measure. Those early critics were not wrong that this new veneration of the primitive was a marked departure from musical evolution up to that point. And it permeated other art forms as well.

One of AC/DC's best-known songs was "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution." Looking over the band's body of work, we see no reason to conclude otherwise.

I can't get too worked up over the Roy Moore situation, but it's important to say why

The Alabama Senate seat just isn't my hill to die on.

So many levels to this: let's start with Moore himself. It's a major stretch to say he embodies the central tenets of conservatism. His ham-handed gestures and utterances over the years might indicate that those tenets constitute the core of who he is, but they seem more likely to be a crude kind of marketing tool, a currying of favor with the yee-haw wing of the right-of-center voting populace. It is one thing to forthrightly proclaim the Ten Commandments as central to one's values and policy orientation, even to press for their status as the wellspring of Western legal thought; it is quite another to plunk a granite monument inscribed with them on the courthouse lawn. It is one thing to fully understand the magnitude of the jihadist threat against the West and amass all available resources to act on that understanding; it is quite another to declare that certain Illinois and Indiana municipalities are subject to sharia. It is one thing to state unflinchingly that homosexuality is statistically abnormal, runs counter to nature's design for sex as a species-propagating drive, and is, per Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6 and Leviticus 18, a violation of God's law. It is quite another to assert that it ought to be illegal.

Then there is the question of whether he's guilty or innocent of all or any of the sexual-impropriety accusations against him. He claims that the former waitress's yearbook is fake and wants to see Gloria Allred turn it over to a third party. He seems to have been a faithful husband and dutiful father since getting married. Still, there are so many stories now, each told in such detail, and bolstered by the recollections of townsfolk who recall his "weird" dating proclivities during the late 1970s that it seems unlikely that all of them have been concocted out of whole cloth. I still maintain that anybody who says that he can be presumed either completely innocent or completely guilty is jumping the gun.

Then there is there very real undesirability of Doug Jones, the Democratic candidate. He is fine with late-term abortions. He may qualify his statements about gun control by claiming to be a big Second Amendment proponent, but he goes in for that "common-sense measures" talk that is the stuff of slippery slopes.

Still, it comes down to Ben Shapiro's point: "If we’re really at the point in American politics where political opposition requires electing credibly accused child molesters, then we ought to put down ballots and pick up guns.

Then, of course, there is Donald Trump, who can be counted on to weigh in with something ridiculous, something incoherent and devoid of substance. "He says it didn't happen" is about as vacuous as it comes.

Are Moore's enthusiasts giving any thought to the bad blood that is going to be implicit in his relations with fellow Republican Senators from the get-go? Have they considered this from a branding standpoint? What if an issue comes before that chamber and its true good guys - say, Ben Sasse, Ted Cruz or Mike Lee - are passionate about a particular legislative approach to dealing with it, and Moore also vocally supports such an approach? How many microseconds do Moore fans think it will take for leftist Senators, leftist pundits and the frenzied social-media warriors to lump all these figures together and tarnish the effort?

It gets harder by the day to resist tribalist gotcha, to set as a goal the wailing and gnashing of teeth on the part of progressives. Still, resist we must. Any such wailing is merely the byproduct of what we ought to be after: the furtherance of our principles in the realms of public policy and far more importantly the culture.

I actually make this argument on the basis of absolutism. The moral relativity which we rightly ascribe to the Left will have infected us deeply, maybe fatally, if we work to send someone to Capitol Hill who plausibly acted in utter violation of what we know to be right and true.

I'll be blunt: I am wary in the extreme of anyone who is going out of his or her way to persuade us that Moore is most likely innocent when we know no such thing.

I think he should go just because it's too late to repair whatever stature he once had.

Tuesday roundup

If Robert Mugabe is indeed forced to step down as Zimbabwe's dictator (which looks ever more likely, given that he has been removed as head of his party, the Zanu-PF, which was the title that gave him his power), his successor will likely be his former bodyguard and enforcer, Emmerson Mnangagwa. Mnangagwa is an even bigger monster. The Fifth Brigade, which he employed to carry out a massacre lasting several years, was trained in North Korea.

More seismic shifts in Saudi Arabia: the country's Grand Mufti has issued a fatwa forbidding war against Jews.  This from a guy whose past pronouncements have included these:

Sheikh Abdul Aziz is not exactly a theological liberal. In March 2012, he reportedly declaredthat it was necessary to destroy all churches in Kuwait, or possibly in the region.

Earlier this year, he warned of the “depravity” of cinemas and music concerts, saying they would corrupt morals if allowed in the kingdom.

In December 2015, while calling for greater Islamic co-operation against Isis, he labelled Isis “part of the Israeli army”, thus suggesting that when it comes to Israel he is delusional.

So undoubtedly he’s not going to announce that synagogues or churches may be built in Saudi Arabia any time soon.

Nevertheless, he is the most senior cleric in the state which has served as the epicentre of Sunni Islamic fanaticism and the most austere and conservative interpretation of a religion which has Jew-hatred at its theological core. If such a man is now saying that war against the Jewish state is not holy at all but must be forbidden on religious grounds, will this not have some impact within the Islamic religious world for which holy war against the Jews is an article of faith?

H/T: Bookworm 

Stephen Moore likes several features of how the Republican tax plan - the synthesis of what the House and Senate are doing - is shaping up: elimination of state and local tax deduction, eliminating the "A"CA individual mandate, and this one, which  is actually the imposition of a new tax. He likes it (and so does LITD), because it addresses the bloat and hence the rot in post-American higher education:

Finally, there is the proposed tax on college endowments. These are massive storehouses of wealth: Harvard and Yale combined sit on a nest egg of almost $60 billion, enough to give every student free tuition at these schools from now until forever. Instead, these university endowments act like giant financial trading dynasties, with very little of the largesse going to help students pay tuition. The GOP plan would put a small tax on the unspent money in the endowments if they don't start spending the money down. My only complaint is that the tax is way too low. But the first shot against the university-industrial complex has finally been fired.

The productivity of American universities, as Richard Vedder of Ohio University has documented, continues to decline. Vedder also found that university tuitions don't go down when these schools have bigger endowments. They go up. These endowments subsidize the six- and seven-figure salaries of pompous, tired, and tenured professors (who teach four or five hours a week) and administrators. Bravo to Republicans for starting to turn off the spigot.

Colin Flaherty, author of Don't Make the Black Kids Angry, writing at The American Thinker, examines the pomposity and enormous self-regard of Pippa Biddle, a writer for Wired and a product of a blue-blood upbringing.

Pippa and her pals used to take vacations to some deprived corner of the world, spread a little whiteness around, pronounce the natives better for it, and go back home to, in her case, to captain the ski team at Miss Porter’s.

During one of her trips of “Volun-tourism,” Pippa and her pals were building some kind of school or nuclear power plant or whatever white people build in third world hellholes, which is almost always pieced out and sold off before their departing flights leave the runway. She later found out that the locals had to come in at night and tore down everything they had built that day. Then rebuilt it. Turns out that building a wall is a lot more complicated than the ladies at Miss Porter’s school realized: you need a level to make sure the wall is… well, level.

Pippa made a bit of splash in the New York Times when she declared that all the white people traveling to help black people were racist and wrongheaded and harmful. 

It could have been called Don’t Make the Entitled White Rich Girls Angry.

And Pippa was not going to stand for that anymore. Not on her watch.

Instead, Pippa decided to make a living out of writing fairy tales of hate speech the same way she built a wall: without foundation, without expertise, without anything except an overweening whiteness that allowed her to appoint herself as guardian of all things black.

With nothing on the level.

Thanks, Pippa, we got it from here: We are going to continue to document how black crime and violence is wildly out of proportion, and how reporters and public officials and trust fund babies are in denial, deceit, and delusion about it. People like you, Pippa.

Ouch!

Erick Erickson makes a point we often make here at LITD - namely, that male and female human beings are not interchangeable. Therefore, he says, men must not treat women the way they treat other men. They must treat women much better. Brings to mind the assertion John Kelly made in his presser a while back, that we used to understand that women are sacred.

 

Adding to the list becomes an hourly exercise now

Charlie Rose. Gentle, reflective Charlie Rose, for cryin' out loud. Eight accusers. Allusions to maneuvers well-known among interns and staff, such as the "shower trick" and the "crusty paws."

Def Jam Recordings mogul Russell Simmons.

New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush 

A staffer at the SEIU.


The cultural rot of the last half-century-plus that is a prominent theme here at LITD seems to run deeper than I'd imagined.

1 Peter 5:8 absolutely nails our current state of affairs.

Hard to muster any empathy for Lois Lerner

She was, you'll recall, the head of the IRS department at its Cincinnati office in charge of monitoring filings by nonprofit organizations. In that capacity, she knew some of her staff were harassing and intimidating conservative groups. Now she's trying to keep the records of her communications from those days sealed.

The LITD position: Make 'em public.

Get this: she and her assistant, Holly Paz, want to make the harassed groups the threatening party in this scenario:

During the course of the Ohio case, the tea party groups filed thousands of pages of documents, but testimony from Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz was left out of the public record because of their earlier request for privacy.

Now Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz say that since the case has been settled, there is no reason for their testimony to ever become public.

“The voluminous record of harassment and physical threats to Mss. Lerner and Paz and their families during the pendency of this litigation provides a compelling reason to seal the materials,” the women’s attorneys said.

They particularly blamed Mark Meckler, a tea party leader whose organization helped fund the class-action lawsuit, saying he helped stoke the threats against them by calling IRS agents “criminal thugs.”

“These words matter. They have created a fertile environment where threats and harassment against Mss. Lerner and Paz have flourished,” the lawyers said.

Mr. Meckler laughed when he learned about the filing.

“Four years of harassing innocent American citizens for their political beliefs, and she’s scared of a guy in a cowboy hat talking to a bunch of little old ladies at a tea party event?” he said, recounting the speech where he called IRSagents “thugs.”

He said if the depositions didn’t show any bad action on her part, then Ms. Lerner should have nothing to fear from their release to the public.

“The reality is because she knows she is guilty as the day is long and she doesn’t want people to know what she actually did,” he said.

“It’s hard to have any sympathy for the women. And frankly, I don’t believe she’s genuinely scared,” Mr. Meckler said.

I suppose comparisons to Elena Ceaucescu pleading, "We loved you like our own children!" are a bit strong, but there is certainly a whiff of the irony that accompanies any comeuppance of fallen and cornered totalitarians. And that's what Lerner, Paz and the anti-free-market-and-low-tax thugs on their staff really are.

Everything about a shameful episode like this needs to be public knowledge. It's the only way to prevent a possible recurrence.

The agency that, among all federal-government bodies, is the encapsulation of government's role as the entity with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, the agency charged with using that force to take the money of citizens using a variety of means (income tax, capital-gains tax, inheritance tax, inventory tax, etc.) had in its employ a number of people who held in utter contempt those who, quite civilly, argued for Madisonian restraint in the exercise of that power.

That is chilling.

Making the records public would be a significant step in eradicating this kind of mindset from the leviathan state.