Just wow

Trey Gowdy is leaving politics to go back to law enforcement.

Obviously, the most likely explanation is that he anticipates a Dem tsunami this fall. I hope there's a different explanation, but we all know what history shows us about midterm elections.

The obligatory SOTU post

For starters, I didn't watch it.

My band had a rehearsal for an upcoming gig, and we needed to nail down our set list. (Which we did. We're going to tear the place up.)

After perusing numerous takes, my sense is that Red State's Joe Cunningham's two-speeches formulation is about right:

Did you catch it? Did you watch or listen as President Donald Trump gave two speeches before Congress?

The first part of the speech was the positives. Essentially, “This is what we have done!” It was a roll call of the GOP’s accomplishments during Trump’s first year – including tax reform, getting rid of the individual mandate, and others. He referenced the hurricane-ravaged parts of the U.S. and Puerto Rico and mentioned both professional and civilian efforts to help affected citizens.

In this part of the speech, he was speaking to all Americans. “This is what I did for you,” he told us. “This is what I got accomplished.”

It was also a nod to his early talk of working with Democrats and negotiating. He mentioned several things Democrats want – paid family leave, more infrastructure spending, etc. – and it was meant to show the American public that Trump does have a heart and care about them.

Then, things changed a bit. If you were watching ABC, you saw the list of topics in the speech as Trump went through them. The first part of Trump’s speech ended on the topic of child care. The second part began with immigration.

It was clear what had happened. That was the part of the speech that Stephen Miller took over in writing.

The more hawkish side of the speech focused on the issues that got Trump elected, and how he intended to keep those promises. He received some “Boos” from the crowd, but he wasn’t speaking to Congress at that point. He was speaking to the base that elected him.

That much narrower audience came at a price. The wide audience is not necessarily into Trump’s promises on immigration reform (as they perceive it). They don’t necessarily want to hear more talk of war and the military. They want to see how Trump will heal America. And that is ultimately something that Trump didn’t quite address in the speech. 

I checked my Twitter feed when I got home from practice to get a sense of the immediate-aftermath  round of takes. Someone - I think maybe John Podhoretz - said that the emphasis on the hard-core criminal element in the illegal-alien population came across as a little gratuitous. Jose Miguel Cruz, director of research at the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University says at the Washington Post that the MS-13 presence in the US is statistically dwarfed by homegrown gangs like the Crips and Bloods. Then again, that's small comfort to people like Elizabeth Alvardo, Robert Mickens, Evelyn Rodriguez and Freddy Cuevas, parents of folks murdered by MS-13 monsters. 

The irony of Dems refusing to applaud for the great economic stats, including record-low minority unemployment, was striking, to say the least.

A word about how members of the Freedom-Hater Party dealt with the whole thing: Federal legislators often don't show up for the State of the Union. Is there ever 100 percent attendance? But they just don't show up. They don't use it as an opportunity to grandstand. Why did Maxine Waters have to get in front of a microphone to tell us what her plans weren't for the evening? And, yes, Luis Gutierrez's office has said he had to duck out for a meeting, but, given the identity-politics poison that regularly comes out of his mouth, including after the speech, are you buying it?

And several commentators have noted the choice of Joe Kennedy III to handle the official Dem response to the SOTU. I think Jim Geraghty at NRO has the most important perspective for us to take into consideration:

There’s a wide chasm between how Democrats perceive the Kennedys and the actual truth, and it’s not petty to keep pointing out that gap. There’s a stack of evidence showing that a lot of the Kennedys were horrible, selfish, abusive people who were somehow stage-managed and airbrushed into secular saints. The list of scandals runs generations, from lobotomizing Rosemary Kennedy, to JFK making Jackie get electroshock treatments, to the multiple allegations against William Kennedy Smith, to Patrick Kennedy driving under the influence. And of course, Chappaquiddick.

By Kennedy standards, Congressman Joe Kennedy III is an accomplished 37-year-old: Stanford and Harvard Law, two years in the Peace Corps, several years as an assistant district attorney. Defying his family stereotype, he doesn’t drink. But let’s not kid ourselves; if his name were Joe Smith and his family wasn’t an icon in American politics, he would have had a much tougher time winning a Democratic Congressional primary in Massachusetts at age 32.

That’s why there’s a good reason to cringe when Joe Kennedy III, grandson of Bobby Kennedy and great-nephew of John F. Kennedy and Ted Kennedy, stands before the nation giving the Democratic response to the State of the Union address and laments “a system forcefully rigged towards those at the top.” 

I've seen several takes on it that concluded with what we must all acknowledge: Trump will ruin the positive effect his speech had on how the public perceives him by indulging in petty, childish tweets about some perceived slight.

Which gets us to Ben Shapiro's excellent latest Townhall column, "Can A Flawed Man Be a Good President?" 

Shapiro makes the point that we recognize the contributions of great artists and athletes even as we take into account their egregious shortcomings as human beings. (I used to be bemused by a glaring incongruity I saw at a jazz-improvisation workshop I attended several years ago. Faculty used to pepper their instruction about scales and harmony with admonishments for us to stay away from dope and reckless living, even as they raved about particular Charlie Parker or Miles Davis solos.)

Can a bad man make a good president? The answer, obviously, should be yes.

What's more, the answer should have been obvious: Machiavelli suggested back in the 16th century that perhaps only a bad man can be a good politician. Machiavelli stated that virtue is an unrealistic and counterproductive standard for a statesman -- what is needed is virtu, a capacity to use virtue and vice for the achievement of a specific end. Even Aristotle, a devotee of virtue, suggested that good citizens need not be good men.

All of which makes sense. Bad men make great artists. Bad men make great athletes. Saints often die in penury; sinners often die in riches.

But the jury is still out on which is going to weigh more heavily in history's reckoning - Trump's accomplishments or, well, you know, his basic nature:

Trump's list of accomplishments is only half the story. That's because the office of the presidency is about more than mere accomplishments: It's about modeling particular behavior. Bill Clinton was a successful president, but he was not a good one: He drove the country apart, degraded our political discourse and brought dishonor to the White House. The same was true for President Richard Nixon. Doing good things as president does not mean being a good president. Being a good president requires a certain element of character.

And Trump's character is still lacking. Perhaps in the end, conservatives should ignore Trump's character defects and take the wins; I certainly cheer those wins. Perhaps in the end, Trump's character will poison the wins themselves; we won't know that for years. We do know, however, that if we believe the president has two roles -- one as a policymaker, the other as a moral model -- then President Trump can only be half-successful so long as he refuses to change himself.

Just came across this tweet from the Washington Examiner's Philip Klein that reminds us that, good bad or in-between, this speech was not the pronouncement of a conservative:

Trump SOTU: --Throws in towel on Obamacare repeal -- Wants to spend $1.5 trillion on infrastructure -- Paid family leave -- No entitlement reform

 Bottom line: State of the Union addresses can provide short-term national adrenaline rushes, but within a matter of days, we'll be talking about other stuff entirely.

Tuesday roundup

The Hoover Institution's Niall Ferguson, writing at the Boston Globe, says everybody's missing who was actually the most important figure at this year's Davos summit:

The most interesting man at Davos was not He Who Must Not Be Named. (In the style of the Harry Potter books, I’m going to omit the name of the Dark Lord, otherwise known as the president of the United States. To be frank, I’m bored of him.) No, the most interesting man at this year’s World Economic Forum was a rather scrawny 53-year-old former English teacher from Hangzhou in eastern China whose business is poised to take over the world economy: Jack Ma, the founder and chairman of Alibaba.

Ferguson says that China's embrace of e-commerce has put Ma ahead of Bezos as a guy with an eye for opportunity. He diversified Alibaba while Amazon was still just selling books.  And the world is still full of emerging markets, which Ma is poised to provide with products.

A few takes on McCabe suddenly leaving his FBI post and the House Intelligence Committee voting to release the four-page memo:

• John Hinderaker at Power Line, who compares and contrasts what Trey Gowdy and Adam Schiff have had to say about the memo release, and also reminds us that there is email documentation of how one conversation in Strzok's and Page's plot to hobble the Trump campaign / administration took place in McCabe's office.
• Victor Davis Hanson at NRO, who invites us to look at a couple of hypothetical scenarios and says in either case we wouldn't be looking a scandals right now:

Had Hillary Clinton polled ten points behind Donald Trump in early 2016, we’d have none of these scandals — not because those involved were moral actors (none were), but because Hillary would have been considered yesterday’s damaged goods and not worth any extra-legal exposure taken on her behalf.

Similarly, if the clear front-runner Hillary Clinton had won the election, we’d now have no scandals. Again, the reason is not that she and her careerist enablers did not engage in scandalous behavior, but that such foul play would have been recalibrated as rewardable fealty and absorbed into the folds of the progressive deep state.

• And just how petty and distaste can the Very Stable Genius be? Look at how he handled the news that, after Comey had been fired as FBI director, was allowed to take an official government flight back home from Los Angeles, per NBC via Susan Wright at RedState:

According to sources (and I’m guessing McCabe was a source):

Trump demanded to know why Comey was allowed to fly on an FBI plane after he had been fired, these people said. McCabe told the president he hadn’t been asked to authorize Comey’s flight, but if anyone had asked, he would have approved it, three people familiar with the call recounted to NBC News.

I’m assuming the FBI plane took him there.

Then of course, showing those New York city values, and his absolute inability to maintain any level of decency, things just went downhill from there.

The president was silent for a moment and then turned on McCabe, suggesting he ask his wife how it feels to be a loser — an apparent reference to a failed campaign for state office in Virginia that McCabe’s wife made in 2015.

McCabe replied, “OK, sir.” Trump then hung up the phone.

Was that necessary?

It was vile. It was juvenile. It was petty.

It was not necessary. McCabe’s family were not part of the job and if Trump supporters get so bent out of shape over anyone pointing out Trump’s wife’s lesbian porn shots, they had better not defend this.

Quincy Jones is interviewed in GQ. It's wide-ranging and full of eye-opening revelations. Take, for example, what he has to say about his early childhood in Chicago:

Jones spent his early years on the South Side of Chicago. His mother was taken away when he was 7—"to a mental home," he says, "for dementia praecox." His father, also called Quincy Jones, worked as a carpenter (8) for, as his son now puts it, "the most notorious gangsters on the planet, the Jones boys." It was rough and scary, and the only promising option that a young boy living within it could envision was becoming a gangster himself: "The '30s in Chicago, man. Whew. No joke. If you think today's bad… As a young kid, after my mother was taken away, my brother and I, we saw dead bodies every day. Guys hanging off of telephone poles with ice picks in their necks, man. Tommy guns and stogies, stacks of wine and liquor, big piles of money in back rooms, that's all I ever saw. Just wanted to be that."

He also speaks of what a good cook Miles Davis was (something I remember Chick Corea noting in a Miles documentary), how he (Jones) currently has 22 girlfriends in places as far-flung as Stockholm and Shanghai, and how he used to buy weed from Malcolm X when he was in Detroit. That merely scratches the surface.

Variety says that the dismal ratings for this year's Grammy embarrassment are not an outlier, but rather emblematic of the numbers for awards shows in the last few years.


Thomas Kidd, writing at The Gospel Coalition, gives us a short history of the misspelling of 18th century evangelist George Whitfield's name.

The Grammys and post-America's shame

There was the special by-remote-video appearance by Madame BleachBit reading excerpts from Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury. Let's put on our latex gloves and unpack the layers of cultural rot going on there. For starters, what does this political failure have to do with the making of musical recordings? (BTW, what the hell is that video of her cheering on "activist bitches" all about?) Then there is the fact that Wolff's discrediting has happened in record time. If he wasn't totally disgraced as an author already, his disgusting and unsubstantiated claim that Nikki Haley had an affair with the Very Stable Genius sealed the deal. Then there is the absurdity of the Grammys crowd making her the face of Trump-loathing. She lost, for cryin' out loud. Couldn't they find an up-and-comer to personify their hatred? Oh, wait. Up-and-comers in the Democrat party are in short supply right now.

And then there's the dismaying backstory to the Joy Villa pro-life dress:

Villa isn’t just an innocent pro-life activist trying to highlight the humanity of a “fetus” on her dress for the world to see. She is a prospective candidate for Congress, and a Scientologist. The former explains why she showed up at the Grammy’s this year aiming to make headlines again, and the latter is the reason why conservatives shouldn’t be taken in by her act.

Villa is, above all, an opportunist. Writing on his blog, former Scientology spokesman Mike Rinder exposed how Villa once called the President crazy, and expressed enthusiasm for obtaining “Feel the Bern” gear during the election.

And then there's that "religious" affiliation of hers:

The fact that Villa is a card-carrying and enthusiastic Scientologist is the second red flag for conservatives cheering her ensemble and potential candidacy (the first being her naked ambition for political office, which is always its own warning sign). Scientology is famous for many things, or it should be at least, and one of them is its reputation for allegedly forcing its members to obtain abortions when they work for its management arm the Sea Org.

But now wait a minute. Christian Headlines is saying that Villa's a Christian.

But then Scientology News claims her as one of their own.

Methinks Christian Headlines let wishful thinking get in the way of thorough fact-checking.

Anyway, thanks for nothin', Joy.

There was grandstanding aplenty. Kendrick Lamar, whoever the flip he is, went into a self-aggrandizing diatribe about how it's "frightening" to "watch a black man be honest in America." Camila Cabello had to prattle about DACA and Dreamers.

Anyway, then there were the performances, nearly all lame. Several of my professional-musician friends on Facebook, all of them left-leaners, came to the same conclusion.

What self-respecting human being who understands the limited time he or she has on this planet would spend three hours on that dog vomit?

As I said yesterday, A lot of the ruination taking place in post-America saddens me, but the ruination of music, as a musician and music historian, truly breaks my heart.

Neither of the two Donald Trumps should sit down with Mueller

Great piece by Andrew McCarthy at NRO today on why DJT should not sit down for an interview with Robert Mueller.

I like his two-Trumps-to-consider formulation:

See, there are two Trumps to consider here. There is the very eccentric and volatile man who is the subject of Mueller’s amorphous investigation. And there is the president of the United States, who has responsibilities to that vital public office. Here, the interests of both happen to align.

Trump's personality is such that the highly trained  Mueller team would know how to make mincemeat of any and every off-the-wall utterance that came out of such a meeting:

Trump is litigious and cocky. He has been in lots of lawsuits and has taken the measure of lots of lawyers. He may be very confident that he can handle an interview. He may be certain he has not colluded with Russia and thus convinced there’s no need to worry.

Trust me, though: He has not been sweated before like he would be in a special-counsel interview. It would be a mistake to assume that because Mueller’s team overflows with Democratic partisans, they are just like the political hacks Trump jousts with all the time. These particular prosecutors are extraordinarily good at what they do. They are not going to be cowed or charmed. If Trump agrees to speak to them, he will not be able to control the direction of the questioning; and if he loses his cool and says things that are dubious or flatly untrue, they will clean his clock.

In other words: Trump the man could walk out of an interview with Mueller in real jeopardy, despite walking into it in nothing more than a bad mood. 

Then there is the office to be considered, along with the little mater of there not being any crime at the core of Mueller's investigation:

A president of the United States should never be the subject of a criminal investigation, and should never be asked to provide testimony or evidence in a criminal investigation, in the absence of two things: solid evidence that a serious crime has been committed and a lack of any alternative means to acquire proof that is essential to the prosecution.

There is a simple reason for this: The awesome responsibilities of the presidency are more significant to the nation than the outcome of any particular criminal case. There is an exception: When there is reasonable cause to believe the president is complicit in a serious criminal offense, and that he has evidence or knowledge that would be admissible and probative. Only in those circumstances should a president be subject to subpoena, and only then should he submit to questioning. Trump has a responsibility to the office to enforce that standard.

As we have noted here since before Mueller was appointed, the Justice Department has improperly assigned a prosecutor in the absence of grounds to believe a crime has been committed. “Collusion with Russia” is not a crime, and there are presently no grounds to believe the president conspired with Putin’s regime to violate any American law.

And again, it is not criminal obstruction for a president to weigh in on whether a subordinate (such as Michael Flynn) should be investigated, or to fire a subordinate — including a subordinate (such as James Comey, or theoretically Mueller himself) who is involved in conducting an investigation, particularly an investigation that continues uninterrupted despite the firing. Whether we think these are foolish things for the president to have done is beside the point. We are talking here about whether they are criminal actions, and they are not. If the voters are repulsed and want to take it out on Trump and his party come election time, that’s democracy. It is not, however, the business of prosecutors.

Every other independent-counsel investigation in which an American president has been a subject was triggered by an actual crime. Those presidents were on notice of the contours of the probe, and of the criminality that rendered it appropriate for a prosecutor to be appointed and for a president to be questioned. That is not the case in Mueller’s probe. It has been formally described as a counterintelligence investigation, which is a national-security inquiry about a foreign country’s designs against the United States, not a criminal investigation targeting an American for prosecution on a known offense.

So, between the matter of DJT lacking a filter between his brain and mouth, and, for better or worse, his holding the office that he does, it is ill-advised of him to submit to such an interview.

How I'd love not to be sick of music

I think longtime LITD readers are aware that music is at the heart of most of my side endeavors that flesh out my career as a writer.

I play guitar. I currently play in a band the repertoire of which encompasses soul music, roots rock, swamp boogie, Chicago blues and touches of funk. We do quite a bit of original material and give great thought to what else we're going to include. I also play jazz in various configurations. Nothing really out there, mostly Great American Songbook standards and hard bop charts by the likes of Sonny Rollins, Horace Silver and Miles Davis.

I teach some guitar. My students have ranged from grade-school kids to orthopedic surgeons.

For years, much of my writing work was for a website called Indie-music.com, for which I wrote hundreds of reviews of albums by hopeful independent artists looking to break out of their local scenes, as well as interviews (notably Buddy Guy and Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls). I occasionally write some promotional material for various acts.

And I teach rock and roll history and jazz history on an adjunct basis at the local campus of our biggest state university. In the first week of each course, we sprint through the first 250 years of American music. We  take a sprint through the first 250 years of American music: the Bay Psalm Book, Stephen Foster, minstrelsy, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, vaudeville, development of the Broadway musical, Mississippi Delta barn dances and fish fries, Appalachian string bands, Chisholm Trail cowboy ballads, New Orleans marching bands, ragtime, the development of the recording industry, blues, the Kansas City scene of the 1920s-40s, the swing era, the American Federation of Musicians' recording-studio ban, the shift in the radio industry from live performances to playing records, the WWII shellack shortage, how black American music went two divergent directions (bebop and jump blues) in the wake of the end of the swing era, Johnny Otis, Lucky Millinder, the late-40s rise of the independent record labels. From there, if it's the jazz course, we embark on the semester by going down the bebop path. If it's rock, we head in the jump-blues direction.

But I run into a conundrum in the last two or three weeks in each case. That's when the syllabus says we cover developments of the last four or five decades. And I have to come up with erudite-sounding content when it seems to me it could be covered by saying, "It's all been a bunch of crap."

In the rock course, I show the students a five-part BBC documentary on the Laurel Canyon scene spanning the 1965 - 1980 period, from the Byrds to the Eagles. The milieu of the singer-songwriters, the country-rock acts, producers such as David Geffen and Lenny Waronker. I always wonder if the students, who for the last few years have primarily been millennials, are equipped by their upbringings and educations to date to see that this documentary is the story of some of the most hedonistic, hollow-souled, narcissistic morally-preening hypocrites who ever inhabited the planet.

All this comes to mind this morning as I read coverage of preparations for the upcoming Grammys. Several paragraphs are devoted to the rehearsals that Elton John and Miley Cyrus are engaged in for their performance of "Tiny Dancer." That's enough to ensure that I will be nowhere near the televising of this "ceremony." I couldn't care less about either of these people. And I'll bet there are those out there who would react with, "Really" I can see that in the case of Cyrus, but Elton John is a venerated icon." Not in my book. I thought he was overrated as soon as I heard him back in 1970. 

The rest of the offerings eaves me equally cold:

After largely being overlooked in major categories for nearly four decades, hip-hop figures prominently in this year's nods — an embrace that acknowledges the genre's ubiquity and pop influence. Jay-Z leads with eight nominations, followed by Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar with seven. Both emcees are front-runners for album of the year and landed in either record or song of the year. One of the night's highlight performances will come courtesy of an explosive set from Lamar, which will feature U2 and Dave Chappelle.

Among the other artists on tap for Sunday's show are Rihanna, DJ Khaled, Sam Smith, SZA, Luis Fonsi & Daddy Yankee, Lady Gaga, Little Big Town, Bruno Mars, Cardi B, Chris Stapleton, Emmylou Harris, Pink, Sting and Childish Gambino.

I don't ever want to hear one note from any of these people.

You see, they are all products of the bloat of the music industry that has been its main characteristic since the 1970s. Every generation since then has spawned its share of hot-shot producers that all the artists want to work with, and they are ever-more disconnected from anything resembling genuine warmth, humanity, dignity, or even actual soulfulness.

I can't stand all the talent shows that foist upon us warbler after warbler who has excelled at the formula for impressing judges and getting record deals, but who have nothing to offer humankind.

The whole thing, all the deliberations about how particular genres are evolving, about sales figures, about the staging of shows, and certainly about "wokeness," has nothing to do with anything.

Perhaps even more than the movie or television industries, the music business over the last forty-plus years has been the chief agent of cultural rot in post-America.

I don't like that I feel this way. As a musician, I want to believe that there is a place for non-phony art.

But in an age when nearly every musical act has some contrived pseudo-quirky name, when said acts usually can't keep their mouths shut about social issues, when the ever-more-extravagant awards shows inflate these people's self-importance, I don't see a path to reversing the process.

Just one more reason why I no longer place my faith in the improvement of this world in anything but the Lord.

Nothing but Him is impervious to ruin.

The many ways to view Donald Trump

There are many facets to the guy, and a lot of inconsistencies, but a thread of continuity does appear when you look at a few of these facets in tendem.

His presence at this year's Davos summit is big news, given that he's the first US president to attend since Clinton. His speech was a fairly disciplined, coherent and comprehensive statement of how he sees the US engaging the world stage on his watch. It was decisively America First, but he tempered the rough edges of that concept by saying that the US was open for business and that foreign firms would find it a great environment for placing operations.

He had to indulge in some bragging as he conveyed this, as is his wont. He also had to indulge his signature touchiness regarding the news media.

He stuck by his resolve to pull out of the climate nonsense - a definite plus in LITD's estimation.

The portion devoted to North Korea and Iran was terse but resolute. The goal on the Korean peninsula remains complete denuclearization.

Melania's absence was conspicuous, and the timing of her bow-out been duly noted in myriad media outlets. Still, with no substantiation, it's risky to flatly declare that it's a response to the Stormy Daniels revelation.

Before he left, the Very Stable Genius ruffled the feathers of a significant portion of his base with this move:

 President Donald Trump is proposing giving 1.8 million young undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship in exchange for $25 billion for his long-promised wall and a host of other strict immigration reforms, according to a White House framework proposed Thursday.

In what the White House framed as a "dramatic concession" and "compromise," Trump would accept a path to citizenship not just for the roughly 700,000 undocumented immigrants were covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program when it was ended. But the proposal would also cover those undocumented immigrants who meet the DACA criteria but did not sign up and even more who would be newly eligible under the proposal's timeframe requirements -- giving legal status and a pathway to citizenship to about 1.8 million people.

The fact that his proposal also includes measures to end chain migration, as well as measures to enforce current laws, isn't doing a great deal to ameliorate his base. Some are just plain outraged, and some are trying to see a bright side, noting that DACA people wouldn't get citizenship, hence the ability to vote, for ten years, and that an influx of new voters is all Democrats care about. Some evangelicals are pleased with it.

The LITD take is that polling data shows the American public to be capable of some nuance on the subject of immigration. They want to see both the legal and illegal kind slowed down as the nations gets its demographic and economic bearings, but they also don't want to abruptly rip people who have only known life in America from their circumstances. A path to citizenship for actual DACA people and no other kind of illegal aliens is humane and doable. So is enforcement of eVerify. The wall? Way down the scale in terms of importance.

DJT did have some noteworthy facts on his side when he did his bragging. The economic buoyancy resulting from the tax-reform bill is extending beyond bonuses and raises. There's a new upsurge in capital-equipment acquisition at a lot of companies.

But this business about tariffs on washing machines and solar panels is a glaring minus. Tariffs distort the market price of any good or service, open the possibility of trade war, and wind up raising the prices of the goods in question. This is what I mean by inconsistent.

Then there's the revelation that he considered firing Mueller in June of last year, and was talked out of it by White House counsel Don McGahn and some others. DJT cited some conflicts of interest on Mueller's part, but was convinced that the resulting firestorm would be counterproductive in the extreme.

The person of Donald Trump points up something conservatives have to reiterate often in this age of tribalism and gotcha: It is possible to acknowledge two or more things as fact that might not appear at first glance to be congruous.

Donald Trump is in many ways a loathsome human being. He has no ideological rudder, he lacks a filter between his brain and mouth, he's not much of a reader, he's thin-skinned and narcissistic, and he doesn't seem too repentant about his sybaritic past. On the other hand, America is dealing with the rest of the world from a position of strength it hasn't enjoyed in over a decade.

In fact, those two facets of who he is impact each other. I'm quite sure the good policy-level moves come from his asking those in his inner circle, when he's deliberating how to proceed on some issue, if a particular choice will make him look like a winner. The key, then, is for the kind of people so advising him to be of the bent that will steer him toward actually winning courses of action.

These guys have completely abnegated their roles as leading figures of American Christianity

It's kind of banal to talk about a "crisis in the Church." Given the fallen nature of humankind collectively and human beings individually, it's going to be an ongoing factor. St. Paul had to wag his finger sternly at the early churches that dotted the rim of the Mediterranean. Martin Luther had had it up to here with the sale of indulgences. And so on.

But those guys provide us with a model for what we need to do when we see crud being put forth as righteousness in our own time. And we can see it plainly today.

There's this guy:

Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, appeared on CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront" Wednesday to provide cover for Trump's alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels.

Falwell, for whom it seems Trump can do no wrong, used common progressive talking points to rationalize Trump's behavior. He trotted out the tired misinterpretation of Matthew 7:1 ("Judge not lest ye be judged") to berate Christians who condemn adultery. (Apparently, Falwell thinks sin is ok as long as it happened "years ago.") He also cited the story of the woman caught in adultery to suggest that Christians are not supposed to point out sin or something.

Embarrassingly, Falwell, who leads the largest Christian university in the U.S., struggled to explain the doctrines of sin and forgiveness, mumbling something about all sins being "the same" in God's eyes (they're not, according to the Bible).

"He did not forgive the establishment elites," he said [we don't know that]. "Those were the ones that he said were a generation of vipers, hypocrites, and those were the ones he came down hardest on, the religious elites of his day," Falwell declared, falsely suggesting that Jesus had a problem with the Pharisees' political leanings, when, in fact, he was condemning their wrong theology.

That's some lame you-know-what right there.

Then there's this guy:

Evangelical leader Franklin Graham in an interview called President Trumpa "changed person" after reports of an alleged affair with an adult film star.

Graham, the president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said during the interview on CNN he's "more interested in who a person is today" than who they were in the past.

"And I believe that he's a changed person and I've never seen anybody get attacked like he gets attacked," Graham said, saying Trump is attacked by the media every day.

Maybe it's been a while since he's had an extramarital dalliance, but it doesn't take a psychologist to see that DJT's basic character hasn't changed one subatomic particle.

Just dandy, guys. Thanks a lot for nothing. Just as I commence a serious faith walk and attempt to learn how to witness for the Gospel message, you provide a fresh heap of fodder to the cynical agnostics I contend with daily.

It really is so very late in the day.

Why I'm staying out of these palace-intrigue weeds - today's edtion

It's to the point where a scorecard, and / or some kind of chart that can accommodate mind-boggling intricacies, is needed to keep straight the layers of investigation, scandal, speculation and known fact covering the District of Columbia these days.

The layer that has been the biggie - the Mueller investigation into supposed collusion between the Trump campaign team and some official or quasi-official elements in Russia - hasn't come up with anything substantive that moves it toward a conclusion in over a year. Nothing. Every supposedly exciting tidbit turns out to be an anonymously sourced nothingburger.

There's the question of which players in all of this are really corrupt, have just been leaned on by one nefarious force or another, or are simply misunderstood honest brokers. Mueller? Flynn? Comey? Rosenstein? Wray? Sessions? In each case, there's no shortage of opinions about that question.

Which leads to the sad state of punditry in post-America. Lefty outlets like MSNBC go apoplectic over each revelation that feeds their feeble hope that the latest tidbit is The Smoking Gun.

Then there is the fever-swamp right's utter conviction - or at least a good impression thereof - that a "deep state" is so infected with a leftist fervor and now also a blind hatred for Trump that it is about to bring down the foundations of the Republic. Sean Hannity merely has to phone in his five-alarm-outrage schtick these days.

Which isn't to say that something doesn't smell awfully rancid. Along with having an affair, FBI agent Peter Stzrok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page left behind a correspondence trail that clearly shows they wanted to cook up a way to render a Trump administration ineffective.

Then there's this memo Devin Nunes has drafted that is supposed to blow the lid off the FBI's agenda. Hot stuff, apparently, but no one else is getting to see it - not Senate Intelligence Committee staffers, not fellow House members, not FBI or DoJ lawyers. No one is getting to see the memo, let alone any underlying documentation related to the FISA court.

The Hillary Clinton email server situation also still smolders. That one stinks, but it's worth noting that Hillary Clinton will never be in public life again, and there are pressing matters in the present that move something that is receding into the realm of history off the front burner.

Then there is the mouth and the phone keypad of the president, which inflames both bases - the one that loves him without reservation, and the one that hates him without reservation.

And then there are those pressing matters referenced above.

I'll close with what I said about those the other day in a post on this general subject (staying out of the weeds and declining to draw conclusions about all this):

And what are those major issues?

They're not infrastructure. They're not a southern-border wall. They're not the renegotiation of global-trade deals.

These are the front-burner issues:

North Korea's nuclear program, brought to fruition due to decades of US appeasement, now poses an existential threat to the entire North American landmass.

Post-American culture is so thoroughly rotten that major societal institutions have embraced the infantile fantasy that there are more than two genders. Christians are being persecuted for conducting business in accordance with their faith. Influential figures in not only the entertainment field, but intellectual circles and even government, are being exposed, in huge numbers, as rank sexual predators. Only 26 percent of the population can name all three branches of the federal government. 37 percent can't name a single First Amendment right. 

Heroin and other opioids are as cheap and available as weed, and as a result, unprecedented numbers of post-Americans are overdosing on them.

Blatant falsehoods such as rampant police brutality against black Americans, or the global climate being in some kind of trouble, are perpetuated in our schools, corporations and even churches.

Institutions that once fostered our civic bonds - Rotary Club, Boy Scouts, Knights of Columbus, Masons, bowling leagues - are dwindling (and buying into the falsehoods enumerated above).


That's the front-burner stuff.

And a narcissistic, bombastic, petty man in the Oval Office, and a disproportionally vocal base of drool-besotted supporters, are in no position to help with amelioration. In fact, they are inclined to make society more brittle with the rigid nature of their zeal.

It's important to conduct ourselves like grownups while defending what's good, right and true

I'd just read Conor Friedersdorf's account at The Atlantic of the interview between clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson and British journalist Cathy Newman - and you should too; his point that there's a trend, on both the left and the right, to reframe what a person has actually said is an important one - when I came upon Jonah Goldberg's take on it at NRO. Goldberg zeroes in on one particular aspect of the interview that is a particular obsession of mine: this utterly false notion that an increasing number of people have that there is some kind of right not to be offended:

Newman questioned Peterson on why he refused to go along with the trendy Leftist cause du jour: using pronouns chosen by individuals rather than pronouns that describe their biology. “Why should your freedom of speech trump a trans person’s right not to be offended?” Newman asked. Peterson, ever the gentleman, answered the question without guffawing: “Because in order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive. I mean, look at the conversation we’re having right now. You’re certainly willing to risk offending me in the pursuit of truth. Why should you have the right to do that? It’s been rather uncomfortable.”

Newman misdirected: “Well, I’m very glad I’ve put you on the spot.” But Peterson pursued: “Well, you get my point. You’re doing what you should do, which is digging a bit to see what the hell is going on. And that is what you should do. But you’re exercising your freedom of speech to certainly risk offending me, and that’s fine. More power to you, as far as I’m concerned.”

Newman had no answer. Point to Peterson. But despite Peterson’s obvious logic, the Left refuses to concede this particular point. Any statement — any statement — must be gauged not only on the basis of its truth-value, according to the Left, but on the basis of whether such truth is likely to offend — or, at last, whether such truth is likely to offend groups the Left perceives as victimized.

According to the Left, any and all truth must take a back seat to “your truth,” so long as you claim minority status in any way.

Goldberg goes on to make the point that those on the right - excepting, of course, those dwelling in its fever swamps - tend to value decorum, courtesy, and calm discourse and get stomped on for it by the Left. It's at that point that a sane rightie might be tempted to go all bonehead in a polemical exchange, but that, with truth on his side, he can afford to maintain a dignified demeanor as he puts his points on the board.

He concludes quite eloquently:

This is the ground on which conservatives should fight, of course: acknowledgement that while manners matter, truth matters more. Unfortunately, too many conservatives have responded to Leftist censorship not with truth-above-manners politeness, but with theatrical displays of unconcern with manners themselves. Rudeness is now seen as a substitute for facts. If the Left uses manners as a weapon, the logic goes, let’s just discard manners altogether. But there’s no reason to do that.

We all ought to behave with decency and truth. Those are the twin pillars of conservatism, after all: virtue and reason. Discarding reason undermines virtue by replacing virtue with emotion-based reactivity; discarding virtue undermines the social fabric necessary to undergird the effectiveness of reason. Yes, let’s behave with manners. But let’s recognize that only a society that values truth can afford manners.

A good maxim to live by.

A must-read

Amity Shlaes, who has carved out a niche for herself as a historian focusing on the impact of economics on the twists and turns of human events, has a piece worth your time at City Journal today. It's entitled "Growth, Not Equality."

She notes that a plurality of economists, even those that lean left (which is a preponderance of the field's practitioners today), acknowledge the importance of growth. The left-leaners, however, say that it's secondary to crafting policies that address inequality.

She gives a good explanation of the Gini coefficient and looks at its uses over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries:

The redistributionist impulse has brought to the fore metrics such as the Gini coefficient, named after the ur-redistributor, Corrado Gini, an Italian social scientist who developed an early statistical measure of income distribution a century ago. A society where a single plutocrat earns all the income ranks a pure “1” on the Gini scale; one in which all earnings are perfectly equally distributed, the old Scandinavian ideal, scores a “0” by the Gini test. The Gini Index has been renamed or updated numerous times, but the principle remains the same. Income distribution and redistribution seem so crucial to progressives that French economist Thomas Piketty built an international bestseller around it, the wildly lauded Capital.

Through Gini’s lens, we now rank past eras. Decades in which policy endeavored or managed to even out and equalize earnings—the 1930s under Franklin Roosevelt, the 1960s under Lyndon Johnson—score high. Decades where policymakers focused on growth before equality, such as the 1920s, fare poorly. Decades about which social-justice advocates aren’t sure what to say—the 1970s, say—simply drop from the discussion. In the same hierarchy, federal debt moves down as a concern because austerity to reduce debt could hinder redistribution. Lately, advocates of economically progressive history have made taking any position other than theirs a dangerous practice. Academic culture longs to topple the idols of markets, just as it longs to topple statutes of Robert E. Lee.

She points out the glaring omission from that way of viewing economic activity: those animal spirits:

But progressives have their metrics wrong and their story backward. The geeky Gini metric fails to capture the American economic dynamic: in our country, innovative bursts lead to great wealth, which then moves to the rest of the population. Equality campaigns don’t lead automatically to prosperity; instead, prosperity leads to a higher standard of living and, eventually, in democracies, to greater equality. The late Simon Kuznets, who posited that societies that grow economically eventually become more equal, was right: growth cannot be assumed. Prioritizing equality over markets and growth hurts markets and growth and, most important, the low earners for whom social-justice advocates claim to fight. Government debt matters as well. Those who ring the equality theme so loudly deprive their own constituents, whose goals are usually much more concrete: educational opportunity, homes, better electronics, and, most of all, jobs. Translated into policy, the equality impulse takes our future hostage. 

She compares the economic vitality of the US during the 1920s with the impact of the redistributive impulse of the 1930s and 1960s. The latter iteration led, of course, to the inflation rate and unemployment rate we saw rising in the 1970s.

It was only late in the 70s, when a number of people said, "We have to reintroduce some human ingenuity here," that a turnaround became possible.

Only when U.S. leaders turned to three areas that had been essential in the past—income taxes, the capital-gains tax, and patents—did a turnaround become possible. In 1978, Congress, led by Representative William Steiger of Wisconsin, cut the capital-gains rate in half, albeit with resistance from the redistributionist president, Jimmy Carter, who called the cut “a huge tax windfall for millionaires.” In some cases, the capital-gains rate was even lower—“Is a capital gains rate of 17.5 percent unfair?” asked the Washington Post. Yes, thought the paper’s editors. Nonetheless, the country saw the opportunity in lower rates and elected Ronald Reagan. Reagan followed up with a series of tax cuts that brought the top rate on the income tax down to a Coolidge-esque 28 percent. Less known, and also influential, was a law that Senators Birch Bayh and Robert Dole sponsored in 1980 to give scientists and inventors, or their universities, ownership of patents for their inventions. Bayh-Dole, as the patent law is known, caused patent applications to increase and venture capital to explode, powering the Silicon Valley expansion. As economist Larry Lindsey showed, the results of the 1920s repeated themselves. After the Reagan tax cuts, the government saw greater revenues than paper arithmetic had predicted.

She concludes by pointing up the dire need for some sound economics education in our secondary schools. Also more pro-growth activity in the economics field itself.

 

The difference between Ted Cruz's position in 2013 and Schumer's in 2018

Caleb Howe at Red State uses an exchange between Senator Cruz and a snarky MSNBC reporter to illustrate the glaring difference between Cruz's 2013 filibuster during spending deliberations - in which he famously read Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham - and Schumer's position in this latest shutdown situation.

MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt jumped in and began peppering the Senator with objections and debate. Now they had something to gnaw on. ‘How could Ted Cruz of government shutdown Dr. Seuss fame say with a straight face that he was opposed to government shutdowns?’ they asked with every sarcasm-filled sac in their lungs.

Senator Cruz has an answer, and he gave it to us. 

RedState reached out to the Senator after the Kasie Hunt clip started shooting around social media, and he gave us this exclusive statement.

There have been few policy fights more important this decade than Obamacare – one of the most disastrous laws to both our health care system and Americans’ freedom over their health care. In 2013, we faced a critical turning point: whether to let Obamacare go into effect or to try and stop it — a choice of whether to transform our healthcare system into a socialist government-run, government-mandated enterprise, rather than a patient-centered free-market system, which everyone agreed needed serious reform. The reason that stopping Obamacare in 2013 was so important is because once it took root, it would be near impossible to reverse it. We’ve seen today the complexities surrounding the repeal and replace debate, even with Republican majorities in Congress and control of the White House, but nonetheless, we are still working to accomplish that goal, because it’s the number one thing voters elected us to do. 

The goal in 2013 was to stop funding Obamacare, not shut down the government. Republicans voted numerous times to fund vital government services, and I fought for measure after measure to fund different government agencies, only to be blocked by Harry Reid and the Democrats time and again. They repeatedly blocked the funding of vital government services, including the military, veterans benefits, the National Guard, and National Health Institute, among others. 

We saw the same Democrat obstruction this time around too. Despite what is being reported in the media, the truth is Democrats voted to shut down the government while Republicans voted to fund it.

None of the Republican senators wanted to see a government shutdown. Democrats, on the other hand, saw a political benefit from a government shutdown. They think it energizes and excites their far-left base. Well, that may be good for the extreme left, but it’s not good for the American people. It is unfortunate that we see such a partisan and divided Senate right now. For instance, last month, we passed historic tax cuts. In the past, tax cutting has always been a bipartisan endeavor. Over and over, Republicans and Democrats have come together to cut taxes. This time, in both Houses of Congress, zero Democrats voted for tax cuts. That’s really unfortunate and it’s a manifestation of just how radical and extreme Democrats have become. 

As Senator Cruz knew, and as I heard him explain that year (2013) in person, the way to move on the "A"CA was cut off its lifeblood, before the bureaucratic entrenchment became irreversible.

Then as now, Republicans wanted very much to fund the government. In both cases, they just insisted that bad policy not be attached to the basic functions that needed funding.

Post-America's premier fetal-death advocate indulges in identity politics on steroids

Come on, you cracker gals, up your game:

Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards told white women to “do better” at the Women’s March event in Las Vegas, Nevada Saturday. She was cheered by the crowd and went on to praise women running for office.

"All across the country, the Women's March inspired doctors and teachers and mothers to become activists and organizers and, yes, candidates for office," she said. "And from Virginia to Alabama and to last week in Wisconsin, women have beaten the odds to elect our own to office. Women of color, transgender women, rural and urban women."

"These victories were led and made possible by women of color," she claimed. 

"So, white women, listen up. We've got to do better. It is not up to women of color to save this country from itself. That's on all of us. That's on all of us," she emphasized.

But ditch the p---y hats. "Women of color" have a problem with them. 

Monday roundup

My latest at Medium is up. It's entitled "This Moment Is Worse and Here's Why."

NYT / Survey Monkey poll shows increasing support for the recently passed tax-reform law.


The Freedom-Haters cave, ending the shutdown. Brit Hume's tweet succinctly tells the story:

I doubted it was possible, but Dems have actually lost a shutdown fight. Schumer has agreed to end the filibuster in exchange for practically nothing. Make no mistake: Schumer & Dems caved. What a political fiasco.

It's easy to succumb to scandal overload, given the nature of Beltway life, but what Strzok and Page were cooking up - and I mean beyond the boudoir - gives us a glimpse into how infected with political agenda the FBI and DoJ had become:

From Johnson’s letter:

The loss of records from this period is concerning because it is apparent from other records that Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page communicated frequently about the investigation. In February 2016, Ms. Page texted Mr. Strzok that then-candidate Trump “simply can not [Sic] be president.” On May 4, 2016–after then-Director Comey began drafting his July 5 statement
clearing Secretary Clinton–Ms. Page and Mr. Strzok communicated about “pressure” building to finish the investigation following candidate Trump’s likely nomination:

Ms. Page: And holy shit Cruz just dropped out of the race. It’s going to be a Clinton Trump race. Unbelievable.

Mr. Strzok: What?!?!??

Ms. Page: You heard it right my friend.

Mr. Strzok: I saw trump [sic] won, fgured it would be a bit

Mr. Strzok: Now the pressure really starts to finish MYE.

Ms. Page: It sure does. We need to talk about follow up call tomorrow. We still never have.

The reference to the MYE by Mr. Strzok refers to the “midyear exam,” the case name for the Clinton investigation.

This is sort of a strange statement if one doesn’t assume there was a “stop Trump” movement of some type, formal or informal, within the FBI. The implication of the statement is that they would have taken their good old time finishing the investigation if Ted Cruz had stayed in the race, that is a decision that would have hurt Clinton. That they felt pressure to wind up the Clinton investigation deserves some serious exploration.

James Comey concealed the extent of Hillary’s Stupidity from the public. 

In addition, Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page discussed the drafting of Director Comey’s July 5 statement exonerating Secretary Clinton. On June 30, 2016, FBI personnel circulated a draft of Director Comey’s statement that noted that Secretary Clinton had emailed with President Obama from the private server while abroad in the “territory of sophisticated adversaries.” The passage read:

We also assess that Secretary Clinton?s use of a personal email domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including from the territory of sophisticated adversaries. That use included an email exchange with the President while Secretary Clinton was on the territory of such an adversary. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton?s personal email account.

The same afternoon, after FBI officials edited the draft to replace “the President” with “another senior government official,” Mr. Strzok sent a text message to Ms. Page notifying her of the
change. The exchange read:

Mr. Strzok: K. Rybicki just sent another version.

Ms. Page: Bill just popped his head in, hopefully to talk to him. [Note: I believe Bill is Bill Priestap, FBI director for counterintelligence and Strzok’s boss.]

Mr. Strzok: Hope so. Just left Bill. Talked about the speech, the [redacted] stuff relating to the case, and what I told you about earlier.

Mr. Strzok: He changed President to “another senior government official”

Director Comey’s statement as ultimately delivered on July 5 omitted a reference to either President Obama or “another senior government official.”

This would have had a significant impact on the Clinton campaign. The central theme of her spinmeisters was that none of the emails she sent was particularly important. It is kind of hard to argue this when the recipient is the president. The fact that Comey obscured this fact is nothing more than a lie by omission.

Loretta Lynch knew a week before Comey’s announcement and a day before Hillary Clinton was interviewed that Hillary Clinton would be cleared.

On July 1, 2016–the same day as Attorney General Lynch’s announcement, but before the FBI had interviewed Secretary Clinton and before Director Comey had announced his recommendation–Ms. Page and Mr. Strzok exchanged the following messages:

Mr. Strzok: Holy cow. . . .nyt breaking Apuzzo, [sic] will accept whatever rec D and career prosecutors make. No political appointee input.

Mr. Strzok: Timing not great, but whatever. Wonder if that’s why the no coordination language added.

Ms. Page: No way. This is a purposeful leak following the airplane snafu.

Mr. Strzok: Timing looks like hell. Will appear to be choreographed. All major news networks literally leading with “AG to accept FBI D’s recommendation.”

Ms. Page: Yeah, that is awful timing. Nothing we can do about it.

Mr. Strzok: What I meant was, did DOJ tell us yesterday they were doing this, so added that language.

Mr. Strzok: Yep. I told Bill the same thing. Delaying just makes it worse.

Ms. Page: And yes. I think we had some warning of it. I know they sent some statement to rybicki, be he called andy. [Note: rybicki is FBI chief of staff Jim Rybicki and andy is, of course, deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe.]

Ms. Page: And yeah, it’s a real profile in couragw [sic], since she knows no charges will be brought.

The fact that Comey had made a decision to clear Clinton months in advance was known. The fact that DOJ knew and seemingly inserted “not coordinated” into the statement. Though the fact that DOJ knew of the results and provided input into Comey’s memo seems a helluva lot like coordination.

More evidence that the fiction that the global climate is in some kind of trouble is just that:

A new study published in the prestigious journal Nature finds that all those global warming doomsday scenarios aren't credible. Not that you would ever know based on how little coverage this study is getting.

The study, published on Thursday, finds that if CO2 in the atmosphere doubled, global temperatures would climb at most by 3.4 degrees Celsius. That's far below what the UN has been saying for decades, namely that temperatures would rise as much as 4.5 degrees, and possibly up to 6 degrees.

Basically, the scientists involved in the Nature study found that the planet is less sensitive to changes in CO2 levels than had been previously believed. That means projected temperature increases are too high.

Of course this is just one study, but it supports the contention climate skeptics have been making for years — that the computer models used to predict future warming were exaggerating the impact of CO2, evidenced in part by the fact that the planet hasn't been warming as much as those models say it should.

Why is this important? Because all those horror stories told over the past decades are based on predictions of  temperature increases that are much higher than 3.4 degrees. 

Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, one of the world's premier medical journals, has written an  edtorial there extolling Karl Marx's vision as an antidote to what he thinks ails twenty-first-century medicine ("privatized health economies," "the power of conservative professional elites," "global health's neoimperialistic tendencies," "product-driven definitions of disease"), and British physician Theodore Dalrymple, writing at Law & Liberty, bracingly smacks down both the worth of Marx's contribution to the understanding of anything, and the lineup of Horton's straw-man problems.

Ethan Renoe's current piece at The Stream lives up to its upside-the-head title, "The Dumbing Down of Christianity."

The other day I was (surprise, surprise) in a coffee shop in the mountains, seated near the counter. A guy in his early 20’s walked in wearing a TOOL shirt and a long ponytail. I could overhear his conversation as he approached the barista and they began chatting. Somehow it came up that she attends a Christian university and he clearly didn’t approve.

“Do they incorporate religion into all the classes there?” he asked. “Even the science classes? How does that work?”

She valiantly began explaining how they pray before every class and teach from a Christian worldview, but it soon became evident that she was being crushed in this conversation. He was well schooled in the writings of Dawkins, Hitchens and Nye and began doling out the punishment.

I use the word punishment because this poor barista has herself been punished by a church system which, for the past 200 years, has begun discarding intelligence within the church in favor of emotion, conversion experiences and passion. Ask most American Christians today any question deeper than “Does God love everyone?” and you’re bound to get some sort of response suggesting that that sort of discourse should be reserved for theological universities.

Turkey has invaded Syria in order to go after US-backed Kurdish forces.