Thursday roundup

Check out Elizabeth Warren's lame attempt to spin her doubling-down on having a Native American ancestry.

David French at NRO says that mass shootings don't lend themselves to macro-level, governmental remedies:

The United States is facing a puzzling paradox. Even as gun crime has plunged precipitously from the terrible highs of the early 1990s, mass shootings have increased. Consider this: 15 of the 20 worst mass shootings in U.S. history have occurred since the Columbine school shooting in 1999. The five worst have all occurred since 2007, and three of those five were in 2016 and 2017.

It’s horrifying, and governmental solutions are hard to find. Twitter’s fondest wishes to the contrary, the unique characteristics of mass shootings mean that they often escape the reach of public policy. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler (hardly an NRA apologist) famously fact-checked Marco Rubio’s assertion that new gun laws wouldn’t have prevented any recent mass shootings and declared it true. Time and again, existing laws failed, or no proposed new gun-control law would have prevented the purchase.

Seth Lipsky at the New York Post says that one level in the Netanyahu-investigation situation that must be taken into consideration is the relentless investigation of any and every Israeli prime minister going back years:

 The recommendation of Israeli police that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be indicted for graftlooks to me like an acute case of a malady that is itself a threat to the Jewish state.

I call it the American disease. This is the itch to criminalize policy differences, an infection America came down with in the 1980s and has been suffering from, on and off, ever since.

Just ask President Trump. He is being pursued by such a gaggle of Democrats dressed up as special prosecutors that it’s a wonder he finds time to do the job the voters hired him to do.

It’s not my purpose to suggest that Israel’s attorney general, who will decide on whether to pursue the charges the police have recommended, drop the case. No one is above the law.

The issue that worries me is larger than Netanyahu.

“Nearly every recent Israeli prime minister has been under constant investigation,” one of Israel’s greatest legal sages, Eugene Kontorovich, tells me. (Yitzhak Rabin resigned his first term for keeping a foreign bank account. Ehud Barak was investigated for illegal campaign cash, Ariel Sharon was investigated but not charged. Ehud Olmert went to jail.)

While no one ought to be above the law, neither ought elected leaders be put further below it, so to speak, than other citizens. That presents its own kind of injustice.

Which may be why two newly reported polls show that most Israelis want Netanyahu to resign — but his party would still come in first were a vote held now.

John Stonestreet at The Stream  has an interesting perspective on Valentine's Day coinciding with Ash Wednesday:

Now don’t get me wrong: romantic love, what C.S. Lewis called “Eros,” is not wrong. In fact it’s a gift from God. As Lewis wrote in The Four Loves, when rightly ordered, eros causes us to toss “personal happiness aside as a triviality and [plant] the interests of another in the center of our being.”

Romantic love can be, as Lewis put it, “a foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us without a rival.”

And that’s the proper place of eros … not as an end in and of itself, but as a means — something that points beyond itself — and points our hearts beyond ourselves to a higher love, agape, a love that only comes from God Himself.

Lent turns our focus to that total self-giving love of God, that love that caused God to become man and live and die as one of us, for our sakes, despite our sin and rebellion.

The sexual revolution has, in so many ways, disordered eros, treating it as an end, not a means. But twisted eros is no longer selfless and life-giving. It becomes a sort of mutant sensuality, that creates the selfish and damaging brokenness our culture is being forced to reckon with this year.

Today, Ash Wednesday, reminds us that there’s more … more to life than sensual pleasures, more to love than the shriveled-up version that has captivated our Western imaginations.

So today, ask yourself, “how am I responding to so great an expression of love as what God has shown us?” Valentinus’s response was to give up his own life.

For us too, a kind of “death” is required — a death to self, a death to the desires that our culture treats as ultimate.

Now of course guys, none of this lets you off the hook with your wives. So don’t forget the flowers.

Bookworm takes on this silly notion that there's something racist about talking about an Anglo-American legal tradition:

I am sure you have heard about this.  A few days ago, CNN breathlessly highlighted in a report that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in a speech to the National Sheriff’s Association, said

Since our founding, the independently elected sheriff has been the people’s protector, who keeps law enforcement close to and accountable to people through the elected process. The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.

Our neo-Marxist proggies went nuts.  Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii wrote:  “Do you know anyone who says “Anglo-American heritage” in a sentence? What could possibly be the purpose of saying that other than to pit Americans against each other? . . .”  Others followed suit, the most obscene being California’s current Lt. Gov. and likely its next governor, Gavin Newsom.  He wrote:  “Reminder that our Attorney General is an outright racist who wants us all to acknowledge our ‘Anglo-American’ heritage.”

Referring to our “Anglo-American” heritage in respect to government and the law is not merely common, it is the norm.  It is one of the fundamental truths of our nation.  And while truth may sometimes be uncomfortable, it can never racist.

For the Freedom-Haters to complete their agenda of a completely regulated state populated by cattle-masses and ruled by pointy-headed bureaucrats, they have to keep our youth penned up in their sewers of indoctrination, where they will assuredly remain ignorant of Constitutional principles:

  Their claims will only resonate with those people — most likely products of a K-grad school social justice education — who do not understand the basics of the Constitution or its genesis, nor any sort of world history over the past two millennia.  These are people who do not understand the importance of their rights or the protections of checks and balances to their freedom, and thus will not fight, let alone fight to the death, to protect them as they are stripped away.  Moreover, the neo-Marxist proggies, sounding their outrage in terms of moral superiority, rightly expect that the sheeple  they have so carefully nurtured in their ignorance through public education will then join  the progs to excoriate the evil, racist wingnuts with the gall to call to mention our “Anglo Saxon heritage.”  It is a gamble, though, as for everyone else, they will see the dishonesty and likely be repelled.  Or as the saying goes, “you want more Trump, this is how you get more Trump.”

So let’s take a moment to look briefly at our Constitution and the Anglo-Saxon history behind it.  Let’s begin with my favorite quote from William Pitt, the United Kingdom’s first Prime Minister.  He was speaking in 1763 before Britain’s Parliament upon the Castle Doctrine — enshrined today in our Fourth Amendment.

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown.  It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter, the rain may enter,—but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.

Pitt’s speech came a little over a year after James Otis Jr., an American lawyer, spent six hours in a Boston court room arguing the same point, that the English right to be free from search and seizure except for probable cause was an Anglo-Saxon tradition that predated even the Magna Carta of 1215 by centuries.  It was a right the English had fought wars over.  And in a little over a decade, they would fight another war over this and other Anglo-Saxon rights — the Rights of Englishmen — on American shores.

The fact is our entire system of government and virtually all of our governing traditions are not merely adopted from Anglo-Saxon law, they are in many cases the truest continuation of them — far more so than in modern Britain.  Our Constitution is, with but a few critical tweaks, nothing more than the laws, rights and governing systems of the United Kingdom as they existed in 1776.

Be very thankful it is so.  Britain was then unique.  Its system of individual rights and systems of governance gave critical protections to the individual — and not because of benign decisions from English monarchs, but because the individuals of England had, over the centuries, demanded those systems and rights.  At various times, they fought and died for every single one of them.  There are no rights in the Bill of Rights nor any protections guaranteed in our governing system with its exquisitely crafted system of checks and balances, that do not float on a historic lake of Anglo-Saxon blood (not to mention the disembodied head of at least one English King).

Peter Thiel is de-teching:

Billionaire investor Peter Thiel is relocating his home and personal investment firms to Los Angeles from San Francisco and scaling back his involvement in the tech industry, people familiar with his thinking said, marking a rupture between Silicon Valley and its most prominent conservative.

Mr. Thiel has also discussed with people close to him the possibility of resigning from the board of Facebook Inc., FB -0.78% the people familiar with his thinking said. His relationship with the social-networking company—where he has been a director since 2005, the year after its founding—came under strain after a dispute with a fellow director over Mr. Thiel’s support for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and a related confrontation over boardroom leaks with Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg last summer, the people said.​

Byron York at the Washington Examiner asks why everybody but the American public has had a chance to see the Comey memos.