Tuesday roundup

Great David Harsanyi piece at The Federalist entitled, "Hey, Democrats, The System Doesn't Need to Be 'Fixed' Every Time You Lose an Election":

If you’re under the impression that the system exists merely to facilitate your partisan agenda, it’s not surprising that you also believe it’s “broken” every time things don’t go your way. This is why so many Democrats argue that we should “fix” the Electoral College when they lose a presidential election and “fix” the filibuster when they run the Senate and now “fix” the Supreme Court when they don’t run the Senate.

Regarding the Supreme Court, what does he recommend? Go into the voting booth assuming that at least one SCOTUS pick is going to be part of what you're choosing:

In any event, there is simple solution: voters should assume that every president will name at least one Supreme Court justice and vote accordingly. The last president who didn’t was Jimmy Carter, and the one before him was Andrew Johnson.

Bernard Hudson, a fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center, on the apparent denouement of the conflict in Yemen:

The deadly civil war in Yemen has reached a climax after three ugly years. No one can know for sure, but it looks like the coalition led by Saudi Arabia is on the verge of a major victory that could push the Iranian-backed rebels into an enduring cease-fire.

The legitimate Yemeni government, backed by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, is poised to retake control of the vital port of Hodeidah, Yemen’s fourth-largest city and its principal port on the Red Sea. Yemen depends on imports to survive and Hodeidah is the port of entry for most outside goods. International aid groups worry a long-term siege there could disrupt the already-limited flow of medicine and food into the country. But the pain is worth the gain – especially for U.S. interests – because of Hodeidah’s strategic importance.

Jim Treacher at PJ Media on Seattle's new anti-drinking-straws ordinance:

If you're caught using one of the newly verboten drinking implements by Seattle's Straw Gestapo, and you don't have a note from your doctor, you will be fined $250. Hey, it's a small price to pay for protecting the planet, right?

What a liberal paradise Seattle is. You can smoke all the weed you want and the cops can't touch you, but you'll need to bring your own straw with you on the resulting Taco Bell run.

Remember how excited everybody got when Narenda Modi was first elected Prime Minister of India? He was going to usher in an era of free-market initiatives that would turbocharge India's economy. Sadanand Dhume at the American Enterprise Institute says that, as Indian politics heat up in the sunup to next year's elections, we're seeing his underperformance in stark relief. He also notes a deterioration in public discourse that may make you react along the lines of, "Oh, no, not there, too."


She's far from the first to take note of the phenomenon of the fading of civic organizations and what it's done to our social fabric - there was the book some years ago by sociologist Robert D. Putnam called Bowling Alone,  and a National Review piece by Slade O'Brien on the topic, to cite two examples, but today's Townhall piece by Salena Zito is an important contribution to the conversation.

It can be argued that NATO members need to step up their efforts to meet the 2 percent goal regarding their defense spending, but, as Andrew Malcolm at Hot Air explains, President Shoot-Off-His-Mouth's inflammatory letters to those countries' leaders is counterproductive, coming as it does before the Brussels summit:

Trump is underlining his unhappiness with NATO by having his first formal summit with Putin immediately after the NATO meeting.

Sowing divisions among NATO allies is a prime goal of Putin’s. Trump’s aggressive tactics fit that perfectly.

Few things would make Putin happier than to see reduced U.S. military forces based in Europe in a  strategic position to discourage or thwart Soviet, er, I mean, Russian military incursion of the invasive type Putin ordered in Georgia and annexing Crimea from Ukraine.

And now we come to the most important piece in this roundup: Jonah Goldberg's latest at NRO, entitled "Another Lazy 'Never Trump' Screed."  It's a takedown of a piece at The American Spectator by One America News Network White House correspondent Emerald Robinson. (Goldberg provides the link to that.)

I'm going to excerpt at length, given the importance of his points. There's this one, for instance. These Trump shills are shamelessly disingenuous in lumping all manner of disparate figures together based on their only common trait: finding Trump objectionable to one degree or another:

Her gloating, smarmy, gleeful thesis is that the Never Trumpers are dead or dying. She means this mostly figuratively but she does go out of her way to indulge in some unfortunate literalism in the case of Charles Krauthammer. (Going by the reactions on Twitter, apparently if you share her Trumpist exuberance, her celebratory tone doesn’t become distasteful when it comes to her discussion of Charles’s demise.) There is precious little “analysis” here, and most of it amounts to gloating assertions that the careers of people she labels “Never Trump” are in trouble.

She then goes on to explain why it happened, or at least claims to.

Now, before I go on, as much as I enjoy reading the musings of someone I’ve never heard of at a cable-news network I’ve never watched explain — in the pages of The American Spectator — the declining relevance of people at Fox, Bloomberg, National Review, and The Weekly Standard, I should make a general point. There is nothing new here. Pretty much every couple of weeks, someone writes another essay — usually timed to some real or perceived Trump triumph — about how the so-called Never Trumpers (almost always defined loosely, in bad faith, or not at all) have been consigned to the ash heap of history. Rarely has so much effort been exerted to prove irrelevance before. If Bill Kristol or Steve Hayes or David French or yours truly don’t matter anymore, why does our existence haunt these people so?

Then there’s the issue of whether it’s actually, you know, true.

Ms. Robinson writes:

Of course, Kristol was not alone in his contempt for Trump — he was only the most vocal and unhinged. Alongside him were other conservatives like Jennifer Rubin and George Will and Michael Gerson at the Washington Post; Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal; David Brooks and Ross Douthat at the New York Times; Jonah Goldberg and David French at National Review; Ramesh Ponnuru at Bloomberg; and Erick Erickson at RedState. A number of others, people like David Frum and Ana Navarro, committed political seppuku early and endorsed Hillary Clinton. Needless to say, the careers of most of these people have been curtailed dramatically.

First off, grouping all of these people together is lazy and dumb. You can’t compare the approach toward Trump of, say, Ramesh, David, and Erick to that of Jen Rubin or Ana Navarro. Or, I should say, you can’t if you’re a remotely informed or serious person. That’s the problem with nearly all of these “Never Trump” screeds: They use the term so promiscuously and selectively that it becomes little more than a straw man.

There's also Robinson's attempt to depict these people as being on the backside of their career trajectories:

Second, is it “needless to say” that the careers of most of these people have been curtailed dramatically? If it were, she wouldn’t need to assert it absent any proof. Bret Stephens moved to the New York Times; is that really a marked demotion career-wise? Since Trump was elected, Steve Hayes has been promoted to editor of The Weekly Standard. That doesn’t sound like career freefall to me. I don’t know about everyone mentioned here, but most seem to be doing okay. I was certainly worried that my positions would hurt sales of new book Suicide of the West — and they probably did — but it still debuted at No. 5 on the NYT bestseller list. Oh, and my podcast is doing great. More broadly, National Review and The Weekly Standard are thriving.

In short, Robinson doesn’t know what she’s talking about. My suspicion is that because she and her network are trying to become state TV in the Trump era, she’s pandering to her audience by telling them what they want to hear. There’s a lot of that going around these days. She might also be confused, thinking that the audience she is pandering to is the only one that matters. While it’s true that the people who take this woman seriously do not like many of her targets, by this standard, Alex Jones can claim our careers are tanking too. 

Goldberg doesn't miss anything about her vacuousness. Her penchant for trite phraseology gets duly noted.

Her “analysis” is equally deficient in fact and seriousness. It conflates disparate people into a single easy-to-slander label and then dresses up the same tired clichés and lazy epithets (RINOS!!111!) that I’ve been reading in comment sections and ALL CAPS emails for nearly 25 years. All that’s missing is a really biting bon mot about Georgetown cocktail parties.

The ugly and shallow Kurt Schlichter likes the cocktail-party image, too.

And, like Schlichter, she employs the alpha-male tactic as well:

Then there’s the atmospherics. Robinson, like so much of this crowd, is obsessed with impugning the manhood of her targets as if “real men” see the world the way she does. When I hear this stuff from male writers and pundits, I assume they’re overcompensating for something. In this case I can only assume it’s just more pandering to readers who need to be reassured.

And then he examines this head-scratcher from Robinson - namely, the assertion that all and any pundits who find Trump objectionable to one degree or another don't care, often because they are agnostics or Jews:

Her one actual attempt at an analytical point is her claim that the “conservative intellectuals didn’t understand the base’s concerns about religious liberty because they hardly cared for religion — which should have disqualified them long ago.”

Goldberg dispatches it handily:

It’s . . . a lie. I’ve written often in defense of religious liberty (indeed, one of my recent columns on the subjected inspired a call from the vice president to thank me for it). Charles Krauthammer and George Will have defended religious liberty and religion generally for decades. Are we really to take someone seriously who would suggest that Erick Erickson, Ramesh Ponnuru, or, my Lord, David French don’t take religious liberty seriously? 

It's interesting, isn't it? Trump lives rent-free inside the heads of enraged hard leftists, and those of us who, while applauding the good moves, particularly judicial appointments and deregulation, find him ideologically unmoored and loathsome on a character level, live rent-free inside the heads of the Robinson and Schlichter types.

Meanwhile, we just proceed according to our principles. To the two groups above - progressives and populists, for shorthand - our continued existence is something they dare not acknowledge.