Friday roundup

Rob Montz makes an important point in his USA Today opinion piece published today:

Another day, another avalanche of news about the President: berating Democratic leaders on camera; unceremoniously announcing the departure of his chief of staff; calling his former Secretary of State “dumb as a rock.”
It never lets up. Trump is a ubiquitous, suffocating presence in American life.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The modern presidency is the framers’ worst nightmare, a flatly unconstitutional concentration of power. As the Trump era has made abundantly clear, the office itself — its size, scope, and prominence in American life — is the driving force of dysfunction in our politics.
Article II of the Constitution outlines a modest office. The president was to execute the laws passed by Congress, appoint some key government posts, interface with foreign leaders, and use the veto to check populist passions.
That’s it. The president was basically a lackey to Congress, the deliberative and more democratically sensitive branch of government.

He cites how the current way the office of President is regarded came to be:

All of that changed with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His “fireside chat” radio addresses — delivered in his charming aristocratic lilt — provided comfort, advice, and moral instruction to millions. Along the way, they created an unprecedented, immensely exploitable emotional connection with the public.
This connection formed the nexus of the obscene set of expectations that have come to define the office: the president is the savior of the national soul; the healer-in-chief administering alms in the wake of disaster; the superhero battling America’s enemies; the master executive personally credited with the performance of the economy.
Under FDR, these expectations fueled a radical expansion of presidential power, specifically through his use of executive orders. FDR’s predecessors averaged a couple hundred per administration; he issued over 3,700, creating vast new jobs programs and public agencies.
Concentrating power makes the system more vulnerable to abuse. It was an executive order, after all, that established the internment camps for Japanese Americans in the wake of Pearl Harbor. There was little public debate over whether FDR actually had the authority to lock a hundred thousand innocent citizens into cages, though there was a Supreme Court case. The mystique worked its magic.

The advent of television increased the momentum, and now it's gotten to this point:

A full third of the White House staff is exclusively devoted to image management. And that image — and the popularity it produces — is largely detached from the president’s concrete accomplishments.

French police have shot dead the jihadist who opened fire on a Strasbourg market.

Dalibor Rohac of the American Enterprise Institute says that a major reason Theresa May has dodged a bullet is that, given the current situation in Britain, who would want her job?

Somewhat predictably, Theresa May survived the Tory no confidence vote on Wednesday evening.

The outcome of the vote wasn’t a surprise largely because Ms. May’s job is one that few people want. As I wrote in the Washington Post a few months ago, Ms. May’s genius lies in the fact that she was handed an impossible brief. Nobody can deliver what the Leave campaign promised the electorate ahead of the 2016 referendum. Yet, May concluded an agreement with the EU that in many ways squares the circle: It is able to take the UK out of the bloc in an orderly fashion and without jeopardizing some key benefits of the UK’s membership.

He lays out the UK's three options:

As of now, the Brits face a threefold choice. First, they are free to leave on March 29 next year without an agreement, causing wide economic disruption on both sides of the English Channel, increasing political instability in Northern Ireland where the peace settlement has been predicated on the absence of a hard border with the Republic, and adding to centrifugal forces in Scotland where departure from the EU is an unpopular proposition.

Second, they can decide not to leave and disregard the outcome of the 2016 vote. That could likely result in another plebiscite, though it would bolster the already rising stab-in-the-back narrative about a glorious Brexit that has been supposedly derailed by back-room machinations of the pro-Remain clique — or, as Boris Johnson put it, “suffocated by needless self-doubt.” Even if the second referendum yielded a different outcome than the first, the narrative of betrayal would continue to haunt British politics for another generation.

Third, Parliament can acquiesce to the agreement. True, the compromise leaves a lot to be desired. But it allows for an orderly departure and opens the way toward concluding a deep free-trade agreement with the EU before the UK is relegated to the status of a third country. More importantly, the EU, for which Brexit is of secondary importance, is simply not going to go back to the negotiating table in earnest. At most, one could imagine moving Britain to a full single market membership, but that would require crossing the UK’s self-imposed red line considering free movement of labor and surrendering even more decision-making authority to Brussels than the deal Ms. May negotiated.

Hugely important Peter Heck piece at The Resurgent entitled "Here's Why I'm Paying Trump Isn't Impeached":

 

I  freely admit that I have not been following the Mueller investigation, the indictments, the newest information, the rumors, or the conjecture surrounding it very closely at all. But in recent days my Twitter feed has been full of speculation that Trump’s presidency may be in serious jeopardy – that Mueller will end up releasing enough evidence against him personally that the new Democrat-controlled House of Representatives will be persuaded to impeach him. And even though the Senate remains under Republican control, there is increased chatter that backroom deals might result in his ouster.

I pray it doesn’t unfold like that.

Perhaps that’s not right of me. But if I’m being totally honest, I just don’t want it to happen.

That might be confusing to those who know my personal dissatisfactions with President Trump. They know that not only did I not support him in his bid for the presidency, but that I explicitly cautioned my fellow conservative Christians about being willing to tie themselves to a man with such questionable (at best), or even reprehensible (at worst) moral character. Why would I, in the moment of my vindication – the moment where I would be entitled to turn, shaking my head, and say “this is what I was warning about” – not want to see that happen?

The answer is pretty simple: because I think it would be disastrous and dangerous for our country. Not for the Republican Party. Not for the conservative ideology. Not for a political agenda or movement. For the country.

Scott Johnson  of Power Line says that if you're looking to give someone a book about Whitaker Chambers for Christmas, here are his five favorites:

1. Witness is Chambers’s autobiography. It has remained in print continuously since it was published in 1952. The linked paperback edition with new forewords by William F. Buckley, Jr. and Robert Novak derives from the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication. Several conservatives including a friend or two of mine have mentioned the impact this book had on them. The book figures prominently, for example, in Andrew Ferguson’s 2011 Weekly Standard cover story on David Mamet.

2. Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case by Allen Weinstein. As a liberal historian who was given access to the files of Hiss’s lawyers, Weinstein sought to write the definitive account of the case. He did all that and more in this meticulous work of reconstruction originally published in 1978 and now kept in print by the Hoover Institution Press in an updated edition published in 2013. Weinstein takes the reader inside the Communist espionage ring that infiltrated the Roosevelt administration. In the introduction to the updated 1997 edition of the book, Weinstein writes: “With the new evidence blended into the ‘old,’ most of the troubling questions about the Hiss-Chambers case can be answered.” I thought he had done that when the book was originally published in 1978, when George Will hailed the publication of the book as a historic event. I couldn’t put it down.

3. Whittaker Chambers: A Biography by Sam Tanenhaus. Theodore Draper wrote of this book in the New York Review of Books: “Tanenhaus had the ingenious idea of filling out what Chambers wrote by going to the memoirs, letters, papers, FBI interrogations, and testimony of all the others in the story. As a result, he rounds out Chambers’s account from different angles, drawing on the accounts of many people who knew Chambers.”

4. The Anti-Communist Manifestos by John V. Fleming. The author is a retired English professor who spent his career at Princeton teaching Chaucer. Pursuing his bookbinding avocation in retirement, he came upon a book that sent him on a voyage of discovery to the other three books that he takes up here along with the one he was about to pulp. Witness is the fourth; Professor Fleming writes that “by any just canon of literary history [it] should claim its place within the great tradition of American autobiography.” Professor Fleming’s aptly named blog is Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche, derived from Chaucer’s description of the Oxford philosophy student in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. “Gladly lerne, gladly teche” is the spirit that suffuses Fleming’s — in my opinion, great — book.

5. Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Alexander Vassiliev. Harvey Klehr is the preeminent historian of American Communism. He has explored the Hiss case in several of his books. I wrote Professor Klehr to ask him which of his books he would recommend to readers interested in the case. Professor Klehr writes: “The best, I think, is Spies. It’s based on the the most complete and latest information from KGB archives. We titled the chapter on Hiss ‘Case Closed,’ since we quote from KGB documents that use his real name and identify him as a Soviet agent.”

I've maintained for years that, properly done, a major motion picture about the Hiss-Chambers case could be an important undertaking and make for riveting cinema.


In his Commentary piece "The Murder of The Weekly Standard," John Podhoretz exhorts TWS subscribers to demand refunds rather than have their subscriptions rolled over into Washington Examiner subscriptions, as DCMedia wants to do.



RIP Nancy Wilson.