Wednesday roundup

David French has moved from National Review to The Dispatch, the new project of Steven Hayes and Jonah Goldberg. Among the things he'll be doing there is a regular newsletter. In today's edition of that, he looks at how the Supreme Court may well dismantle Elizabeth Warren's signature achievement, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

For years I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that Warren’s political biography is littered with landmines. Yes, she’s known for inflating claims of Native American heritage, but did you also know that she (strangely enough) claimed to be the “first nursing mother to take a bar exam in the state of New Jersey”? A Boston Herald writer spoke to a New Jersey Judiciary official who said there was no way to verify her claim. Women had been taking the New Jersey bar since 1895, and the official was “not aware their nursing habits were ever tracked.”

But her academic career isn’t even quite as glittering as you might think. In 2010, Megan McArdle wrote a fascinating analysis of Warren’s scholarship and found a “persistent tendency to choose odd metrics” that inflated the case for her leftist causes. McArdle said Warren’s famous scholarship on medical bankruptcies “isn't Harvard caliber material—not even Harvard undergraduate.” McArdle is hardly the only serious critic of Warren’s academic work, and the theme of the criticism is much the same—that she had a history of “overstating her findings to make ideological points.”

Now, I know that these critiques can feel like nit-picking when she’s running to take on a Republican president who is one of the most extraordinary (and ignorant) fabulists in the history of American politics, but sloppiness in her biography and sloppiness in her scholarship extend to sloppiness in her public policy positions, and this cuts directly against the core of her political image—as the person who has the “plan for everything.” What if her plans are illegal or unconstitutional? What if the veneer of wonkiness is hiding the unworkable substance?

And this brings us to the Supreme Court. Earlier this month SCOTUS granted certiorari in a case called Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The court will decide two issues:

(1) Whether the vesting of substantial executive authority in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an independent agency led by a single director, violates the separation of powers; and (2) whether, if the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is found unconstitutional on the basis of the separation of powers, 12 U.S.C. §5491(c)(3) [it] can be severed from the Dodd-Frank Act.

Let’s put this in plain English. The CFPB is quite fairly described as Warren’s signature public policy achievement. She proposed, she built it, and she initially hoped to run it. Now the nation’s highest court is set to decide whether it’s structurally unconstitutional. The governing statute places substantial restrictions on the president’s ability to remove the CFPB director, and the smart money is betting that the Supreme Court will rule against the bureau.

SCOTUSblog’s Amy Howe describes the stakes:

If the justices agree that the restrictions violate the doctrine known as the separation of powers – the idea that the Constitution divides the different functions of government among the executive, judicial and legislative branches – their ruling could potentially unravel all the CFPB’s decisions in the nine years since its creation.

And what is the precise constitutional problem? Here’s a nice summary from a CATO Institute amicus brief:

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the most independent of independent agencies in the federal government. Despite its significant power, it is essentially accountable to no one. A single director heads the CFPB, this director serves a five-year term, and the director can be removed only for cause. The CFPB does not need Congress to approve its budgets because its funding requests must be rubber-stamped by another independent agency—the Federal Reserve. The CFPB has regulatory authority over 19 federal consumer protection laws, for which it is empowered to write regulations, investigate potential violations, and bring enforcement actions in its own administrative proceedings. This concentration of power in the hands of a single, unelected, unaccountable official is unprecedented and cannot be squared with the Constitution’s structure or its purpose of protecting individual liberty from government overreach.

In other words, the Obama administration created in essence a fourth branch of government. The CFPB exists almost outside our constitutional system of checks and balances. It’s an executive agency not truly run by the president. It’s a statutory creation not truly funded by Congress. 

It is true that the Ninth Circuit and the D.C. Circuit have upheld the CFPB’s structure, but there is one very notable dissenter from the D.C. Circuit’s en banc opinion—then-Judge (now Justice) Brett Kavanaugh. This was his assessment of the CFPB director in January, 2018:

Because the Director acts alone and without Presidential supervision or direction, and because the CFPB wields broad authority over the U.S. economy, the Director enjoys significantly more unilateral power than any single member of any other independent agency. By “unilateral power,” I mean power that is not checked by the President or by other commissioners or board members. Indeed, other than the President, the Director of the CFPB is the single most powerful official in the entire U.S. Government, at least when measured in terms of unilateral power.

There is no such thing as a foregone conclusion at the Supreme Court, but given the number of justices who’ve signaled a willingness to rein in the administrative state, Warren’s political creation is likely in for a rough ride. 

To uphold the structure of the agency, the court would have to extend the present understanding of the ability of Congress to create independent bureaucracies— and that’s exactly the opposite way that the Supreme Court has been trending. So, look for the court to rebuke Warren in the middle of a presidential campaign. 

It would be one thing if the CFPB was simply one constitutional swing and miss, but Warren has a habit of making policy proposals that cross legal lines. 

Can she keep her promise to “ban fracking everywhere”? No, she cannot. Her plan plainly conflicts with the Energy Policy Act, passed by Congress in 2005. 

Can she pass a wealth tax and raise hundreds of billions of dollars to pay for an explosion of progressive policies? No, she cannot. Her tax likely violates the 16th Amendment, which holds that any “direct tax” must be “in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration.”

She wants to create a national statutory right to abortion that overrides restrictive state laws. But once again she has proposed a plan that contradicts relevant Supreme Court authority limiting congressional authority under the commerce clause. 

Elizabeth Warren makes promises she can’t lawfully keep, and when those flawed promises become unconstitutional laws, they impose real economic and legal costs on American citizens. 

Great piece by Noah Rothman at Commentary entitled "The Blue State Model Is Failing." How have big, resource-rich states like California  and New York gotten to the point of deliberate blackouts?

Satan is on the prowl in Austin. Fortunately, a significant number of parents aren't taking it lying down:

On Tuesday morning, the Austin Independent School District (ISD) school board approved a radical new sex-education curriculum for grades 3-8 that encourages all kinds of sex at young ages, urges kids to join LGBT "pride" parades, and aims to redefine biological sex and erase the words "mom" and "dad" from children's vocabulary.

More than 100 people testified against the new curriculum on Monday night, and testimony lasted until after midnight. Yet the school board unanimously approved the new curriculum.

"This vote by the Austin ISD Board sends a clear message: people of faith and traditional moral values are not welcome in Austin ISD," David Walls, vice president of Texas Values and a parent in Austin ISD, said in a statement. "By passing this curriculum, Austin ISD has broken the sacred trust that parents put in their children’s schools. Austin ISD parents have no reason to entrust their children to a school district that weaponizes education to indoctrinate children into the LGBT political movement."

Do the right thing, Philippines:

An Iranian beauty queen who has spent almost two weeks inside Manila's international airport says she will be killed if she is sent back home and is seeking asylum in the Philippines.

Bahareh Zare Bahari, a contestant in the recent Miss Intercontinental pageant in Manila, claims Tehran is attempting to silence her because of her public stand against the government.

In a press release last week, the Philippines Immigration Department said the international police agency Interpol issued a worldwide request to arrest Bahari, known as a red notice. The statement did not specify which country requested the red notice, but Bahari told CNN that an immigration official told her Iran requested one in 2018. 

"I have been living here since 2014 and I've not gone back to Iran. I explained to them many times, how can I have a criminal case in Iran when I've been living here?" she told CNN by phone.

Bahari said she has been confined to a passenger room in Terminal 3 of Manila's Ninoy Aquino International Airport since she arrived from Dubai 12 days ago. "I'm really mentally sick," she said, adding that the uncertainty over her case is wearing her down. 

Bahari believes she is being targeted for supporting the exiled Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah of Iran overthrown in the country's 1979 revolution. 

The beauty queen blamed the situation on Iranian authorities, saying it came up because she used an image of Pahlavi and the flag of the former Iranian monarchy as props during a recent competition. Bahari said she made the statement "to try and be the voice of my people."

She also believes she may be targeted because of her social activism in Iran. Bahari said that she became a teacher there because she wanted girls to learn "they are not things, they are not toys, they are human and they have same right as boys."

The Philippines Department of Immigration and Department of Justice have not responded to CNN's request for comment. Requests for comment made to the Iranian embassy in Manila and the Iranian government in Tehran have not been answered. 

AOC is a walking caricature of her own worldview:

On Wednesday, far-left Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) linked the death of her grandfather to white people.

According to the socialist’s logic, “predominantly white” corporations and communities have set climate change in motion with their fossil fuel admissions; climate change apparently caused and/or amped up Hurricane Maria, a devastating Puerto Rico storm in 2017; AOC’s grandfather died in the aftermath of the storm, ergo: white people are connected to, if not the cause of, his death.

“[T]he people that are producing climate change, the folks that are responsible for the largest amount of emissions, or communities, or corporations, they tend to be predominantly white, correct?” the 29-year-old asked during a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee hearing on civil rights and civil liberties, according to The Washington Examiner.

“Yes, and every study backs that up I know no one is intentionally trying to kill people and hurt people,” National Wildlife Federation’s Mustafa Ali answered the NYC rep. 

“My own grandfather died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria,” Ocasio-Cortez highlighted.

“We can’t act as though the inertia and history of colonization doesn’t play a role in this,” she added. 

At The Imaginative Conservative, Louis Markos imagines how Dante might have corresponded with us in the twenty-first century about the Beatific Vision.

About these Trumpist charges that the transcript is the long and the short of it

They've been crowing that Vindman's expressions of being disturbed are mere subjectivity. "The transcript has been out there for weeks" and "his role was to advise; the president sets the policy" and all that.

Not so fast:

The National Security Council’s top Ukrainian expert testified to the House on Tuesday that key words and phrases were omitted from the transcript that President Trump released of his July 25 call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

The New York Times first reported that Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman mentioned the discrepancies between the call he listened to and the released transcript. According to people familiar with the testimony, Vindman said that the White House omitted a claim by Trump that there were recordings of former vice president Joe Biden discussing Ukraine corruption, as well as Zelensky’s explicit mention of Burisma Holdings, the energy firm that hired Hunter Biden.

Vindman did not posit a motive for the altered transcript and told the House that he attempted to change the transcript to better reflect the omissions, which was partially successful, but did not include those two corrections.

While Zelensky does not mention “Burisma” in the transcript, he does refer to “the company.” Sources told the Times that the note-takers and transcription software used on the call missed Zelensky saying the word “Burisma.” Vindman also testified that, in one of the three areas where ellipses turn up on the transcript, Trump mentioned the Biden recordings.

One less point of shill spin to muddy the waters.

Bernie Sanders is a champion of the forces of darkness

At what point in his life did he become this warped?

Senator Bernie Sanders, who is nominally Jewish but has a long history of attacking the Jewish state of Israel, wants to take some of the funding the United States gives to Israel for military assistance and give it to the Palestinians in Gaza, where the terrorist group Hamas rules, The Times of Israel reports.

Speaking at the national conference of the notoriously anti-Israel J Street organization, and interviewed by former Obama officials Ben Rhodes and Tommy Vietor, both of whom supported the Iran nuclear deal that represented an existential threat to Israel, Sanders curried favor by suggesting that Israel did not respect human rights, snapping, “I would use the leverage of $3.8 billion. It is a lot of money, and we cannot give it carte blanche to the Israeli government, or for that matter to any government at all. We have a right to demand respect for human rights and democracy.” He threatened, “My solution is, to Israel, if you want military aid you’re going to have to fundamentally change your relationship to the people of Gaza. I would say that some of the $3.8 billion should go right now to humanitarian aid in Gaza.”

Sanders boasted, “My proposal in terms of Israeli-Palestinian efforts is not a radical proposal. All it says is that we need an even-hand proposal for both people. What is going on in Gaza right now, for example, is absolutely inhumane. It is unacceptable. It is unsustainable.”

"Even-hand." That's rich, Bernie. You don't think maybe Hamas ought to knock it off with the tunnels and rocket barrages as a first move?

He's right that the current situation in Gaza is unsustainable, but the reason is the thoroughly corrupt Hamas "leadership":

While the protests are continuing and more Palestinians continue to put their lives at risk at the behest of the Hamas leadership, the terror group's senior officials are busy throwing lavish parties for their family members and upgrading their personal treasuries. It is as if the Hamas leaders were telling their people: Sacrifice yourself for the cause of destroying Israel and killing Jews so that we and our families can continue to live it up.

The latest example of this exploitation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip surfaced in the form of a video of the birthday celebration of 20-year-old Mohammed, son of senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad.

Hamad, a former deputy foreign minister in the Hamas government of 2012, currently serves as deputy minister in the Hamas-controlled Ministry for Social Welfare and is personally entrusted with overseeing aid to the most impoverished families in the Gaza Strip. Ironically, the man in charge of caring for the poorest families was caught on camera throwing a lavish birthday partyfor his son.

The video of the birthday party in the Gaza Strip has gone viral on social media. Many Palestinians expressed outrage over the celebration which, they said, took place at a time when the residents of the Hamas-ruled coastal enclave are facing dire economic conditions and are being killed in clashes with the Israeli security forces as they try to infiltrate the border with Israel and throw rocks, petrol bombs and explosive devices at Israeli soldiers.

"The sons of our leaders are always different from the ordinary people," commented Facebook user Ahmad Hassan.

Another Palestinian, Bashar Bashar, wrote: "This party is at the expense of the victims of the weekly demonstrations [near the border with Israel]."

Hussein Qatoush, yet another Facebook user, wrote: "Frustrated Palestinian youths are committing suicide because of poverty, while the sons of the leaders are holding birthday parties!"

Many other social media users said they were not surprised to see a Hamas leader throwing a big party for his son at a time when young Palestinians are fleeing the Gaza Strip because of soaring unemployment and economic hardship there.

Dem presidential candidates who are ahead of Bernie would do well to distinguish themselves from this poisonous position.

Will they?

Don't hold your breath. They've given wet kisses to J Street.

Both things are true: Democrats are power-mad and Trump's foreign policy is a recklessly conducted mess

The whole concept of acknowledging several things to be true at once, even though each thing poses a threat to some tribe's agenda, has never been so important. Unless you're cheerleading for something other than full revelation of truth, and America's founding principles, you're acting out of fear that you're forfeiting points on the board to forces you've built up an emotional investment in holding a fixed image of.

The Left, and its political embodiment, the Democrat party, have been at this a long time. It's what identity-politics militancy is all about. Anything that can be blamed on some combination of white / male / heterosexual / Christian "privilege" can shut off any further inquiry into what's really at play in a given situation.

The Fusion GPS / Steele dossier / Mueller report crusade succeeded in getting a lot of people to see in Trump's erratic relations with foreign leaders, particularly Putin, evidence that Trump was somehow desirous of a Russian overshadowing of US global influence. (It's true that he sometimes seems not to care that his utterances stoke such a conclusion - to wit, his statement that Russia and Syria could "play in the sand" once there was no more US presence in the Kurdish area along the Turkey-Syria border.)

Adam Schiff clearly wants Trump gone by any means necessary. His over-the-top paraphrasing of the Zelensky call, his leaks and his constant preening make that clear. He's determined to see the impeachment process through to Senate conviction if he possibly can.

All that said, Trumpists would have us believe that that's the only set of developments on the national plate of any substance. That's not the case. Trumpist reaction to the statements by acting US ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor and Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council's top Ukraine expert, to the House committees involved in the impeachment inquiry has been equal parts whataboutism and character smear.

The whataboutism reflexively reverts back to the above-discussed Democrat machinations and such Obama-era figures as James Comey and John Brennan. This tack at least has a rootedness in truth to commend it, even though the truth is here being employed as a tool of distraction.

The smears of Taylor and Vindman are another matter.

Taylor's statement put the spotlight on what he called the "highly irregular" channels through which US-Ukraine relations were conducted, particularly the role of personal Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. It's worth recalling that he got that job because the previous, official ambassador, Masha Yovanovitch, was perceived to be insufficiently loyal to Trump. By July, "it was becoming clear" to Taylor that a Trump-Zelensky meeting was dependent on the Zelensky administration getting going on an investigation into Burisma, the energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat.

And here's a glaring question: why did Taylor not hear about the July 25 Trump-Zelensky phone conversation until September 25?

For his trouble, Taylor has been called a "Never Trumper" - a term the meaning of which has morphed - especially since Trump's "human scum" tweet - from a catchall for anyone who deviates from a position of slavish devotion to an accusation of being somehow left-leaning - by Laura Ingraham, and a "deep state hack" by Bill Mitchell. Jack Posobiec accused Taylor of undermining US foreign policy. Trump himself has repeated Ingraham's "Never Trumper" charge and saying he didn't know Taylor.  Mr. President, does this mean Mike Pompeo didn't consult you about appointing Taylor to the position?

In his opening statement, Vindman, a decorated Army Lieutenant Colonel, said he was so alarmed by what he heard in the Trump-Zelensky conversation that he alerted a national security lawyer.

Vindman has also testified that Ukrainian officials frequently reached out to him in confusion over Giuliani's outsized role and demands, which has earned him the accusation of being a double agent by Ingraham. Sean Duffy has pretty strongly suggested that the fact that Vindman was born in the Ukraine has tempted him to embrace dual loyalty.

It's clear that the throne-sniffers don't want us talking about the use of Trump's personal attorney to conduct a shadow foreign policy concurrent with the shifting set of figures in official Ukraine-relations roles. Their idol is clean as a whistle as far as they're concerned, and the only big stories are Adam Schiff's laser-focus zeal for impeachment and the matters with which John Durham's criminal probes concerned.

One noteworthy aspect of their mindset is that it's devoid of any consideration of how to persuade anyone outside their ranks. The closest they come is this attempt to intimidate "Never Trumpers" into silence, or joining them is slavish fealty to the tribal line, if possible. It smacks of desperation, which is not a good look for those in control of a party with increasingly wobbly near-future prospects.  That party might take heed of how it participated fully into the probe of the Nixon administration circa 1973-74 and let the chips fall where they may. It meant a short-term rout, but by November 1980, a rebirth, with a true conservative standard-bearer at the helm, had been made possible.

Us "Never Trumpers" would never try to tell the Trumpists not to point out the fact that blind rage is what is motivating the Democrats. Go for it. But the time has come to acknowledge some other aspects of our present reality.

In other words, it's damn hard in late 2019 to find somebody who isn't up to his or her eyeballs in some flavor of Kool-Aid.

Give me old-school hymns over praise-band jangle every time

This entire essay by Tom Rabbe at The Federalist is a worthwhile read about the saddening but apparently fait accompli encroachment of big screens and general razzle-dazzle in churches of most types. For present purposes, I would draw your attention to the portion in which he talks about hymns:

As hymnals fade, theology also suffers. The rich repository of religious wisdom contained in hymns will be lost. The old-fashioned language of hymns may strike some as unusual, but their text teaches the Christian faith far better than most of the praise choruses that dominate contemporary services. Old hymns were carefully crafted with theology at the forefront. Traditional hymns present doctrine clearly and beautifully convey the gospel story of saving grace.

This is one of the main points of appeal for me regarding the little country church I attend. Just a pianist leading us in the great old hymns.

And the converse is the only thing that bugs me about Emmaus Walk and Residents Encounter Christ weekends. The talks, the discussions among those at the tables, the candlelight event, etc. are profoundly faith-deepening and even life-changing. But when the spiritual director announces, "Okay, now we'll have the band play a couple of songs," I'm thinking, can we not? Simple, saccharine phrases repeated seemingly endlessly, minimal melody and jangling guitar tones are really a vibe-disrupter for me.

And if I never hear another G major chord voiced like this, it will be too soon:

On men, women, the Church and leadership

As an LITD reader, by definition, you're well-informed, so there's a good chance you're already familiar with the dustup between John MacArthur and Beth Moore. Still, given that you're also a busy person, I offer this synopsis from Joe Dallas at The Stream:

I doubt you need the backstory, but in case you missed it, last week renowned pastor and author John MacArthur was asked during a panel discussion to give a one-word reaction to the equally well-known name “Beth Moore.” His two-word response? “Go home.”

At the core of the situation is that fact that Moore is an egalitarian and MacArthur is a complimentarian. My research into this dichotomy  is not presently extensive, but I suspect that these terms and the distinction between them has arisen as one element of the great sociocultural upheaval of the last several decades. If there's documentation that it goes back further, send it along.

The minister at the Methodist church I attend - a woman - was pretty incensed over MacArthur's dismissal of Moore's ministry. She riffed off of it for her sermon yesterday, and made a compelling case for her position. She's obviously a woman of God and asserts that she was called to be a a pastor. She is steeped in Weslyan doctrine and clearly embraces it. And she made the same point Dallas makes - after admitting that it took the better part of last week to see clear to do so:

I refuse to call him, as many are now doing, a buffoon, chauvinist, or prideful jerk. On the contrary, the man has faithfully preached, taught, and written about the Word for decades with a consistency and discipline I admire hugely.

That admiration is one sided — I am, after all, both a Charismatic and a Counselor, two C’s that don’t sit well with him — so I approve of him far more than he’d ever approve of me. Still, he doesn’t deserve to be denigrated or have his motives and character called into question, as many are now doing. On this point let’s take a lesson from Beth herself who plainly said, “I esteem you as my sibling in Christ.” That he is.

Which is, I guess, why I’m so disappointed in his remark, and even more so, in the enthusiastic approval he got from those present when he made it. Some say it sprang from sexism; some say it was ego.

I say we’ve got a sweeping problem of worldliness infecting way too many of us.

This is the age of the mob scene, the tantrum, and the sad, juvenile tendency to run and observe whenever someone yells “Fight! Fight!” We gather around controversy for entertainment, and we follow people who huff and puff and berate others, stupidly telling ourselves their public aggression is strong leadership; deep conviction. Dear Lord, what a sad trend has settled onto America!

But we, the church, can do better. We can do it by denying ourselves permission to use social media as a platform to belch when a reasoned statement is called for.

Both my pastor and Dallas bring far more open-heartedness to the matter than I'm able to muster at present. My current take is that MacArthur is a bonehead. He thinks Catholicism is Satanic, he'll brook no challenge to his young-earth creationist, cessationist and millennialist positions, and will not even consider the possible veracity of free grace theology. He's been in trouble with various institutions a few times throughout his career for his boneheadedness.

Now, with all that said, for the past several months I have been looking into the positions of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, the organization behind The Nashville Statement, which strikes me as a sound declaration of the way God has designed humankind.

Longtime LITD readers will not be surprised that I've been drawn to this, given my repeated stressing that until 20 years ago at the very outset, no culture anywhere in the world at any time throughout history has had a definition of marriage that included two people of the same sex being so joined, as well as my repeated stressing that people who "feel" like they are the opposite gender are suffering from a delusion. No matter how much someone has gobbled hormone blockers or had his or her crotch carved up, the DNA in any cell of his or her body will tell us his or her gender. Bruce Jenner remains Bruce Jenner.

But if you get into the CBMW literature, you see that it's a pretty forthrightly complimentarian outfit.

It seems to me there are degrees to this, with the aforementioned MacArthur's absolutism being way out at the end of the spectrum. Council spokesmen John Piper and Wayne Grudem don't seem to come at it with MacArthur's rigidity.

Forty, even maybe as recently as ten, years ago, I had a much different view of all this. For one thing, I wasn't a Christian yet. I had been through my ideological conversion, and was the conservative that I still am, so I wasn't a feminist, but I just saw any doctrine that talked about men as the only suitable leaders in a church or family as inherently unfair. In fact, this issue was one of my last sticking points.

But as I deepened by faith journey and came to understand that Scripture has an authority from which there is no escape, I had to grapple with the fact that God is a He, that his only begotten child was a son, and that such shapers of Judea-Christian history as Moses, David. the prophets and the apostles were males. There are some passages about this in 1 Timothy, Ephesians and Titus that we must grapple with. To expand beyond our religion to a look at the sweep of worldwide history, we can see that human societies have almost exclusively been organized patriarchally. 

I'm no longer a novice Christian, but I still have much to learn. At this point, my gut has me seeing things Morris's way. She takes, and always has taken, doctrine seriously. She calls God "Father." But, like my own pastor, she has contributed too much to a richer understanding of God's word for me to believe that she should not be so contributing.

Bottom line: the central truths of our faith are not imperiled by our willingness to say that ongoing conversation and debate about some of these more intricate points is merited.

We, after all, are the creatures. He is the Creator. There are always going to be limits to our understanding. Part of being a faithful child of the Most High God is being okay with some mystery, no matter how much we grasp.

Death of al-Baghdadi - initial thoughts

Excellent work by the Delta Force A-Squadron. Meticulous planning, careful cultivation of local sources, and courageous risk-taking.

It was perfectly appropriate for Trump to describe him as dying like a simpering coward.

I have no problem with the administration not notifying Congress beforehand. Given the zeal of Democrats to kneecap Trump (a real issue, which exists alongside Trump's objectionable nature), it may well have messed up the mission.

The Washington Post's decision to change its original headline, characterizing him as the chief terrorist of ISIS, to one depicting him as an "austere religious scholar" was made by someone and signed off on by someone. Who? This information must be made public and this person / these persons must be subjected to a level of ridicule that has them concerned about career implications.

Anybody in any current political or ideological camp who uses this occasion to advance a brand or protect turf needs to b e called out for making a shameful decision. This is a great moment in the history of the struggle against jihad.

ISIS didn't die with al-Baghdadi. Ridding the world of this ideology is a long-haul undertaking.

"Whatever you do, don't hire a yes man"

In his waning days in the VSG White House, John Kelly felt emboldened to lay some bracing candor on his boss:

John Kelly warned President Trump that hiring a “yes man” to succeed him as White House chief of staff would lead to impeachment and, in hindsight, regrets his decision to resign.

House Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry into Trump less than a year after Kelly departed the administration. The retired, four-star Marine general suggested the blame lies squarely with acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and other advisers who are unable, or unwilling, to keep the president out of trouble. 

Kelly, 69, said he privately cautioned Trump during his final days on the job that he would be impeached if he did not tap a chief of staff with the fortitude to check the president’s bad impulses. Kelly said he does not believe the president would be in this predicament had he stayed. 

“I said, whatever you do — and we were still in the process of trying to find someone to take my place — I said whatever you do, don’t hire a ‘yes man,’ someone who won’t tell you the truth — don’t do that. Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached,” Kelly recalled, in an interview at the Sea Island Summit, a political conference hosted by the Washington Examiner.

How long until the VSG dismisses him as a Never Trumper?

If you're a serious grownup in the VSG administration, you have to know how to persuade him

The word "oil" came across his radar screen and that was the selling point:

President Trump was persuaded to leave at least several hundred troops behind in Syria only when he was told that his decision to pull them out would risk control of oil fields in the country’s east, according to U.S. officials.

Trump had rejected arguments that withdrawing U.S. forces would benefit American adversaries, while endangering civilians and Kurdish allies, but he tweeted Thursday that “we will NEVER let a reconstituted ISIS have those fields.”

Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper confirmed on Friday that troops would remain in eastern Syria to prevent the oil fields from being retaken by the Islamic State.

Speaking at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Esper said that military planners were “considering how we might reposition forces in the areas” and that the deployment “would include some mechanized forces” such as tanks or other armored vehicles and support personnel.

A U.S. official with knowledge of operations in Syria said that Trump’s interest in the oil provided an opportunity for the Pentagon, which was unhappy with the initial decision, to temper his insistence on a full withdrawal and allow counterterrorism operations and airspace control to continue.

“This is like feeding a baby its medicine in yogurt or applesauce,” said the official, one of several who spoke on the condition of anonymity about internal U.S. deliberations. 

Now, what would be the angle for getting him to sign off on actual consistent, productive courses of action on North Korea, the deficit and health care?

When there's no clarity about what is and isn't a right, you get tyranny

You knew some Freedom-Hater would come up with this:

Rep. Ilhan Omar said she plans to introduce a "Homes For All" bill that she hopes will guarantee a home for every person in the U.S. 

"It is a moral stain on our country that we have half-a-million or more people facing homelessness," the Minnesota Democrat said Thursday at a congressional town hall for women of color. "In a few weeks, we are going to introduce our 'Homes For All' legislation, which will, hopefully, guarantee a home for everyone." 

Omar said homes would be guaranteed by having the federal government invest "in the creation of millions of homes." She added that Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and "the squad" would be joining her in sponsoring the bill. 

"I am really excited for the opportunity to work on this legislation and get it done so that we don’t have an Ilhan that arrives in America and gets to see — have it be the first thing she sees, people sleeping on the side of the streets in a country where people come to seek prosperity and hope," she added.

The discussion of the fact that those "sleeping on the sides of the streets" have addiction issues and mental illnesses is important to include in the overall conversation about this wacky initiative going forward, but for now, let's focus on what she's predicating this on. She thinks having a home is a right.

It 's impossible for it to be a right for the same reason that it's impossible for health care or having a job to be a right. We have no right to the effort of our fellow human being. Foundation-pourers, flatwork crews, carpenters, electricians, plumbers and roofers have to be lined up. And practitioners of those arts only exists because there are people motivated to become such practitioners. It sounds theoretical, but the question must be asked: What if, starting tomorrow, nobody in the world wanted to be any of those things? How would anybody exercise this "right" to a house? Would the government make certain people go into those  fields?

And then there is the matter of choice. Government is going to hand all these people without homes a particular domicile and say, "Here's your place to live, comrade. Move in." Never mind the matter of preference. If you want a side courtyard, or a day room off of the kitchen, or a walk-in basement - well, you don't get to shop around and find those features. Without competition, nobody's busting his tail to come as close as possible to your desired array of features.

Then there's the redistribution aspect. Government is going to take your hard-earned money at gunpoint to put somebody else in a house. And anytime the state is taking Citizen A's money to address the wants or even needs of Citizen B, Citizen A has lost control over what was his. It's called redistribution.

It will be interesting to see how far this cockamamie stunt goes, given that it joins Medicare for All, college loan forgiveness, and a raft of other goodies as shiny campaign-season objects being dangled before the post-American public, which, for all its dulled senses, still understands, at least to some degree, that none of this is affordable.

But that's the secondary matter. The first principle that's relevant here is the imperiling of basic freedom.

Um, isn't this pretty much the opposite of what the Very Stable Genius said our objective was going to be?

Reality inserts itself into the cut-and-run policy in northern Syria:

The United States will send armored vehicles and combat troops into eastern Syria to keep oil fields from potentially falling into the hands of Islamic State militants, U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Friday.
It was the latest sign that extracting the military from Syria is more uncertain and complicated than President Donald Trump is making it out to be.

Though Trump repeatedly says he is pulling out of Syria, the reality on the ground is different. Adding armored reinforcements in the oil-producing area of Syria could mean sending several hundred U.S. troops -- even as a similar number are being withdrawn from a separate mission closer to the border with Turkey.

Esper described the added force as “mechanized,” which means it likely will include armored vehicles such as Bradley armored infantry carriers and possibly tanks, although details were still be worked out. This reinforcement would introduce a new dimension to the U.S. military presence , which largely has been comprised of special operations forces not equipped with tanks or other armored vehicles.

Esper spoke at a news conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels, where he consulted with American allies.

Sending an armored force to eastern Syria would partially reverse the ongoing shrinkage of the U.S. troop presence in Syria. Trump has ordered the withdrawal of nearly all 1,000 U.S. troopswho had been partnering with a Syrian Kurdish-led militia against the Islamic State group. That withdrawal is proceeding even as Esper announced the plan to put reinforcements in the oil-producing area.

 And now that Turkey and Russia have signed that pact that is supposed to make them the guarantors of stability in northern Syria, what effect does this new development have on that arrangement?

Thursday roundup

What was she doing on that board in the first place?

Four prominent pastors came under harsh criticism last week for promoting the new book of President Trump’s spiritual advisor Paula White, who is also on Trump’s evangelical advisory board. The ire directed at Franklin Graham (son of Billy Graham), former Southern Baptist Convention President Jack Graham (no relation), Greg Laurie, and Robert Jeffress for their promotion of White was well deserved.

An article at The Gospel Coalition highlights some of the disqualifying aspects of White’s ministry, the most egregious of which include unrepentant adultery and a fundraising video made by White in 2016 in which she suggests that giving her $1,144 could result in salvation.

“There’s someone that God is speaking to, to click on that donation button by minimizing the screen. And when you do to sow $1,144. It’s not often I ask very specifically but God has instructed me and I want you to hear. This isn’t for everyone but this is for someone. When you sow that $1,144 based on John 11:44 I believe for resurrection life.”

The video has been removed from YouTube, but The Christian Post reports that White went on to offer those who couldn’t afford the $1,144 “resurrection seed” prayer cloths that could heal them and bring about other miracles.

“You say, ‘Paula, I just don’t have [$1,144]’, then sow $144. ‘I don’t have that.’ Sow $44. But stand on John chapter 11:44. And when you do, there are prayer cloths that we have anointed that we have prayed over, that are going to be a point of contact.

“In Acts 19, the Bible says, Paul prayed over these prayer cloths and they brought forth special miracles, signs and wonders. There have been times that I have taken prayer cloths that have been anointed as a point of contact. I put them in my loved one’s sneakers, I put them under their bed. I put them on parts of my body that I believe God for healing.”

Sadly, such heresy is not out of character for White, who calls fellow prosperity gospel preacher T.D. Jakes her “spiritual father.”

Another particularly egregious example of the overtly non-Christian nature of White’s ministry is when her co-pastor and ex-husband Jonathan Cain promoted pornography to the women in the congregation that they would discover what their husbands like sexually. White laughed along with the crowd before stating that while she and Cain aren’t advocating for anyone to get addicted to porn, people do need to educate themselves. This is supposedly a church service to give glory to the creator of the universe and redeemer of sinners.

Laurie and Franklin Graham have rescinded their endorsements, but JackGraham and Jeffress have not.

Maybe, as he said later in a tweet attempting to explain it, that it was kind of a shout-out to Colorado and Kansas people that were in his Pennsylvania audience, but that comes across as pretty flimsy, given the way he put together this word salad:

President Donald Trump said, “We’re building a wall in Colorado” when talking about border wall progress on Wednesday afternoon. Trump was speaking in Pittsburgh at the Shale Insight Conference when he made the comments.

“And we’re building a wall on the border of New Mexico and we’re building a wall in Colorado, we’re building a beautiful wall, a big one that really works that you can’t get over, you can’t get under and we’re building a wall in Texas. We’re not building a wall in Kansas but they get the benefit of the walls we just mentioned,” said Trump.

No unicorns, rainbow, tofu and sprouts in 2019 post-America: 

Partisan political division and the resulting incivility has reached a low in America, with 67% believing that the nation is nearing civil war, according to a new national survey.

“The majority of Americans believe that we are two-thirds of the way to being on the edge of civil war. That to me is a very pessimistic place,” said Mo Elleithee, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service.

And worse, he said in announcing the results of the institute’s Battleground Poll, the political division is likely to make the upcoming 2020 presidential race the nastiest in modern history.

Thanks, Squirrel-Hair: Major shift in Mideast power dynamics:

Once again, Syrian President Bashar Assad has snapped up a prize from world powers that have been maneuvering in his country’s multi-front wars. Without firing a shot, his forces are returning to towns and villages in northeastern Syria where they haven’t set foot for years.
Assad was handed one victory first by U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from northeastern Syria, analysts said. Then he got another from a deal struck between Turkey and Russia, Damascus’ ally.
Abandoned by U.S. forces and staring down the barrel of a Turkish invasion, Kurdish fighters had no option but to turn to Assad’s government and to Russia for protection from their No. 1 enemy.

Freshman House member from California Katie Hill needs our prayers.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott is calling for his state's attorney general and Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate this suituation with 7-year-old James Younger.   So glad to see that the jury decision will not be the final chapter on this grotesque situation.

That did it

Hell, let's impeach the guy because he personally insulted me. Good enough reason in my book. I do not take lightly affronts to my honor.

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

The Never Trumper Republicans, though on respirators with not many left, are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats. Watch out for them, they are human scum!

10:48 AM - 23 Oct 2019

I guess he's done with any attempt to persuade us to come together with him, but then again, what would be the grounds on which he could? There is no core set of principles he could use to appeal to those who find him more objectionable by the day. He's all over the map with everything - foreign policy, health care, economic development, immigration. His view is that we aren't getting behind the impulse du jour, which makes us - well, human scum.

And consider how ate up his base is. I've shared here the sad discovery that a fellow conservative - a great guy with whom I'd swapped stuff to read over the years, with whom I'd engaged in mutual defense when either of us were attacked by leftists in social media exchanges, with whom I shared such extra-political interests as pets, food and music - had unfriended me over the Very Stable Genius. Now that the VSG has exhorting his devotees to deal with us as scum, what's out of bounds for them to do to what's left of our outlets for real conservative discourse? You all know what I'm suggesting, and I'm not out of the realm of possibility.

He's drawn a line in the sand here. We get behind his erratic and self-directed "agenda," because that's  the modern Republican Party, bitch.

Well, if that's where we are, then I shall position myself accordingly.

I shall say to anyone in any context that this guy is bad news and needs to go.

Post-America is officially post-Christian

I've recently come across two blog posts about the Pew Research Center's report on the state of cultural Christianity in our nation. One is by Erick Erickson at The Resurgent and the other is by Shane Van Der Hart at Caffeinated Thoughts.

I'm going to take the liberty of reprising Erickson's piece in its entirety:

Pew has a survey on the state of Christianity in America. There really is no good news for Christianity in it. The religion is on the decline in every part of the country. Whether rich or poor, black or white or hispanic, college educated or without a degree, regardless of region of the country Christianity is declining.

Millennials will be the first generation that is predominately atheist or agnostic.

It is important to note that it is very likely that the number of self-described evangelicals already does exceed and certainly will exceed the number of actual church going Christians in the country too. Evangelical is rapidly becoming an ethnic identifier of someone who loves Jesus, but doesn’t really have a relationship with him.

Parents have a lot to do with the faith of their children and to the extent Baby Boomers identify as Christian but have a deeply shallow faith, their millennial children do too. More interestingly, when you dig into data on church decline in this country, it turns out that actual orthodox Bible believing churches are experiencing less of a decline than their mainline counterparts. It really is true that the last Episcopalian and probably the last of the PCUSA has already been born.

The Southern Baptists, PCA, and other denominations that believe in the inerrant word of God will continue, if in reduced numbers.

Therein lies both a problem and a path forward. Many Bible believing churches that practice expository preacher are practicing shallow faith. It is increasingly common to encounter Christians with no concept of church doctrine. They do not recognize or understand the necessity of belief in the trinity and will argue that since the word isn’t in the Bible that they don’t have to believe it.

The doctrines of the church are falling by the wayside as even some orthodox churches transition their scriptural exposition to self-help messages and pastors who engage in exposition of the Bible leave the deep waters out of sermons.

One of the major problems in Christianity today is the church that uses Sunday service not to recharge the Christian, but lure in the unconverted. These churches deliver shallow sermons that might avoid being off-putting to new believers, but don’t nourish the souls of the believers. If church is a hospital for the wounded saint, more care needs to go into the church’s nursing.

Concurrently, a lot of evangelical churches have ceded the social gospel to the left. The Bible is full of admonitions to take care of those in the church community and to seek the welfare of the local community and a lot of evangelical churches have gotten really bad at doing that. When local communities fall on hard times, even local churches willingly step aside for the government to help. Churches need to do a better job of being parts of their whole community and step up even more to be a part of their internal community.

Hard times are coming to the American church. As those in power are less likely to appreciate or even understand the faith, they will begin structuring society differently. Churches need to build stronger communities within and need to strengthen and deepen the faith and understanding of their congregants.

As an aside, this is a big bonus for seminaries like RTS and Southern that do not cut corners and insist on scholarly depth. The practical preacher needs to become a real scholar and teacher who can help his flock understand the nuances of their faith. That is going to matter more and more as the world becomes more tempting and the faith looks more absurd.

Let's take the points I've put in boldface one at a time.

Millennials, due to what  Erickson points out, are a historically unprecedented lot. Elsewhere in his post, he talks about shallow-faith Christians. At least they had swelled the ranks of Christians of any degree or type sufficiently that the faith, or at least its trappings, informed the secular culture, with traditions and customs that reinforced everyone's notion that ours was a Christian nation. That goes away now that millennials are what they are.

The lack of knowledge of church doctrine that Erickson notes is want makes possible such vapid pronouncements as "Jesus basically just wants us to all love each other," which is nothing more than excuse-making for sinful living.

And, as he says a little further on, sermons in even doctrinally sound churches steer clear of anything that might ruffle feathers. The result is that, as he says, souls go unnourished. Fewer and fewer people develop any kind of spiritual maturity, any sense of relationship with the triune Creator.

And the plain speaking about hard times should be a wake-up call. We are going to find out what it means to be really tested. Maybe we won't be firebombed in our churches as happens in Nigeria, but there's going to be a cost to professing what we know to be true.

Van Der Hart gives us some specifics from the report:

• Twelve percent fewer Americans identify as Christian (65 percent) while religious “nones” (atheists, agnostics, and the unaffiliated) now consist of 26 percent of the population up 9 percent.
• In 2009, a majority of Americans identified themselves as Protestant. In 2019, only 43 percent of Americans do. Only one in five Americans now identify as Catholic, down 3 percent from 2009.
• Atheists have doubled their numbers from 2 percent in 2009 to 4 percent in 2019. There are three percent more agnostics in 2019, 5 percent, than in 2009. The unaffiliated or “nothing in particular” subset of Americans has grown by five percent from 12 percent to 17 percent.
• Only 49 percent of Millennials identify as Christian and four-in-ten identify as a religious “none.”

The going away of those trappings of the faith that used to inform the secular culture means that the general society no longer has our backs as truly hostile societal elements attack and try to silence us.

I'm also currently reading How the West Really Lost God by Mary Eberstadt, and its contention is that , while there's undeniably going to be a chicken-or-egg element to the question of whether Christianity's decline or the decline of the traditional family structure preceded the other, the argument is strong that family decline came first.

I'm not too far into it yet, but she has already discussed the fact that bonds of kinship, which used to be the central identifying factor for anyone and everyone, are now considered fungible. To be someone's sister or uncle or even spouse or child is merely a conditional arrangement. Traditions and customs within a family have been diluted to the point of being effectively inconsequential. One result of this is that understanding of the basics of the faith are not getting passed down.

We're going to have to muster a degree of strength and courage that we hadn't anticipated. We're going to find out firsthand what our Lord meant when he said it would cost us to follow him.