Three stories for the death-rattle-of-Western-civilization file

It's still a few minutes before 7 AM and I've just begun my perusal of news stories and analysis pieces. But in that short time I've already come across these stories:

• A lady - I guess she must be white, given the situation she's encountering - wrote a novel about a Mexican bookstore owner who comes north to the US after her family is killed by a drug cartel. The author's motives seem to lean more toward proselytizing than creating timeless art; according to her publisher, "the intent [was] to shine a spotlight on tragedies facing immigrants." Oprah made it this month's pick for her book club. Too late. The identity jackboots have already raised such a stink - saying it presents a "stereotypical and opportunistic narrative" -  that the author's promotional tour has been replace with "'townhall meetings' which will bring together Cummins [the book's author] and those who've raised objections to the book for discussion."
• Yale University is cancelling a longstanding and popular class entitled "Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present" because the artists and works it discusses are all white males. When students caught wind of this development, 400 signed up for the 300 seats available for the spring semester's final run of it. It's going to be replaced by several classes, including The Silk Road, Art & Politics, and Global Crafts.
• Cory Booker has introduced a bill in the Senate that would make it illegal for employers to take a pass on job applicants with corn rows, dreadlocks and Bantu knots. 

In a time when the nation's focus is on how the impeachment process is going to conclude, and what a good economy means for this year's political twists and turns, it's important to remember that identity-politics jackbootery has not gone away. Those who would passively-aggressively assume the victim pose are still ruining the rollout of works of fiction - and serving notice to Oprah that she better examine her wokeness level, and quick - as well as further destroying the university's role as the transmitter of the works and ideas that make Western civilization a unique blessing to humankind, and creating an environment in which federal legislators are seriously deliberating whether proprietors of privately owned organizations can set their own standards for appearance.

They're able to do this without really getting very physical about it. No roving gangs a la Mao's Cultural Revolution, no reeducation camps al a Pol Pot's Khner Rouge regime, no firing squads a la Che Guevara's way of handling "diversity" in the early days of Cuba's revolutionary regime.

No, the bedrock institutions of American life are now so peopled with cowards that a little diversity-and-inclusion-speak on social media, at board meetings and faculty meetings and on the Senate floor is sufficient to intimidate them into complete acquiescence. And contrition. "Thank you for pointing out our blindness. We'll now take time for some soul-searching."

I want to close on this note, though: Trumpism is inadequate to address this. Not because Trump or his slavish devotees are racist - they're not - but because they actually elevate ignorance of history and the West's defining ideas to a virtue. They lack the core set of principles that would make it possible to mount a real resistance. You can't "own the libs" on social media and make this go away. The Left has rotted our culture beyond recognition, and there doesn't seem to be a bridge back to terrain on which it would be recognizable.

It is so very late in the day.

The Israel-Palestine peace plan - initial thoughts

The most interesting point to be made about it is that it looks like it was crafted and presented without  much interest in whether it would actually be implemented. When Jared Kushner held his first meetings about it, no Palestinians showed up. Since then, Palestinian weigh-in has consisted of denouncing it.

It seems to have been crafted with a recognition of two realities of the present-day Middle East:

• The US is allied with Israel and therefore isn't going to assume the role of a neutral arbiter, and
• The region has largely moved on from Israel-Palestine relations. A new bloc consisting of Israel and Sunni Arab nations has emerged, and countering the Iran-Turkey-Russia bloc is its main concern

The plan calls for a sovereign nation-state of Palestine. Its shape is rather distended, but what is to be done when this new country is going to be carved out of an existing sovereign nation-state? Jerusalem is, as Israeli politicians frequently point out, the eternal capital of the Jewish state. A portion of East Jerusalem that does not include the Temple Mount is about all that can be found for establishing a Palestinian capital. No existing Israeli settlements would be rolled back.

Some of its other terms are noteworthy as well. It calls for Hamas to be removed as the governing authority in Gaza, to be replaced by the Palestinian Authority. The right-of-return question is put to rest: there will be none.

The US has invited the Palestinians to sit at the negotiating table, using this plan as the basis for moving forward. My sense is that the US position is that it's no biggie if they don't accept:

President Trump’s posture is a classic take it or leave it. “Without (the Palestinians), we don't do the deal and that's okay,” he said. “If we do, it'll be a tremendous tribute to everybody. And if we don't, life goes on." For the Palestinians, life going on means diminishing control of territory, stifled economic development, faded relevance on the diplomatic stage, and generally watching as the world moves on without them.

The status quo is not ideal for the United States, Israel and the Arab states, but it is not intolerable either. The same cannot be said for the Palestinian Authority. Moving the peace plan forward to the negotiation stage would be a positive development for everyone involved. If the plan is DOA, the biggest losers will be the ones who are making peace impossible.

The plan doesn't depend upon specific political players for its implementation:

Although U.S. officials insist they’re not taking sides in the Israeli elections slated for March 2, the timing of the plan’s release is useful for Netanyahu, who was indicted today on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of public trust. Given Netanyahu’s troubles (and the likely prospect that he’s not Prime Minister for much longer), the administration was committed to bringing Gantz on board with the plan as well. Kushner told me: “It’s good to see how two competitors in the Israel elections can put aside their differences to promote the interests of their country ahead of their political interests.” That wasn’t the Gantz’s initial position—he first publicly objected to the release of the plan before the election; after weeks of diplomacy he reversed his position and expressed support. Meanwhile, while Netanyahu will receive receive a temporary boost, he will have trouble guarding his right flank. The far-right parties on which he relies for political survival will decry his endorsement of a Palestinian state, whatever else the plan says.

I have to give Jared Kushner more credit than I did when he first announced this project. It takes into account the above-mentioned shifted regional dynamics. It's basically a message to the Palestinians that this is their best shot at getting something workable. The US and Israel are dealing from a position of strength; if the Palestinians take a pass, so be it. The real action is now elsewhere.

Also noteworthy is the fact that the Very Stable Genius basically delegated it to others. That generally works out best in any arena of US policy.

The archive of LITD posts about Donald Trump from September 2015 through June 2016

We don't even have him up to the convention, let alone the election, but LITD had already had plenty to say.

It's quite interesting to see how some of the players - people, magazines, think tanks - were viewing him t that point.

Only thing: It's exclusive content for paying members of the LITD Patreon community. But this one is worth joining for.

John Bolton

In Trump-era fashion, he now becomes the latest figure about which we must have a hot take.

As I said the other day, I think it would be enlightening for our nation to have him on the stand in the Senate. I think so even more now that some content from his book manuscript is becoming public knowledge due to leaks by somebody or other.

And now, to Twitter Trumpists, he's a RINO and a traitor. Federalist editor Sean Davis says that Bolton was "fired . . for trying to start new wars."  Jim Hoft, Dan Bongino and Jack Posobiec have had a busy morning.

The Pavlovian instantaneousness with which this bunch has staked out its position is unsurprising. They're keen to shepherd impeachment through to a Senate acquittal with as few complications as possible. The common theme to pretty much all of today's attempts to dismiss Bolton's impact is a president's prerogative in hiring and firing diplomatic, military and intelligence-gathering personnel as needed to support his policy vision. The problem is that, at least in the case of Ukraine, this business of policy vision is exactly what's being looked at. There's some pretty strong evidence out there that Donald Trump didn't much care about that particular nation, beyond its usefulness in gaining political advantage.

The Trumpist take is specious at best. If anybody has exhibited consistency over the years and shown that his career's been driven by a core set of principles, it's Bolton. John Podhoretz stated it well in a Commentary piece from last September:

John Bolton has never trimmed his sails in pursuit of power or authority. He is who he is and always has been. He believes in the efficacy of American power and the need to project it to make America safer and improve its position in the world. And he believes that we should confront antagonists rather than seek to find common ground with them.

He was this person the day before Donald Trump appointed him national security adviser, and he remained that person throughout his tenure. He argued internally for exactly the policies and ideas he had advocated before he was installed in the West Wing.

Love his views or hate his views, isn’t this what we want from our public servants—what might be called “intellectual transparency?” Those who disagree with Bolton’s worldview are right to celebrate his departure, but they only know they are right because Bolton is not a prevaricator or a careerist. I have had my differences with him in the past. In 2007, he spoke at a COMMENTARY dinner at which he went through the possibilities of salutary American military action in the Middle East without bothering to confront the argument that the mess in Iraq pretty much precluded any further action along the lines he was laying out.

That said, consider the difference between Bolton’s White House tenure and that of, say, Samantha Power—a person who rose to prominence arguing heatedly and with the zeal of an Old Testament prophet that failure to stop genocides was the moral stain of our age and who then sat there like a tower of Jell-O in the Obama White House as a genocide went on in Syria.

From what we can tell, Bolton never stopped pushing his positions on American strength and not coddling our enemies, on the reasonable assumption that this was what he was there for. Or perhaps because, as a man of integrity, he could do no other. At a time when people are twisting themselves into ideological pretzels to keep their jobs and stay in good with the boss, John Bolton kept his honor and his integrity. And in the end, what else does a public intellectual have but those?

The guy ran his high school's Students for Goldwater group in 1964.

At Yale Law School, his fealty to conservative principles was palpable according to a classmate:

 In his memoir, Justice Clarence Thomas credits Bolton with pushing him to question his liberal beliefs. "John was known as a conservative while I still thought of myself as being far left of center (when I wasn't just being cynical)," Thomas writes. He explains how Bolton challenged him. During one argument, Bolton said, "Clarence, as a member of a group that has been treated shabbily by the majority in this country, why would you want to give the government more power over your personal life?" Though it didn't instantly make Thomas a conservative, the justice writes, "John's question reverberated in my mind for a long time to come."

After some law-firm work, he joined the Reagan administration and over the next several years served in the departments of State and Justice, as well as at USAID. His foreign policy approach became well known. He understood the folly of appeasing rogue regimes like those in North Korea and Iran. He viewed the United Nations as basically worthless, which didn't help him at his acrimonious Senate confirmation hearings when President George W. Bush nominated him to be UN ambassador. Bush felt strongly enough about sending Bolton to the UN that he made a recess appointment when the Senate failed to confirm him.

Trump was keen on finding a place for Bolton in his administration, too. When he did, Bolton went right to work, reshaping the National Security Council, requesting the Pentagon to fashion a plan for striking Iran. He quite vocally castigated the International Criminal Court.

His alarm at what was happening regarding Ukraine - Guliani's shadow policy team, the Trump-Zelensky phone call - was of a piece with his positions through the years. In John Bolton's worldview, you strengthen alliances and thwart adversaries' designs.

The idea that he's just out to peddle his new book doesn't wash. He sincerely feels strongly about this. That said, he probably would tread very carefully under oath, not wanting to be the agent for bringing about the end of the administration that had zapped Suleimani.

An honest examination of his life, career and positions doesn't leave room for either of the characterizations that Trump-world is peddling: that he gets a gratuitous kick out of war, or that he's just another opportunistic Beltway bureaucrat hustling his own brand. He's a person who has thought hard and deeply about what would really keep America secure, and what would most effectively support the flourishing of freedom in the world.

Getting all worked up about the prospect of Bolton testifying at the Senate trial indicates a desire to gloss over what is plain even before we hear from Bolton: that Trump used his office in impeachable ways.

Harping on this the-president-has-the-right-to-hire-and-fire-executive-branch-personnel argument is a tacit acknowledgement that so many administration figures have left because they knew Trump's course, such as it is, was reckless. That's the essence of the matter that Trumpists don't want anyone contemplating for very long.

A new post for the LITD Patreon community

It's the archives from the Behavior and Motivation category from the early days, 2011 - 2012.

A seven-year-old with a Twitter account

This man has sole access to the nuclear code. He is the face of America at gatherings of world leaders:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Our case against lyin’, cheatin’, liddle’ Adam “Shifty” Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, Nervous Nancy Pelosi, their leader, dumb as a rock AOC, & the entire Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrat Party, starts today at 10:00 A.M. on

@FoxNews

,

@OANN

or Fake News

@CNN

or Fake News MSDNC!

9:37 AM · Jan 25, 2020·Twitter for iPhone

Modern presidential!

Not surprising that a garbage union would adopt this garbage position

The labor organization for the indoctrination profession has weighed in on the extermination of fetal Americans:

The National Education Association approved a new "business item" expressing support for abortion access during its annual conference in Houston.

"[T]he NEA will include an assertion of our defense of a person's right to control their own body, especially for women, youth, and sexually marginalized people," the resolution states. "The NEA vigorously opposes all attacks on the right to choose and stands on the fundamental right to abortion under Roe v. Wade."

The NEA is the largest teachers' union in the U.S. with more than 3 million members. It collected nearly $400 million from American educators in 2018, according to federal labor filings. The union is also one of the most politically active in the country, spending $70 million on politics and lobbying in 2017 and 2018. Nearly all of the union's political action committee spending went to Democrats during the midterm cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

This will filter down into classrooms. Girls will be told that their ambitions come first, and that occasionally a precious, sacred life growing inside them will have to be snuffed out in order to realize those ambitions.

Using "journalism" to dismantle Western civilization's underpinnings

Pervasive media bias has been widely acknowledged for decades now. Still, we must not become inured to it. I'm not even talking about "fake news." The facts in this story are probably as stated. But is it ever laden with subjective qualifiers.

No, actually, there is one glaring falsehood, and it gets its first trotting-out in the title: "Anti-LGBT Florida Schools Getting School Vouchers." These schools are not "anti-LGBT." The accurate characterization would be "with admissions qualifications that students adhere to sound doctrine regarding sexuality."

Here is the sly way the authors nod to objectivity and proceed to hammer home their in-your-face position:

The private schools defend their views about sexual orientation and gender identity, saying they are found in the Bible, the foundation of their faith. School administrators have a right to infuse those beliefs into school lessons and policies, they say, and parents using scholarships have a right to choose those religious schools for their children.

“Students don’t need to go to that school if they feel that is going to be a problem for their families and their lifestyles,” said Howard Burke, executive director of the Florida Association of Christian Colleges and Schools.

Burke’s association counts as members nearly 40 schools that take Florida vouchers and espouse anti-gay policies. “Don’t try to conform our programs into something they’re not established to provide," he said.

The debate touches on civil rights, religious freedom, past discrimination cases and the future of Florida’s school choice programs. It comes as the U.S. Supreme Court this week hears arguments in a Montana case about whether state scholarships can go to religious schools. The outcome could hinder or fuel the expansion of Florida’s scholarship programs.

Florida scholarship laws prohibit private schools that accept the tuition vouchers — earmarked for students from low-income families and for those with disabilities — from discriminating against students based on “race, color or national origin."

So far, so good. Schools accepting tuition vouchers shouldn't be able to discriminate on that basis. There's even a mention of the Florida Association of Christian Schools and Colleges position, which is just a statement of the primacy of free choice in school selection, But then comes the apples-to-oranges comparison:

 But they do not protect LGBTQ youngsters, and neither federal nor state laws require such safeguards.

Flawed juxtaposition. There's nothing in Christian doctrine that says it's a sin to be of a particular race, color or national origin.

And this lady needs to understand that there's no right to send one's kid to a particular school. She disqualified herself from being able to choose a Christian school when she "married" her "partner":

About eight years ago, Nicole Haagenson’s wife, Cari, received Florida scholarships for her two oldest children and tried to enroll them in Master’s Academy of Vero Beach school, which they’d previously attended when Cari was married to a man. The school refused to accept the girls, she said, when they learned their mother was in a relationship with another woman.

"I don’t want to infringe on someone else’s religious belief,” Haagenson said. "But you should not be accepting public funding if you’re going to discriminate.”

Haagenson, a U.S. Air Force veteran and an information technology director at a Vero Beach company, ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat for the Florida House last year. She and her wife, who now parent a blended family with five children, want Florida’s voucher rules to change.

“Just because I’m gay doesn’t mean my kids can’t go to a great school,” she added.

Master’s Academy, which shares a campus with a church, describes “homosexual behavior” as “sinful and offensive to God" and explains neither gay students nor youngsters from homes that don’t uphold a “biblical lifestyle” can enroll.

Nice touch, the quotes around "biblical lifestyle."

Now, I suppose the argument can be made that Haagenson is justified in saying, "Hey, I want to send my kids to this particular school with a taxpayer-funded scholarship!"

Which may result in at least some Christian schools taking a pass on accepting scholarships if the program is amended:

The schools see the proposed legislation as an unconstitutional attack on their religious rights, and many likely wouldn’t change their policies, even if the scholarship law gets amended.

"I would say most schools would stop taking the scholarships. They are operating within their philosophy and their beliefs,” said Wesley Scott, executive director of the National Alliance of Christian Schools.

And can you believe this? The schools are allowed to set their own standards for teacher credentials, facility and curriculum! They "operate largely free of state oversight"! The horror!

As the Sentinel reported in its 2017 “Schools Without Rules” series, the private schools that take Florida scholarships operate largely free of state oversight, setting their own standards for teacher credentials, facilities and curriculum, which can fall short of the requirements the state imposes on its public schools.

Read the Orlando Sentinel series, "Schools Without Rules" »

The schools are also able to set their own admission standards, which could include rules about sexual orientation and gender identity as well as demands for church attendance and certain academic benchmarks, such as satisfactory test scores and good grades.

Of course, the authors take the historical tack, citing Christian schools that, in the past, did not accept black students, quite blatantly trying to lump that kind of discrimination in with the instance upon adhering to sound doctrine about sexuality. The gaping hole in this lame attempt to draw a parallel is exposed by the inclusion of a photo of Florida state senator Manny Diaz and Florida governor Ron DeSantis posing with Piney Grove Academy leaders Frances and Alton Bolden, both black, and two Academy students, both black. The caption says that "Piney Grove is one of 146 schools with anti-gay policies that the Sentinel found."

There's an expansion of the scope to show that the  "discrimination" can be found in other states. Indiana, Georgia and Maryland Christian schools make the authors' list of infamy.

And then the authors come full circle, wrapping up their "report" with more on the Haagenson sob story:

The rejection still stings for Cari and Nicole Haagenson, whose two oldest girls were refused admission when they wanted to return to Master’s Academy in Vero Beach. The school received at least $371,000 in state scholarship money to educate more than 60 students last year.

When Cari told her the children could not return to the school, Nicole initially assumed there had been a misunderstanding.

“I’m pretty sure they can’t discriminate against you,” she remembers telling her. "I was wrong. They definitely could, and they definitely did.”

The story is lengthy - one of those deep dives, doncha know - but it comes down to the question of what kind of say-so the government can have in a school's affairs if it's receiving government gravy. To what extent is a scholarship the same thing as good old receiving of tax-generated funds like public schools get? I think a strong case can be made that a scholarship is a little different, that it is a check to a family, given with the message, "go forth and find the educational institution that best suits the values you want to equip your kid with."

But if that argument can be shown to not hold up, then I'm all for tearing the whole playhouse down. That's right. Get government at the state or federal level completely out of the education business. This is one of those frontlines in the war for our culture that must not be dismissed with a roll of the eyes. It's not a crank and far-fetched position. In fact, when one brings it up in a debate with people like this article's authors, they have to fall back on the "education-is-a-public-good-like-roads" position. It is not. There's a narrow window of opportunity for a parent to instill as much of the family's values and sense of what's needed for someone to effectively engage the world throughout life, about eighteen years at the outside. That window must be protected. The alternative is saying that government should instill some kind of core set of values to be embraced by everyone growing up in our society. (Of course, there is such a core set of values, but government's hands should be nowhere near it.

We all know what the authors of this story mean to do: further entrench the notion that there is something inherently bigoted about Christian doctrine.

These schools are not "anti-gay." I would wager that their principals, admissions counselors and faculties, upon having to decline to enroll a gay student, or the student of a gay couple, pray for those applicants as they continue their search for a school that is a proper fit. Real Christians are not anti-anybody. The Gospel message is the ultimate in inclusivity.

But the key thing to remember here is that both parties, school and applicant, are free to respond to circumstances. They have agency. No one is being denied any  rights under the current structure of this scholarship law.

A little factoid that Leslie Postal and Annie Martin, the authors of this story, would no doubt rather didn't get brought up in the conversation.

"A choice between two parties led by conspiracy theorists and gaslighters"

Post-America has been subjected to a sort of rolling news story for nearly four years now. It's morphed from early rumblings of certain Trump campaign associates being involved in shady dealings, to government investigative bodies proceeding on the basis of a patently ridiculous dossier about supposed lurid behavior by Trump on a trip to Moscow to Comey's evolution from a nice, normal career law enforcement guy to an enigmatic figure whose motives were hard to figure out to a flat-out get-Trump zealot, to the Mueller report's firm conclusion that Trump was not in cahoots with Russian snoops, to the revelation shortly after the report's release that Trump was, however, using a shadow Ukraine-policy team to use the instruments of official power to obtain political advantage, to the resultant impeachment trial we're living through today.

The whole thing is quite arcane, as is generally the case in palace-intrigue stories, and I've not mentioned nearly all the players who have shaped the twists and turns along the way.

What's been needed is a succinct-yet-comprehensive overview, and Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake has provided just that in a Commentary article entitled "The FBI Scandal." He calls it that, for that agency's role in the arc of this whole matter, going clear back to that enigmatic James Comey's taking fifteen minutes at a July 2016 presser to outline the reasons why the Department of Justice should indict Hillary Clinton, only to conclude by saying he would not recommend such an indictment.

The whole thing is, in a sense, an inquiry into what motivates people in highly charged environments to conduct themselves as they do.

I'll provide snippets here, but I recommend reading the whole piece.

He starts by using a particular Trump tweet to illustrate the phenomenon of Trump letting loose with a boneheaded utterance that actually has a kernel of truth at its core:

Donald Trump published the most consequential tweet of his presidency on March 4, 2017. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process,” the chief executive pondered. “This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”

The response from Trump’s opposition was outrage. The Washington Post fact checker gave it four Pinocchios. The director of the FBI, James Comey, rebuked Trump and said such a thing had never happened. James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, assured NBC’s Meet the Press that no warrants had been issued in 2016 to surveil members of the Trump campaign.

In a narrow sense, the pushback against Trump’s tweet was correct; Trump himself was never personally the target of an FBI wiretap. In any case, the president doesn’t order such a thing; the FBI applies for a warrant to eavesdrop on Americans from a secret court. No such warrant was issued to bug the president’s offices.

But the furious denials were misleading. To paraphrase a cliché from 2016, Trump’s tweet should have been taken seriously, not literally. Obama did not tap Trump’s phones. But his FBI did spy on Trump’s campaign. That fact is no longer in dispute. The question is whether the FBI was justified in treating the Trump campaign itself as a suspect in this crime against the 2016 election.

The answer is messy. A comprehensive survey of all available information about the matter shows there were grounds in the summer of 2016 for American intelligence and law-enforcement officials at the FBI to turn their attention to the peculiar behavior of some Trump campaign advisers. 

But the FBI sullied its own inquiry by imparting credence to this mythical Moscow-hotel-room episode described in the Steele dossier, "information so spurious that even liberal news organizations . . . wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole."

And

[e]ven after the bureau had good reason to doubt its veracity, it didn’t share the exculpatory information it had uncovered—not with the public, not with the courts, and not even with the Justice Department lawyers who were supposed to check its work.

The result was a debacle. What had been teased as the greatest espionage scandal in American history—a U.S. president conspiring with Russia to steal an election—today should be seen as a cautionary tale about the fallibility of our lawmen and spies, the credulity of our press, and the hubris and hysteria of Trump’s resistance.

Lake then divides the main body of his article into four sections representing the phases of this whole matter: Crossfire Hurricane, the Steele dossier, the aftermath of the 2016 election, Schiff and Comey, and Mueller and beyond.

I'd like to focus on the Comey and Schiff section, because it raises this question about the motive's for people's courses of action and how they come by them. Of all the figures in this story, Comey and Schiff may be the most enigmatic. As I say, there was a time when Comey was regarded as a straight-shooting professional, but all the twists and turns of the past few years have reduced him to a book-hawking proselytizer untethered to any institutional support. It's also true of Schiff. What in his background would indicate that he would become the rabid spearhead of the impeachment push?

Schiff was a fairly moderate Democrat until 2017. As the committee’s ranking minority member, he had worked cooperatively with Nunes on the committee on a number of issues—from legislation on the authorization for the War on Terror to oversight of the National Security Agency process for unmasking U.S. citizens caught up in wiretaps of overseas targets. Schiff ended up supporting Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, but he did so with prudent reservations.

After Trump was elected, Schiff turned into a cyber-age Joe McCarthy. The latest example came in November, in a report to Congress on impeachment, when he published phone logs of journalist John Solomon and Nunes himself. He obtained those records through subpoenas of shady Ukrainian Americans and the president’s lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani. Nonetheless, that was an extraordinary breach of a journalist’s privacy, not to mention decorum. The fact that most journalists didn’t rush to Solomon’s defense—because they disliked the pro-Trump thrust of Solomon’s work—was a sign of how deeply the Resistance mindset had penetrated the mainstream.

Back in 2017, Schiff also hyped Steele’s allegations. At a hearing on March 20 of that year, he repeated most of the ex-spy’s allegations in his opening statement. He asked openly whether Page, Flynn, Roger Stone, and others in Trump’s orbit were all part of an elaborate quid pro quo to relax sanctions against Russia in exchange for assistance during the 2016 election. Schiff was careful to say he did not yet know these things to be true—which made raising the question a perfect example of irresponsible innuendo. But because Schiff was the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, his innuendo appeared to be informed by state secrets. Over time, Schiff repeated these charges—particularly against Page—and he has never apologized for issuing them. Indeed, after Mueller’s report found no evidence of this conspiracy, Schiff then suggested that Mueller had never delved into the counterintelligence dimensions of the Trump-Russia investigation. Like all conspiracy theorists, Schiff was suggesting that the failure to find a conspiracy was proof that the investigation must go on.

When Schiff was not working as a prosecutor of the Trump campaign, he was serving as the FBI’s defense counsel. In early 2018, Nunes pressed the Justice Department to declassify a Republican memo that first flagged the FISA abuse that Horowitz’s report detailed in December 2019. In response, Schiff and his staff prepared their own memo. It said FBI officials would have been “remiss in their duty to protect the country had they not sought a FISA warrant and repeated renewals to conduct temporary surveillance of Carter Page.”

After the Horowitz report’s release, Schiff has said that he was unaware of much of the information contained in it. The FBI and Justice Department leadership also objected to the Nunes memo in 2018, saying it painted an inaccurate picture of the investigation. But Schiff’s job on the Intelligence Committee was and is to perform oversight of those institutions. Instead, he went along with a cover-up, even as the chairman of the committee at the time was uncovering abuse that Horowitz would confirm in greater and more alarming detail.

Of course, Trump tribalists are not interested in the question of Schiff's devolution. Myself, I'm just naturally curious about how people come by a recent behavior pattern that their pasts provide little or no indication of. How the level of character and personality can shed light on a person's change of demeanor is just plain interesting to me. Not so the Trumpists. To them, he's just an obstacle to the Very Stable Genius's "plan" for making America great again.

And then we get to the Ukraine phase of this mess. Lake explains why Dems are unlikely to peel off any Republican Senators in the current trial:

Is it any wonder that no Republican voted to impeach Trump in the House on the Ukraine matter? This cannot just be explained away as political and moral cowardice. It’s a response to the failure of the party leading the impeachment to acknowledge the falsehood of its initial conspiracy theory about Russia.

He also summarily handles this business about a monolithic "deep state":

But it also must be said that this debacle is not evidence of a deep-state coup, as so many on the right have alleged. There are two important reasons for this. First, there is no singular “deep state.” Horowitz also showed in his report that there were FBI agents at the New York field office who were rooting for Trump. Certainly the key deep-state figure here would be James Comey—and if he were, why would he have mortally damaged the campaign of Trump’s rival 10 days before the election by briefly reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private server? In any case, the “deep-state” theory suggests there is a governmental hive mind, an unelected bureaucracy that runs things while officials like Comey sit on top, clueless and imagining themselves powerful.
You can see how the “deep-state” theory might let the actual saboteurs off the hook. Comey, McCabe, Brennan, and others had a mix of motivations for making the decisions that they did. To say they were acting on behalf of an unelected bureaucracy is to absolve them.

The deep-state theory also leads those who espouse it to overreact. If the institutional rot is this profound, then why not eliminate the FBI and CIA altogether? But that’s a bit like calling for the abolition of a police department after a brutality scandal. The country needs spies and lawmen to protect us against real foreign threats. The problem with the Trump-Russia investigation is that at the moment the investigators were receiving exculpatory evidence, the false collusion theory became the hottest story in the world. And that happened because the most important evidence the FBI leadership believed was true was also briefed to media.

Terms like "deep state" and "swamp" make tidy shorthand for Trumpism sloganeers, but the truth is somewhat more nuanced.

The two-things-can-be-true-at-once principle applies here. Trump was indeed an entirely different kind of president than the nation had ever had, and by no means completely in a good way. But he wasn't a mastermind of a complex web of nefariousness. He's not bright enough to fill a role like that. On the other hand, elements within the FBI were so focused on that fact of his unprecedented nature that they lost sight of the fact that he was elected in a free and fair fashion.

What's it all doing to our nation?

That folly has deformed our politics. Now, in 2020, voters are faced with a choice between two parties led by conspiracy theorists and gaslighters. Instead of saving America from Trump, the Resistance may have reelected him.

What's going on in the Beltway is emblematic of the attempts on the part of the various factions (and there are several within the left and right sides of our ideological landscape, as well as the basic polarization between the two sides) to make the case for opposing factions being so evil that no legitimacy must be conferred upon them, that they must be driven from the public square into dark corners where they cannot impede a given faction's agenda.

All this has my thought processes churning. Are there signs one can detect when one first suspects that someone is no longer operating from any set of principles, but rather from a pure lust for power?

The obligatory Senate-trial post

This won't be lengthy, as I'm still of the view that the endgame is already etched in stone. Trump will not be convicted, and the odds are better than even that he'll be reelected.

I fully understand how pundits afflicted with Trumpism to varying degrees are continuing the witch-hunt claim, but to see Senators with resumes full of solid conservative bona fides taking the same line is dispiriting. (Ted Cruz, I'm looking at you. In fact, my respect for you took a hit when you never publicly and explicitly said, "Anybody who treats my wife and father like that can go to Hell.")

On the other hand, Democrats have irreparably tainted the case that could have been made for Trump's impeachment, due to their inability to accept the legitimacy of 2016's outcome:

To Democrats, having Trump in office is the problem. Getting him out of office, by any means necessary, is the solution. Be it impeachment, the 25th Amendment, forcing a resignation, or beating him in an election, they simply want him gone. Even crazy talk like Elizabeth Warren’s trashing of the Constitution’s means of electing a president gets a hearing because Democrats will go to any length to achieve a fantasy of not having Trump in the White House.

The phrase “stolen election” still gets plenty of play on Twitter. Democrats have stoked the flames of #Resistance by never accepting President Trump as their president. On one hand, balled into a raised fist, they are serious about removing him through impeachment, but on the other, open palmed hand, they are fundraising like hell on Trump, and letting that dictate their actions on impeachment.

House Democrats never agreed on the means to remove Trump. Speaker Nancy Pelosi always wanted to let Trump hoist himself on his own petard and beat him in 2020. But she was forced to accept impeachment, on a rushed scheduled, engineered by Adam Schiff, who had an impeachment hammer looking for any nail.

The evidence is not flimsy. From the July 25 phone call itself to the testimony that the House heard, to the trove of documents that Lev Parnas has made public, it's clear that Trump leaned on Ukraine to announce investigations into the Bidens and into this Crowdstrike server that only existed in Trump's mind. In other words, to use the power of his office and to exploit policy toward an ally that has Russia breathing down its neck for political gain.

Still, does anyone seriously think Dems can peel off the requisite number of Republican votes?

Now to the question of whether he should be impeached. Here, my bunch - conservatives who find Trump fundamentally unfit - are divided. Some have made "he must be impeached!" their battle cry, and even made the matter of how Republican Senators vote on bringing in additional witnesses, and then the actual conviction of the president, the determinant of whether these Senators are fundamentally people of moral courage or cowardice. Others say, "Let's wrap this up quickly and let the voters decide in November." I can see the merits of both positions.

That's a strange view on my part. I'm generally an absolutist. One rarely finds me blowing hot and cold on anything. (Right, LITD readers?)

I guess it's just that pulling the trigger on the Trump presidency would not have a measurable effect on post-America's spiritual sickness. Trump's base would be more inflamed than ever, and leftists would be emboldened like never before. Pence would have a short time to mount a serious campaign to keep the presidency he gained through impeachment, and he'd have a hornet's nest of disarray to sort through to make that happen.

So we'll get lots of preening and righteous indignation until this thing reaches its foregone conclusion.

I'm not apathetic. I jut understand that we as a nation, as a society, have put ourselves in a dandy of a pickle, and there is not going to be any kind of splendid resolution to that in the short term. The phrase "the way around is through" is disturbingly apt at this moment.

The first post for LITD Patreon community members is up

Here it is. It's a mini-e-book of posts in the culture category from 2011 and 2012. Ir provides an interesting perspective on fairly recent history. You'll recall that Barack Obama was president at the time. Outbreaks of civil unrest characterized the summer of 2011. The GOP field vying to take on Obama was shaping up. Gender nonsense was taking hold in earnest on university campuses.

I anticipate that there will be a bit of bemusement at what LITD found shocking or outrageous at the time. ("You really were that worked up about campus diversity programs and hip-hop lyrics?") How steep the decline has been!

Become a community member and have a look. If you like this idea, I have compilations of posts from the early days in other categories I'll put up.

In the works: an LITD Patreon community

LITD is making the leap into community-building. I've started a Patreon page entitled Late in the Day Content for Fans Who Want Extra Helpings.

The link for joining is https://www.patreon.com/join/3705500/checkout.

Now, let's build our community. What kind of Patreon content would you like to see? Posts that get a little more "real" - that is, without so much precaution regarding those who may be checking out LITD for the first time and are not exactly sure what to expect? Discussion forums for specific posts - either here at the main LITD site, or at the Patreon page? Podcasts?

Your feedback is valuable as LITD takes this next step. Hope to hear from you soon.

Barney and Clyde - season two, episode two

It's here.

Pour yourself something bracing and join us at the Libation Station for an hour of examination of

1 Purity of Vision and Facts on the Ground - Are Libertarian and Conservative Visions too Quixotic for Application in a Complicated World?

2 - They Really Said THAT?! - Trump Tirades are Revealed in an Upcoming Book & Senator McSally has the Audacity to Question CNN's Motives. 

3. Bad Ideas That Will Not Die - Every Idea that Elizabeth Warren has ever Proposed, Including Running for President.

Now that the House has sent the articles of impeachment to the Senate, some thoughts

The most glaring question is about the merits, and/or appropriateness, of calling more witnesses.

There's a diversity of perspectives about that:

“Evidence is coming in every day that supports our case,” said Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), one of seven impeachment managers who will be prosecuting the case against Trump in the Senate trial.

“All of this continues to underscore the need for witnesses and documents,” added Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), another impeachment manager. 

Democrats remain hopeful that the revelations will dial up pressure on Senate Republicans weighing whether to seek witnesses and documents in the trial. It has already provided the House’s impeachment managers new angles to lay out their case against Trump, as they race to prepare for opening arguments expected to begin Tuesday.

So far, Senate Republicans appear unmoved.

“They were in such a hurry that they didn’t get all this information? What the heck, OK?” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), blaming House Democrats for impeaching Trump before waiting to develop additional strains of evidence. “So let’s focus on the record. They obviously felt they had enough information to impeach the president with what they had. Let’s take a look at what they had.”

Another big question has to do with Lev Parnas's credibility. He was lobbing bombshells all over the place on Rachel Maddow's show the other night, but the guy's track record needs to be considered:

You would like to think that even if the president of the United States decided to go through with a back-channel inquiry to the Ukrainian government to see if he could get them to investigate the Bidens, he would take one look at Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman and say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. These guys look like the most oafish henchmen since Jeff Gillooly and Shawn Eckardt went after Nancy Kerrigan. You wouldn’t trust these guys to pick up a take-out lunch order, much less use them to execute a secret and politically sensitive request of a foreign government.”

Just a minimum of due diligence would have alerted the president that Giuliani had not recruited the A-Team:

Reports by McClatchy and the Miami Herald showed that Fruman is an exporter of luxury goods and Parnas is a former stockbroker who has left a long trail of debts in Florida and beyond.

Parnas has been sued repeatedly over unpaid debts and has faced eviction from several properties, federal and state court records show. During his career as a securities broker, he worked for three brokerages expelled from the industry by regulators.

Before that, Parnas “worked in an unspecified capacity” for Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash. Who’s Firtash?

Firtash, one of Ukraine’s wealthiest businessmen, is battling extradition by U.S. authorities on bribery charges from Vienna, where he has lived for five years.

Federal prosecutors in Illinois said in court papers in 2017 that Firtash was an “upper-echelon” associate of Russian organized crime. He was indicted in 2013 and charged with bribing Indian officials for access to titanium mines. Firtash has denied any wrongdoing.

Firtash was “financing” the activities of Parnas and Fruman, the source familiar with their business dealings said. The source did not detail their specific work for the oligarch or how much money he had paid them and over what period.

An honest question: How did these guys get cleared by the U.S. Secret Service to meet with the president and vice president inside the White House?

Parnas and Fruman posed like well-connected Ukrainian movers and shakers, and Giuliani and Trump appeared to have bought into the image. Once again, they didn’t do their homework:

Fruman and Parnas don’t appear to be big names in Ukraine, despite the spate of reports in the U.S. about their efforts there.

John Herbst, who served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006 — and since 2014 has headed a program on Ukraine and the broader Eurasia region for the think tank Atlantic Council — said he doesn’t recall anything about the pair.

“I have never heard their name in Ukraine until this issue arose. They are not well-connected Ukrainians,” Herbst said in an interview.

There’s some evidence that these guys managed to ingratiate themselves with Giuliani and Trump by telling them what they wanted to hear, that there was some sort of secret evidence about Biden corruption in Ukraine, and that only they knew how to get it revealed:

Parnas told the Miami Herald last month that Ukraine’s government has access to information on alleged wrongdoing by Biden and his son and other U.S. officials overseas — but that the U.S. government had shown little interest in receiving it through official channels. Parnas said his and Fruman’s friendship with Giuliani was their avenue to get the information into the Trump administration’s hands.

“I got certain information and I thought it was my duty to hand it over,” he told the Miami Herald on Sept. 26.

Last night, Parnas appeared on Rachel Maddow’s program and more or less admitted that he and his partner were just a pair of schmoes from South Florida. They had no special connections or avenues of influence in Ukraine. The only reason any government officials in Ukraine were willing to meet with them and listen to them was because they said they were acting on behalf of the American president.

But then the judgement of the US president has to be considered. Why did he trust Giuliani, let alone Parnas and Fruman? If a president were to use back channels in a foreign-policy situation, wouldn't he want really sharp, credentialed people of character?

I would dearly love to hear John Bolton testify at the Senate trial, but the context might sully what would surely be some bracing straight shooting.

There's no doubt that the whole proceeding is tainted with the partisan aim of inflicting maximum damage on Trump. How come no impeachment managers coming over from the House are Republicans?

Bottom line: it's unlikely that any of this changes the endgame. The choice in November is still going to be the Very Stable Genius or some radical leftist.

Do I have a horse in this race? No. A three-pillar conservative will not be among the choices.