Monday roundup

Great Allen Guezlo essay at Public Discourse on reconciling two views of America: creed and culture.

Pete Wehner at The Atlantic on how the GOP has been broken by Trump:

From a certain perspective, their timidity is understandable. They know that to publicly challenge Trump—to call out his ethical transgressions, cruelty, and indecency even as they support his policies—invites impassioned attacks from Trump supporters and, in some cases, a primary challenge. No one likes to be under attack, particularly by the base of one’s own party, and no one wants to lose a job.

Moreover, they will argue, they must defend the president in public so they can have influence in private. They have also convinced themselves that they are essential to the project of repairing the Republican Party post-Trump, and that this requires that they not be viewed as disloyal to Trump while he’s serving as president. “What good does it do to attack Trump?” they will ask. He won’t change his ways, and they will only weaken themselves in the process. (Many of them are happy to attack Trump in private conversations, citing, chapter and verse, things he has said or done that alarm them, showing that they both know better and are playing a cynical game.)

That, at least, is the story they tell themselves. Some of what they say is worth taking into account. But what they don’t tell themselves, probably because it would be too psychologically shattering, is that they have become fully complicit in a corrupt enterprise called the Trump presidency. (Romney is the rare exception.) They are defending actions they know are wrong and that, if they had been done by a Democratic president, they would be outraged by. More than that, they are validating Trump’s approach to politics—the hyper-aggression, the lawlessness, the mendacity, the shamelessness—and therefore guaranteeing imitators. It also happens that their influence on the president is far sm

aller than they tell themselves. They have made concession after concession after concession, justifying each one along the way. Then you look back at the road they’ve traveled, and it’s breathtaking. Donald Trump has changed them far more than they have changed Donald Trump.

Michael Strain, writing at Bloomberg, makes a point, focusing on economic policy, that LITD often makes in a broadly applied way: Yeah, we're facing a binary choice, and both options are rotten. That's especially so if the Dem candidate turns out to be Bernie Sanders.

For a presidential contender who makes her aversion to fossil fuels the centerpiece of her political life, Elizabeth Warren has some eye-opening connections to that industry:

So it’s worth noting that, for years, she and her husband reported modest income from natural-gas royalties in her native state of Oklahoma. Ms. Warren’s financial disclosure filed with the Senate in 2012 included $504 of income from “gas well royalty interests” in Latimer County. The next year it was $203. Drill a little deeper and the facts get even more interesting.

Ms. Warren’s campaign has posted 11 years of her tax returns, which show gas income from at least 2008. That year she filed jointly with her husband, Bruce Mann, who had $872 in royalties from gas wells in Oklahoma. There are smaller amounts—a few hundred dollars—reported over the next several tax returns, before the yearly earnings stop.

You might be thinking that we’re only talking about a few hundred dollars here and there, several years in the past, for someone who is a multimillionaire. What’s the big deal, right? Well, if you read on in the WSJ report, it goes deeper than what’s found on her tax returns. Property records show a 2011 sale of all the oil, gas and mineral rights for some of their property to none other than their own son, Alexander. (Keeping it in the family, I guess.)

The paper trail goes on further, including quite recent events. There’s a 2017 transfer of parcels of property in Hughes County, Oklahoma, including drilling rights, involving her son and three of her brothers. The agreements include the payment of royalties for any recovered resources. And those agreements were slated for three years, so they will still be in effect until at least this summer.

Paul Krause at The Imaginative Conservative says that revisiting Milton's Paradise Lost can broaden our sense of the full meaning of the term eros.

I seriously have not drawn a conclusion yet on this one. Was Nigel Farage's farewell address to the European Parliament, replete with Union Jack flag-waving, hours before Brexit became official, a gratuitous stunt that merely increased the sum total of yay-hoo-ism in the world, or was it the perfect outgoing message to send to Brussels? It sure brought out the pinched-face-schoolteacher in Parliament VP Mairead McGuinness. What do you all think?