The election of Johnson as House speaker crystallizes the danger facing conservatism since 2015

 It's expressed as succinctly as I've seen in these paragraphs from this CNN opinion piece:

On almost every issue, Johnson is hard right. He has been a staunch opponent of same-sex marriage. He has been at the forefront of opposing reproductive rights. He opposed funding for Ukraine. He wants to deregulate the economy, cut taxes and deny the very real problems facing our climate. He supported “expunging” former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment and has questioned the Justice Department for how it has handled investigations into Hunter Biden.

Most importantly, Johnson was at the center of the effort to overturn the 2020 election, something that in other times would have been immediately disqualifying for holding office let alone being speaker. Within the House itself, he was one of the point persons working with the Trump administration to subvert the decision of American voters by standing against certifying the 2020 results and helping create the legal strategy that was the basis for Trump’s attempted overthrow. In particular, he helped to round up support for a legal brief behind a lawsuit in Texas that would have thrown out the election results in four battle ground states where Biden was victorious.

The author, Julian Zeliker, a Princeton history professor, focuses on American political unfolding over the past 60 years. He's written books on Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and Newt Gingrich's role in transforming the Republican Party. 

So he's done some serious looking into the forces that have brought us to where we are. But it doesn't take a surfeit of astuteness to see that he has done so with a conviction that the good guys of the story have been located left of center. 

Johnson's assumption of the speakership makes easy pickins for the likes of Zeliker. 

Since so many on the right have willingly let their core set of principles be muddied in the name of "the times" calling for the core's situational tweaking, we've seen such developments as "national conservatism," which is basically gussied up protectionism, and, more recently, a clouded understanding of the stakes involved in Ukraine. 

The Zelikers of the world will happily conflate these positions - and, more importantly, the election denialism that has poisoned the stances of all Republican Speaker aspirants in the past several months, to one degree or another - with solidly conservative positions that Never Trump conservatives get behind: unnborn Americans' right to life, the understanding of what marriage is common to all cultures throughout all human history until five minutes ago, the understanding that cheap, dense and readily available energy sources has made for the quantum boost in human advancement over the last two centuries, and the principle that government ought to have to puke all over itself to take the first red cent of any citizen's money.

But since the Very Stable Genius came down the elevator, these get tangled together in ways that make reversing the tangle increasingly difficult. 

There might be some kind of reader who would here be inclined to respond, "Don't you think this presents you with an opportunity to reassess this whole conservative enterprise you've been so solidly behind most of your adult life?"

And I can't deny that it does raise interesting questions. I've been fascinated, in a horrified kind of way, at the wholesale signing on to Trumpism by towering intellectual figures I'd once greatly respected: Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball, Bill Bennett, to name a few. I do ask myself, is there something flawed about the basic vision that would lead to their kind of excitement about an obvious charlatan?

What makes me doubt the validity of such doubt about conservatism is that there are still so many voices, found at journals such as National Review and The Dispatch (and LITD and Precipice) that did not swallow the Kool-Aid and are still capable of extracting Trumpist sludge from immutable verities.

But impressionable ordinary Americans, particularly the younger ones coming out of an "educational" system that has left them woefully ungrounded in a comprehension of the West's unique blessings for humankind, are vulnerable to a low-taxes-and-traditional-marriage-equals-election-denialism formulation as they prepare for the coming election cycle.

And postmodern Republicans will dig in their heels, flaunting a damn-right-it's-all-part-of-the-same-worldview / we-must-get-down-in-the-mud-for-this-fight attitude that makes any kind of healing or yearning after that which actually makes sense and is noble even more remote than it has been for eight years. 

Garbage party

 Well, the Tom Emmer chapter of the House Republican dysfunction saga certainly didn't last long. It seems to have boiled down to that litmus test all Republican politicians must pass to experience any kind of career advancement: whether his or her loyalty to the Very Stable Genius is sufficient, according to the VSG's standard:

Just hours after Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) won the Republican Conference’s nomination to be House speaker on Tuesday, former President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to deride the congressman as “totally out-of-touch with Republican Voters” and a “Globalist RINO.”

He then got on the phone with members to express his aversion for Emmer and his bid for speaker.

By Tuesday afternoon Trump called one person close to him with the message, “He’s done. It’s over. I killed him.”

Just minutes later, Emmer officially dropped out of the race.

How did the killing take place?

. . . a CNN reporter caught up with the congressman and asked him on camera whether he supported Trump in the Republican primary for president.

Emmer dodged, saying only that he was “gonna concentrate” on the speaker’s race.

That was not the answer Trump was looking for. The former president was aghast — especially after the congressman spent the day making it look like the two were allies. Emmer, who thought he had neutralized Trump’s opposition, would soon find out how wrong he was.

Trump previewed his annoyance late Monday, when he shared a post on Truth Social from far-right activist Laura Loomer bashing Emmer as a “NEVER TRUMPER” and “COMMUNIST ENABLER” for his involvement in The National Popular Vote campaign, which supports electing a U.S. president by popular vote, over a decade ago.

“President Trump doesn’t support Tom Emmer and neither should you!” Loomer wrote. The next day, Trump blasted Emmer on Truth Social. And Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill began calling around to House GOP members to encourage them to oppose the Minnesota congressman, according to a person familiar with the conversations.

So how abut the new sacrificial lamb, who doesn't have any more of a chance in Hell of meeting th 217-vote threshold than Emmer, McCarthy or Jordan did? What's he made of?

Well before he secured the GOP nomination for House speaker, Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., played a key role in efforts by then-President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn Joe Biden’s electoral victory in the 2020 election.

Johnson, who currently serves as the GOP caucus vice chair and is an ally of Trump, led the amicus brief signed by more than 100 House Republicans in support of a Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate the 2020 election results in four swing states won by Biden: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Did he really buy the notion that those results were questionable?

Hard to say. A lot of drool-besotted leg-humpers seem to have sort of convinced themselves, only to wake up to reality when offered plea deals in any of the court cases that have Squirrel-Hair at their center. 

Consider the fact that Mark Meadows is now saying that he told a blatant lie in the book he wrote two years ago:

Former President Donald Trump's final chief of staff in the White House, Mark Meadows, has spoken with special counsel Jack Smith's team at least three times this year, including once before a federal grand jury, which came only after Smith granted Meadows immunity to testify under oath, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The sources said Meadows informed Smith's team that he repeatedly told Trump in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election that the allegations of significant voting fraud coming to them were baseless, a striking break from Trump's prolific rhetoric regarding the election.

According to the sources, Meadows also told the federal investigators Trump was being "dishonest" with the public when he first claimed to have won the election only hours after polls closed on Nov. 3, 2020, before final results were in.

"Obviously we didn't win," a source quoted Meadows as telling Smith's team in hindsight.

Trump has called Meadows, one of the former president's closest and highest-ranking aides in the White House, a "special friend" and "a great chief of staff -- as good as it gets."

 

The descriptions of what Meadows allegedly told investigators shed further light on the evidence Smith's team has amassed as it prosecutes Trump for allegedly trying to unlawfully retain power and "spread lies" about the 2020 election. The descriptions also expose how far Trump loyalists like Meadows have gone to support and defend Trump.

Sources told ABC News that Smith's investigators were keenly interested in questioning Meadows about election-related conversations he had with Trump during his final months in office, and whether Meadows actually believed some of the claims he included in a book he published after Trump left office -- a book that promised to "correct the record" on Trump.

ABC News has identified several assertions in the book that appear to be contradicted by what Meadows allegedly told investigators behind closed doors.

According to Meadows' book, the election was "stolen" and "rigged" with help from "allies in the liberal media," who ignored "actual evidence of fraud, right there in plain sight for anyone to access and analyze."

But, as described to ABC News, Meadows privately told Smith's investigators that -- to this day -- he has yet to see any evidence of fraud that would have kept now-president Joe Biden from the White House, and he told them he agrees with a government assessment at the time that the 2020 presidential election was the most secure election in U.S. history.

Jenna Ellis is doing some fast growing up in public, particularly in the area of having enough of a moral compass to be able to judge the character of someone as obviously odious as the VSG:

At an unscheduled hearing in Atlanta, Ellis pleaded guilty to one count of aiding and abetting false statements, a felony stemming from the election lies that Ellis and other Donald Trump lawyers peddled to Georgia lawmakers in December 2020.

She was sentenced to five years of probation and ordered to pay $5,000 in restitution.

“As an attorney who is also a Christian, I take my responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously and I endeavor to be a person of sound moral and ethical character in all of my dealings,” Ellis said. 
But after the 2020 election, “I failed to do my due diligence,” she said.

“I relied on others, including lawyers with many more years of experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information … what I did not do, but should have done, your honor, was to make sure that the facts the other lawyers alleged to be true were, in fact, true,” Ellis said.

Still, the charlatan from Queens has the party in his vice grip:

Former President Donald Trump's support now stands at 59% among Republican voters nationwide in the 2024 presidential nomination race. His lead over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, still the second-place candidate in the race, is 46.3 points. Both Trump's support and the size of his lead are the biggest they have ever been.

After four indictments from federal and local prosecutors, plus an ongoing and widely reported trial in a lawsuit by the New York attorney general -- after all of that, Trump's lead is still inching higher. And that is affecting the thinking and decision-making going on in campaign offices all around the country, as well as on Capitol Hill.

The Republican majority in the House, of course, is still trying to elect a speaker. You don't have to be reminded that it is not going well. There were at least nine candidates for the job when Republicans began casting votes again Tuesday. Many critics pointed out that seven of the nine voted to decertify the results of the 2020 election from Arizona and Pennsylvania on Jan. 6, 2021. That's not likely to have a big effect on the speaker contest; on that day, 58% of House Republicans voted against certifying the Arizona results, and 66% voted against certifying the Pennsylvania tally.

What will have more influence on GOP thinking is what Trump says about the contest. 

Yes, a lot can happen between now and November 2024, but even if the seven-year-old-in-a-seventy-seven-year-old's body were to be taken out of the equation, the amount of soul-searching the entire party - from federal-level office holders down to precinct committee people and ordinary voters - would have to do to begin the rebuilding process would have to be ruthlessly thorough, lest his stain continue to determine the direction going forward. 

A tall order for a party that has no idea what conservatism is anymore.  

And my response to anyone reading this and saying, "Oh, so you're going to cast your lot with the Democrats and the Left" is "You're new here, aren't you?"

Anyone who's read LITD for any length of time knows that I have vociferously denounced the Bulwark / Principles First mindset that posits that the choice is binary. I wrote in presidential candidates in 2016 and 2020, and stayed home for the 2022 midterms. I plan to stay home next month, when local elections will determine my city's mayor and the makeup of the city council. A lot of good folks are running, but I'd have one question for any of them, "Will you vote for Donald Trump if he's the Republican presidential candidate in 2024?" 

I also foresee staying home in November 2024 as well. There is a third choice other than either cult worship or what the Democrats are offering (wealth redistribution, climate alarmism and militant identity politics), and it's the only moral choice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a pretty important piece of information about that Gaza hospital

 I doubt it will change the time-is-up message coming from Iran and Syria, but let the record show that this documentation is out there:

Israel's Defence Forces have released a slew of evidence they claim proves an overnight explosion at a Gaza hospital that killed hundreds of people was caused by a misfiring rocket launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

In an audio clip procured by Israeli military intelligence, two alleged Hamasterrorists can be heard discussing the explosion and confirming the rocket came from Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) - an independent jihadist group.

'They are saying (the rocket) belongs to Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It's from us?' one alleged Hamas member asks in the clip provided by Israel's military intelligence. 

'This is the tragic result of firing rockets from densely populated neighborhoods,' the IDF said.

And finally, IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari showed a series of infrared images, satellite photos and intelligence documents he said proved the damage caused at the hospital could not possibly have come from an Israeli strike.

He explained the images showed there was no structural damage to buildings around the Al-Ahli hospital, no craters in the adjacent car park, and no debris consistent with an air strike, implying a direct hit from an Israeli missile would have caused far more destruction.

'The walls stay intact. There are no craters in the parking lot. These are the characteristics that show it was not an aerial munition that hit the parking lot,' he concluded.  

He also pointed out images of what he claimed was shrapnel on the roof of nearby buildings, suggesting the rocket fell apart in the air and sprayed its detritus across a larger area.  

Hagari said Hamas knew the hospital blast was caused by an Islamic Jihad rocket but launched a 'global media campaign' to blame Israel.

The evidence was published amid a torrent of fury from Hamas, the Arab world and Israel's foes over the explosion, with Iran declaring last night that Israel's 'time is up' and Tehran-backed terror group Hezbollah calling for a 'day of rage' after Gaza's Health Ministry said some 500 people died in the blast.

Alas, in a war the momentum of which is still gathering, the incident started shaping events even before proof of the cause was disseminated. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman snubbed Antony Blinken in Riyadh, and Jordan cancelled its summit of Arab leaders, which Biden was planning to attend.

Churchill's quip about the different speeds a which lies and truth make their way around the world comes to mind here.

 

How a fragmented America reacts to the Israel-Hamas war

 Former Harvard president is completely disgusted with that university:

Former Harvard president Larry Summers said Monday he has never been as "disillusioned and alienated" toward the institution as he is now after student organizations purported that Israel is "entirely responsible" for the country's war against Hamas terrorists.

Summers, who was a Harvard professor before serving as university president from 2001 to 2006, posted a thread on X, formerly Twitter, on Monday saying he is "sickened" by the student groups' statement and "cannot fathom" the Harvard administration's "failure to disassociate the University and condemn this statement."

How egregious was the source of his nausea?

Following the attack, Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups released a statement signed by 27 organizations that said, "We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence." The groups that signed onto the statement included the Harvard Islamic Society, the Harvard Jews for Liberation, the Society of Arab Students and the Harvard Divinity School Muslim Association.

"Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum," the statement continued. "For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to ‘open the gates of hell,’ and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence."

Summers has had it with the administration's lack of a moral compass:

"In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today," Summers wrote. "The silence from Harvard’s leadership, so far, coupled with a vocal and widely reported student groups' statement blaming Israel solely, has allowed Harvard to appear at best neutral towards(sic) acts of terror against the Jewish state of Israel."

On the other side of the post-American spectrum, the supreme leader of the cult of drool-besotted leg-humpers let loose with this:

Former US president Donald Trump on Wednesday appeared to mock Israel for failing to anticipate the weekend Hamas onslaught and for not going on the offensive against Hezbollah amid several deadly clashes along its northern border. He also launched personal attacks against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he accused of “letting him down,” and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, whom he called a “jerk.”

 . . .  Turning to Gallant in Israel, Trump said, “They have a national defense minister or somebody saying, ‘I hope Hezbollah doesn’t attack us from the north.’ So the following morning, they attacked… If you listen to this jerk, you would attack from the north because he said, ‘That’s our weak spot.’”

. . . Trump made the comments while recalling his administration’s 2020 assassination of Qassem Soleimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force.

Trump reiterated his claim that Netanyahu backed out at the last minute from actively taking part in the killing.

“I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down. That was a very terrible thing. We were very disappointed, but we did the job ourselves, and it was absolute precision, magnificent, beautiful job,” he said. “Then Bibi tried to take credit for it. That didn’t make me feel too good. But that’s all right.”

I have no affection for the Biden administration, but, for the moment, it's behaving in a grown-up manner regarding this war.

Most other places you look, it's being used as an instrument to further rub raw everything in our country that can be rubbed raw.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some key architects of the softening of the US stance toward Iran

 Talk about a must-read.

This is one I'll be excerpting generously from, both for the facts and for Atlantic staff writer Graeme Wood's understanding of their significance.

It's a story, like so many modern investigative pieces are, of emails and meetings:

. . . a handful of Americans and Europeans . . . were, by the looks of their emails, groomed by the Iranian government to promote conciliatory policies toward Tehran. According to reports by Semafor and Iran International, Iranian foreign-policy bigwigs such as Mohammad Javad Zarif identified think-tank staffers of Iranian origin, sponsored meetings with them, and used the group to coordinate and spread messages helpful to Iran. The emails, which date from 2014, suggest that those in their group—the “Iran Experts Initiative”—reacted to Iranian outreach in a range of ways, including cautious engagement and active coordination. The Iranian government then paid expenses related to this group’s internal meetings; cultivated its members with “access to high-ranking officials and extended invitations to visit Tehran,” according to Iran International; and later gloated over how effectively it had used its experts to propagate the Islamic Republic’s positions.

It would be interesting to know why Mr. Malley lost his security clearance:

The government had reason to gloat. It picked excellent prospects, some of whom sucked up to Tehran over email and echoed its negotiating positions publicly. A few of them ended up in and near positions of prominence in the U.S. government through connections to Robert Malley, a veteran Middle East hand in Democratic administrations. Malley, who led Obama teams focusing on the Islamic State, Syria, and Iraq, is known to favor negotiation with unfriendly governments in the region and to scorn the “maximum pressure” approach that replaced nuclear negotiation when Donald Trump entered office. Earlier this year, Malley lost his security clearance for reasons still not explained, and he is on leave from government service. (He did not reply to a request for comment.)

Wood then introduces us to two key figures, Ariane Tabatabai and Ali Vaez:

One of Tehran’s targets, Ariane M. Tabatabai, joined the Biden administration’s Iran team with Malley and is now the chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations. Another, Ali Vaez, formerly worked as an aide to Malley on Iran issues. That is the disturbing upshot to the reports: Witting participants in an Iranian influence operation have been close colleagues with those setting the Biden administration’s Iran policy, or have even served in government and set it themselves.

Wood has a few choice words for the Biden administration's attempt to soft-pedal this:

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden’s State Department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, dismissed the reports as “an account of things that happened almost a decade ago, most of which involved people that do not currently work for the government.” I assume he meant the U.S. government. Anyway, the accusations are serious and can’t be batted away by the suggestion that 2014 was a long time ago.

One sign of the gravity of these accusations is the unconvincing attempts to minimize them. The commentator Esfandyar Batmanghelidj said opponents of Tehran had smeared the analysts merely because they “maintained dialogue and exchanged views with Iranian officials.” He went on to note Semafor’s links to Qatar and Iran International’s to Iran’s archenemy, Saudi Arabia. The journalist Laura Rozen tweeted that the stories were “McCarthyistic” and targeted blameless analysts “because they try to talk to everybody and because of their Iranian heritage.”

Defending the emails as maintaining “dialogue” so ludicrously misrepresents the accusation that I am forced to conclude that these defenders find the actual accusation indefensible. No one is alarmed that Americans of Iranian descent are talking with Iranian-government officials. What’s alarming is the servile tone of the Iranian American side of that dialogue, and the apparent lack of concern that the Iranian government views them as tools for its political ends. Rozen and Batmanghelidj don’t dispute the emails’ authenticity. Comparing the Iranian influence operation to supposed Qatari and Saudi ones is, in turn, tacit admission that the emails are probably real.

Cultivating a source is fine. But any self-respecting analyst, journalist, or politician wants to be the one cultivating, not the one being cultivated. And mutual back-scratching can erode one’s integrity and independence. That is why the Iranians do it: to turn influential and otherwise smart people into their pets, and eventually condition them to salivate at the issuance of a visa, or an email from Javad Zarif. Responding to these overtures is fine, too. You can butter up an official (“Your Excellency”), maybe grovel a little for a visa. But the writing itself, and the analysis behind it, must be independent to the point that even the most cynical observer could not accuse you of altering your views to please a subject.

By this standard, some of the reported exchanges between the Iran Experts and their convenor are mortifying. After the report, Vaez, a deputy to Malley, admitted on X (formerly Twitter) that he’d sent a full draft of an op-ed to the Iranian government. “I look forward to your comments and feedback,” his email to the Iranians read. If I sent a source a draft of a story, I would be fired. (I asked The National Interest, where the article appeared, if its policy also forbids sharing drafts. The editor, Jacob Heilbrunn, did not reply.) Sending questions is laudable. Checking facts is standard practice. But a magazine article is not a Wiki whose contributors are also its subjects. Sharing a full draft of an article, whether for approval or just improvement, makes the recipient an unacknowledged co-author.

It keeps getting smellier:

Vaez later pledged to the Iranian foreign minister to “help you in any way,” by proposing “a public campaign” to promote Iran’s views on its nuclear program. He offered these services “as an Iranian, based on my national and patriotic duty.” Vaez, like his former boss Malley, has written widely about Iran and U.S.-Iran relations, for magazines including this one. (Attempts to reach Vaez through his employer to verify the authenticity of the emails and their context were not answered by the time of publication.)

According to the same reports, Adnan Tabatabai, CEO and founder of the German think tank CARPO, “offered to prepare articles for Iran’s foreign ministry.” “We as a group [could] work on an essay,” he suggested. “It could, for example, be published under a former official’s name.” Tabatabai, the report says, worked as a contractor for Malley’s International Crisis Group. (He did not respond to a request for comment.)

Ariane Tabatabai (who is not related to Adnan) wrote to her contact at the Iranian foreign ministry and asked his advice on whether to work with officials in Saudi Arabia and attend a meeting in Israel. “I would like to ask your opinion too and see if you think I should accept the invitation and go,” she asked Mostafa Zahrani of the foreign ministry. She made clear that she personally “had no inclination to go” to a workshop at Ben-Gurion University, but she thought it might be better if she went, rather than “some Israeli,” such as Emily Landau of Tel Aviv University. Zahrani told Tabatabai to look into Saudi Arabia and avoid Israel. She thanked him for the guidance, and she went to Tehran herself in 2014. In another email to the Iranians, she noted that she had recently published an article arguing that Tehran should be given more leeway to spin up centrifuges for uranium enrichment.

Better me than "some Israeli," she was thinking. And now she works at the Defense Department. 

As Wood notes, we must bet careful not to wax hyperbolic about just how close Tabatabai and Malley are to the Iranian government. But as Lee Smith notes at Tablet, she should at least have to answer some questions under oath:

Congress needs to demand the Biden White House make Malley and Tabatabai available to testify immediately. It must also press to interview the security officials who buried evidence of Tabatabai’s covert activities, putting her in a position to endanger the lives of American civilians and special forces operators. It’s time to find out why the interests—and now the personnel—of the Iranian “death to America” regime intersect so frequently with those of America’s own ruling party.

Especially given the fact that Iran, at a meeting a week ago in Beirut, was the party that gave the go-ahead to Hamas to unleash hell on Israel.