The Stone pardon

He was willing to fall on the sword, because he was confident that the VSG would come through before Stone had to set foot in a correctional facility:

Stone was accused of—and convicted of—lying to Congress about his role in the WikiLeaks matter. Since Stone himself would have been in no legal jeopardy had he told the truth, the strong inference is that he lied to protect somebody else. Just today, this very day, Stone told the journalist Howard Fineman why he lied and whom he was protecting. “He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.” You read that, and you blink. As the prominent Trump critic George Conway tweeted: “I mean, even Tony Soprano would have used only a pay phone or burner phone to say something like this.” Stone said it on the record to one of the best-known reporters in Washington. In so many words, he seemed to imply: I could have hurt the president if I’d rolled over on him. I kept my mouth shut. He owes me.

And sure enough, Trump did owe him. Trump commuted Stone’s 40-month sentence. Roger Stone will not go to prison. Stone’s former business partner Paul Manafort is likewise keeping silent. And so the American public will likely never know what use the Russians made of the Trump polling information that Manafort shared with them. Manafort has extra reason to keep quiet, for he must feel new confidence that his pardon is coming.

A question looms: Why are Republican members of Congress not standing up and saying, "This is the bridge too far"? 

 

Saturday roundup

The  headline for the Washington Post's story about May unemployment numbers had a hold-off-on-the-celebration tone to it, but it turns out to be a case in which reading the actual article greatly diminishes the sensationalism:

. . . the Washington Post is out with a story titled “A ‘misclassification error’ made the May unemployment rate look better than it is.  Here’s what happened.”

The story itself takes the shock out of the headline. Nothing went wrong with the May unemployment rate in particular. There’s just an ongoing, and incredibly boring, technical difficulty stemming from the pandemic.

Basically, the unemployment rate is calculated from surveys the government conducts; people are classified as employed, unemployed, or out of the labor force depending on the answers they give to a slew of questions. But these questions were not written with a pandemic in mind. For instance, if someone is not working because their business was idled, are they considered temporarily laid off (and thus unemployed), or are they employed but not working, like someone who’s on leave?

These workers are supposed to be counted as unemployed, but they’re not always getting entered into the system that way:

The BLS instructed surveyors to try to figure out if someone was absent because of the pandemic and, if so, to classify them as on “temporary layoff,” meaning they would count in the unemployment data. But some people continued to insist they were just “absent” from work during the pandemic, and the BLS has a policy of not changing people’s answers once they are recorded. It’s how the BLS protects again[st] bias or data manipulation.

How does this affect the numbers? Basically, it just makes the official unemployment rate a little lower during this period. After adjusting for the sudden rise of “absent” workers, the March, April, and May unemployment rates are about 5.4 percent, 19.7 percent, and 16.3 percent, respectively, instead of the official figures of 4.4 percent, 14.7 percent, and 13.3 percent. The unemployment rate still fell a bit in May when everyone expected it to rise, and it’s still good news.

Hey, I warned you it was boring.

Saving Elephants, a website I've recently discovered and become a big fan of, has the second part of a series on how belief in an enduring moral order is the crux of conservatism. The latest installment explores how we can know that the order exists a priori:

Kirk summarized two methods of discerning order outside of reason. The first was prescription—"those ways and institutions and rights prescribed by long—sometimes immemorial—usage”—and the second was tradition—“received opinions, convictions religious and moral and political and aesthetic passed down from generation to generation.” Both methods operate from a basis of faith—namely, faith in the notion that order can be discerned via revealed truths or those things shown to be true through generations of trial-and-error. The conservative who believes in God might go so far as to say that the only reason humans would ever conform to order—which grates against our sin nature of appetite and pleasure-seeking—is that God has put inside of each of us the capacity for both discerning and obeying that order.

 Part One is here. Poke around the site. Great podcasts and resources for learning more about the foundations of conservatism.

This one's pretty big and may warrant its own post as things develop: The VSG has issued a directive to draw down U.S. troops in Germany by 9500, and, as of mid-day Saturday German time, had not notified that country's government.

Senate Republicans fear that the VSG might take their majority in that chamber down with him in November. Well, people, it's a little late in the game, but you could still demonstrate some spine and forthrightly declare that you're not in his camp.

Bracing piece by Alexandra Hudson at The Bulwark on how the riots press upon us the truth that it never takes all that much to sever the gossamer thread by which civilization hangs:

The violence and destruction that emerged from the protests, and the speed with which they emerged, should cause us to reconsider some of our assumptions—some of the fundamental social facts we misunderstand or take for granted. In particular, the events of the past week provide a valuable reminder of the fragility of our civilization and our way of life; they refute the notion of inevitable human progress; and they underscore the way in which a truly civilized society is underpinned by a respect for equal human dignity—without which we are lost.

First, the fragility of civilization. Many of us ordinarily and unthinkingly assume that the civilization—and perhaps even the peace and prosperity—we enjoy are somehow natural, the default state of things. Students of history, of course, know otherwise. And even before the events of the last week, 2020 has been an education in overturning such comfortable assumptions.

The riots remind us that civilization and community are not foregone conclusions. They do not simply spring up from the earth, but are the work of centuries; they are the fruit of institutional and social arrangements that must be cultivated and nurtured in our every interaction, every day. Democratic governments in particular depend upon most individuals choosing to follow the law, respect their fellow citizens, and act for the common good. As we saw over the last week, when even just a few citizens choose not to do so, chaos ensues.

Second, the riots also refute the conceit of human progress—the notion that we are continually evolving to have moral and ethical codes superior to those of our forebears. In his autobiographical book Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis referred to this way of thinking as “chronological snobbery”—“the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”

Whether today or two millennia ago, the right conditions can unleash the worst of human nature. We remain as vulnerable to fear and rage and tribalism and a “mob mentality” as we have ever been. Social science research suggests that when people act in groups, individuals suppress their moral codes and dispel some of the social and societal constraints that otherwise inhibit violence and destruction. Relatedly, research also suggests that the sense of self—and the individual moral codes that come with it—are diminished in crowds. Anonymity is easier to maintain in large groups, and responsibility is easier to spread across large numbers.

Thanks especially to advances in technology, our overall standards of living have risen dramatically in the last several hundred years. But it is a mistake to think that because our species is improving materially, we are also improving socially and morally. The chaos we observed across the country over the last week reminds us of the truth of an unchanging human nature. 

That last point, by the way, is the point of Part One of the series at Saving Elephants.  We keep getting fancier in terms of comfort, convenience and amazing gadgets but we're still the same critters we were when we got kicked out of the garden of Eden.

A look back at the November prez-candidate choices we've had over the last 50 years

I've come across two pieces today - one by Erick Erickson at The Resurgent, and one by S.E. Cupp at The New York Daily News -  that examine the same basic theme: the parallels between where the Democrats seem to be headed in 2020 and how things unfolded for the Republicans in 2016. In each case, an overcrowded field of presidential contenders would not winnow itself down due to the stubbornness of candidates who surely realize(d) they don't / didn't have a chance, so that the party was left with a candidate that much of the country found completely unpalatable. Erickson's focus is on how the looming specter of Bloomberg keeps the prevailing of Sanders from being a certainty, but leaves Dems with the possibility that the former New York mayor, who greatly alarms most kinds of contemporary Democrats, may shake out to be their man. Cupp doesn't seem to think the Bloomberg factor is that significant, but points to Trump's ascendancy going from a remote possibility to a reality, suggesting that Sanders may have a similar successful trajectory.

It got me to thinking about the way primary season has shaken out to give the country the choices it has had in all the elections since 1972.

That year, Richard Nixon's popularity was proven by his landslide victory. Yes, the Watergate scandal had broken that summer, but the Dem choice, McGovern, was the first candidate to represent the faction within that party that spoke plainly about its view that US involvement in Vietnam was dishonorable. The radicals who had come off the streets to commence a Gramscian long march through the institutions threw their support behind him. The voting public had no appetite for a pivot in that direction.

In 1976, the Republican candidate was the first in a line of what I call afflictees of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome. That's a term I used to use a lot here at LITD and still occasionally find useful. A Reasonable Gentleman is the kind of Republican politician / officeholder who cannot or will not speak of the stark difference between the collectivist ideology of the Democratic Party and the worldview that at least ought to inform Republican politics. Gerald Ford just wasn't up to the task. The Reasonable Gentleman is basically what a lot of people call RINOs or squishes. The Dem candidate, Jimmy Carter, intrigued the public with his mix of Baptist faith, grits-and-gravy Southern sensibility, concern about the energy situation, and support from the rock stars of the day.

By 1980, Carter had proven such a miserable failure, with inflation and economic indicators generally out of hand, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the spread of Marxism-Leninism in Central America, that the contrast between him and the towering Ronald Reagan was the clearest contrast any of us now alive have ever see. Ronald Reagan's three-pillar conservative bona fides were in impeccable order. He'd been recruited into politics by none other than Bill Buckley.

By 1984, Reagan had proven that tax cuts can turn around a troubled economy. He didn't do detente with the Soviet empire, much less impeachment. He spoke of that empire's demise as a reality within the world's grasp. He forthrightly supported the right to life movement. And he did it all with a cheerfulness, an optimism, and a dignified bearing that  mightily impressed the nation. Mondale? He was basically cobbling together a platform of elements from both the ever-more-radical left wing of the Democratic Party and its "establishment," for want of a better term (and there surely is one).  He proclaimed that he was a feminist and that he would raise taxes. He didn't stand a chance against Dutch.

By 1988 the Soviet Union was so plainly on its last legs, and the economy so good, and Michael Dukakis exuding doofusness at every turn, that Vice President George Bush's run was a walk in the park.

Bush deftly managed the US role in the actual collapse of the Soviet empire, and commanded Desert Storm superbly. But he made the fatal mistake of trusting Democrats, and it cost him Republican support. He'd come across so resolute when he said "Read my lips: No new taxes!" and then he sent Richard Darman up to Cpitol Hill to negotiate spending cuts in return for - you guessed it - tax increases.

That was Bill Clinton's opening. He had a heaping helping of that Southern charm - even a thicker accent than Carter's - a bit of a wonky air about him (he'd given a stemwinder of a speech at the 1988 DNC convention), and spoke of a Third Way effectively enough that it looked like something other than a mushy middle. There were hints that he was a rascal, but his machine was able to sufficiently tamp down those who tried to make it a full-blown issue.

By 1996, however, much more about that rascal streak had come to light, as had various scandals dating back to his time as governor of Arkansas. His wife's utter unlikability and power-hunger was becoming obvious. Congress had gone to the Republicans in the 1994 midterms. It was becoming clear that the whole reason he'd gotten into politics was Still, his opponent was a Reasonable Gentleman of the first order. I mean, Bob Dole? Really?

2000 was a hot mess. The final decision extended considerably past early November, and the nation was subjected to the grind of magnifying-glass examinations of hanging chads and David Boies appealing every court decision that didn't go the Dems' way. Al Gore finally exited the stage, to the relief of an exhausted nation. George W. Bush seemed like a healthy mixture of humanity ("compassionate conservatism") and firmness. He was of east-coast pedigree, but, due to his father's oil-business career prior to getting into politics, had grown up in Texas, and had that charming folksy drawl.

In 2004, even though no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq - a concern not only of the Bush administration at the time, but of Democrats such as Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, Bob Graham and Sandy Berger as far back as 1998 - the US had achieved the mission of removing Saddam Hussein from power in that country, thereby bringing relief to a terrified Iraqi populace. US domestic life was stable. John Kerry, whose persona was another mixture of radical-wing and Dem-establishment, seemed out of tune, and he lost to George W. Bush.

In 2008, a totally new political creature appeared on the scene: Barack Obama. The racial angle allowed a lot of Dems to support him so as to indulge in that classic Dem emotion, self-congratulation. That angle's unprecedentedness went far in obscuring Obama's radicalism. Here was the first true candidate who came out of that hard-left wing. He'd been mentored as a kid in Hawaii by Communist Frank Marshall Davis. John Drew recalls how, at Occidental College circa 1980, Obama had advocated revolution. He wandered into a socialist convention in New York City while at Columbia University and became a fan of the thought of Saul Alinsky and Cloward and Piven. As a community organizer in Chicago, he was under the tutelage of such radicals-who-came-in-off-the-street-to-subvert-the-system-from-within as Heather Booth, Greg Galluzzo, Robert Creamer, and Bill Ayers. He attended Trinity Church, the pastor of which was liberation-theology proponent Jeremiah "God damn America" Wright. He gave a talk, oozing with lavish praise,  at the farewell dinner for Rashid Khalidi, who was leaving Chicago for the east coast. Khalidi was fiercely anti-Israel. Obama said he'd learned a lot sitting at Khalidi's kitchen table.  He was on record supporting single-payer health care. In his autobiography The Audacity of Hope, he wrote of feeling like a sellout for going to work for a private-sector law firm.

But he was undeniably charming and glib. He knew how to play all the cards he'd been given. And, again, the Pubs put up a ridiculously squishy Reasonable Gentleman, John McCain.

21012 was a repeat, with Mitt Romney standing in in the Reasonable Gentleman role.

So that's the series of choices we've had over the last half-century.

What stands out to me is that Dems have fairly consistently offered solidly leftist candidates. Sometimes they won, sometimes they didn't. Only once in that time span did Republicans put forth an actual conservative. He won handily twice.

And now we're going to get a Dem candidate even further to the left than Obama (there are no moderates in their field; people need to stop applying that term to any of them) and the Republican candidate is going to be - well, you know.

I think it's pretty clear that retrospective such as I'm putting forth here a half-century hence will deem this the age of cacophony and incoherence. That is, if there's still a United States of America at that point, if the infantilism that has beset both parties has not so thoroughly degraded our political life that we've morphed into something having nothing to do with freedom, dignity, prosperity, strength and reverence.

Republican failure to repeal the "A"CA - first thoughts

A lot of layers of lessons here.

I'll start with a lesson that applies to a number of other issues, particularly how to deal with rogue states' nuclear ambitions. I've said before that the reason we're in such a pickle regarding North Korea and Iran is that no one mustered the foresight decades ago to take requisite preventive measures.  This applies to the health care situation as well. Full-throated defenses of a free-market approach should have been coming from every Republican legislator in both houses of Congress in the early 1990s in response to Hillary Clinton's attempt to steer policy toward a collectivist bias. I put a fair amount of the blame in Bush 43, who readily signed on to the expansion of Medicare to include prescription drugs. Collectivists, including then-presidential candidate Obama, held the megaphone, since arguments in favor of liberty, choice and competition were relegated to the op-ed pages and some wonky journals. As with the line rogue regimes eventually cross (they become nuclear powers, and there's no going back), once this degree of government involvement in health care became law and got a few years of application under its belt, turnaround faded to the status of an improbability.

Another level it behooves us to look at is the aforementioned wonkery. I'm all for everyone and anyone being as knowledgeable as possible, certainly about the details of health care. And I acknowledge that, regarding health care, that's a pretty daunting task. Everybody concedes that health care policy gets complicated real fast.

But why?

That is not really so complex. The progressive mindset that started infecting American thought just about a century ago - the idea that modern, urban, industrialized life had become too complicated to be addressed by the Constitution and required a battery of specialists and experts in various fields to staff executive-branch agencies to regulate various aspects of life - flourished to the degree that FDR's ridiculous 1944 "second bill of rights," asserting such impossibilities as freedom from want, a guarantee of a job, and, yes, guarantee of health care, found a disturbingly large applauding segment of the public. Then of course came 1965 and the two major programs which have sprawled and grown more insolvent every day since their enactment: Medicare and Medicaid.

So the idea that government was supposed to "do things for us" and "provide services" came to be seen as innocuous and as self-evident as the actual governmental function of keeping us safe.

I'll say it again: freedom is elegantly simple. Government involvement in any aspect of life is the factor that complicates it.

It comes to change the thinking of private-sector players as well. Health insurance companies started talking to their customers in a markedly different way than those in the auto-insurance or home-insurance business, in which the monthly premium is clearly intended to mitigate the risk of unplanned occurrences.

Then there is the inexorable collapse of the "A"CA. Failure to repeal guarantees that millions of Americans will experience a moment of unprecedented shock at some point in the not-all-that-distant future, and waiting to fill the vacuum will be full-fledged socialism:

The bill for Obamacare’s unworkable financial scheme is already overdue, with health care companies fleeing the marketplace and that will leave 40 percent of the nation’s counties with only a single Obamacare-compliant insurer in 2018. Waiting in the wings for the moment of national health-care crisis is Bernie Sanders with Medicare for All, his euphemism for socialized medicine. At an estimated cost of $32 trillion over a decade, Bernie’s remedy would attempt to cure cancer with a draught of hemlock.

Then there is the question of why the Republican Party, even as it enjoys control of all three branches of the federal government and a majority of state governments, has shown that it is not the repository of the kind of clarity needed to provide a path back to freedom.

For that, I don't have a handy, paragraph-sized answer. I suppose a lot of it is all the factors involved in achieving political victory and just getting one's tail end to Washington: the fundraising, the kind of networking and schmoozing that must be undertaken, the risk of being vilified for speaking too plainly in a hostile media climate as society becomes more brittle.

It's a grim juncture at which we find ourselves, but there is no alternative to continuing to defend freedom. If it's foremost among one's values, one can't live with oneself if the only other voices in the national conversation food fight are championing tyranny and dehumanization.

A much-deserved ass-kicking of Republicans - from National Review

Michael Brendan Dougherty at NRO steps back from the immediate DACA situation to look at how things got to this juncture:

Famously, J. Paul Getty said that if you owe the bank one hundred dollars, that’s your problem; if you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem. A similar dynamic is at work with immigration. If you’ve been in the country for a few months or years without legal status, that’s your problem. If you’ve been in the country for two or three decades without legal status, that’s the government’s problem.

Of course it’s an absurdity to deport thirty-something Anglophones who have no memory of their country of origin back to Mexico or Guatemala. And it looks gratuitous to use them as bargaining chips in the immigration debate.

Decades of Republican lies about immigration reform and enforcement have led us to this point. In 1986 restrictionists were told that a limited amnesty would be followed by rigorous enforcement. The amnesty wasn’t as limited as promised, and the enforcement never came. Since that time, every few years, a new “comprehensive” approach to immigration tries to bring Republicans back to the 1980s. Republicans get out on the trail and make campaign commercials saying “Finish the dang fence!” Then they get in office and write up a massive amnesty to go along with a doubling of legal immigration.

Along came Trump, who can beat anyone at a game of promising things he won’t deliver. He very quickly out-promised normal Republicans on immigration reform. Part of his success in convincing restrictionists that he was serious was his willingness to say impolitic or even outright racist things when talking about the issue. His willingness to take some political damage for their cause, they reasoned, was a sign of authenticity. Yet you have to wonder sometimes: In the long run, did the political damage fall on Trump or on the restrictionist cause?

So what is to be done going forward?

A serious country, one that cared about the democratic nature of its society, would never have permitted a population of 800,000 people who fit the “Dreamer” description build up in this country and live so much of their lives here without legal status. That’s why it was such an easy political win for Obama to grant them a simulation of legal status. He was addressing an urgent issue, and doing so from a position of liberality, even if not lawful.

 Three decades of negligence is enough. It has created an America that is more socially divided, it has habituated a population of millions of newcomers to the idea that American law turns on a whim, and it has radicalized people who just want to have what Peter Thiel called a normal country. 

Trump has thrown down the gauntlet to a Republican caucus in a crude and cynical way. Even so, they should still take up the opportunity to resolve the legal status of the “Dreamers” and everyone else living here without the full protection of the law too.

This, like pretty much everything that comes onto Republican legislators' / policy-crafters' plates, got to this ridiculous state because there was a lack of the spine required to adhere to principle.

When an unusually astute and articulate DJT water-carrier tries to discredit actual conservatism, we must let it sharpen our vision all the more

Honest, Kurt Schlichter doesn't live rent-free inside my head. It's just that the elements he combines - an undeniable understanding that the Left in post-America is waging war on the foundations that have given this nation its unique identity and heritage among the countries of the world, a writing style that, while a little bombastic, is genuinely funny a lot of the time, this abrupt shift to an actual enthusiasm for Trump after regularly reminding us prior to Trump's winning the nomination path that Trump was his fifteenth out of sixteen choices, his conflation of the pretty-much-worthless Republican majority on Capitol Hill with the actual solidly conservative pundits who still find Trump troubling but actually agree with Schlichter on the congressional GOP, and, to get to the crux of the matter, his main message, which is that conservatives can and ought to adopt Trump's roughest stylistic edges - can seem formidable to those of us who refuse to lionize Donald Trump unless we are prepared to counter them.

His latest column - you know where to find it (Townhall); I don't link to such things - really tightens the screws. The basic message, aimed at those of us who still can't stand Trump, is, "You know damn well that Congress has not delivered on "A"CA repeal or tax reform, and is now going wobbly on DACA. Can you honestly say that you're not endorsing the same old, same old?"

So what's our answer?

I'd say it begins with a repeat of what I've asserted here often: Trump is too flawed a weapon to effectively accomplish what we envision. For starters - and the damn thing is that Schlichter has always acknowledged this - Trump has no consistent ideological core. He thinks in terms of deals and winners and losers. He's been all over the map on health care policy. Then there is his utter lack of a core faith. He may have prayers sessions in the Oval Office, he may call the nation to prayer over Harvey's devastation, but he's never said anything that indicates any depth, any grounding in scripture or the theological traditions of Christianity. Then there is that crudeness that Schlichter thinks we ought to adopt . . .

But as I say, he's got us in a vulnerable position, and we'd best gird ourselves appropriately. That starts, it seems to me, with keeping those principles of which Schichter makes light front and center. Issues and political, cultural, economic and world-stage developments are ephemeral. They constantly morph in response to circumstances. Let us remember that there is no point in talking about them except in terms of how to apply our principles to them.

And we will be echoing him as we lambaste Congress for being such a squishy blob. He's not wrong about that. In fact, bringing our ire to bear on Congressional squishiness burnishes our bona fides. Our credibility is in good shape for when the conversation turns to how Trump is a bombastic buffoon and nobody to rally around.

One last point, speaking of credibility: Schlichter squandered pretty much the last few subatomic particles that remained of his in that column today by lumping the great Ben Sasse in with Jeff Flake. It just illustrated how hopelessly skewed his entire worldview has become.

The Left is being disingenuous in its claim that conservative opposition to Trump rings hollow

Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona has written a book called Conscience of a Conservative, and an article for Politico that is an excerpt therefrom.

On the surface - but no deeper, as I am about to make clear - I am in concurrence with his premise: that a lamentably big swath of conservatives convinced themselves that a rudderless, vulgar buffoon like Donald Trump could be their standard-bearer in the volatile climate of the middle of this decade.

People of various stripes are going to react to the book title in various ways. There's an argument to be made that it's an exercise in self-delusion. Yes, in some years during his service as a House member and now Senator when his voting record is solidly conservative, but his FreedomWorks ratings for 2013, 2014, and 2014 dipped from a general run of 100 percent ratings, peppered by occasional dips into the high 90s, to 85, 77 and 79 percent, respectively. There was his vote for Loretta Lynch. There was his support for normalizing relations with Cuba.

An argument he makes in the course of his book and article is a classic case study in Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome:

There was a time when the leadership of the Congress from both parties felt an institutional loyalty that would frequently create bonds across party lines in defense of congressional prerogatives in a unified front against the White House, regardless of the president’s party. We do not have to go very far back to identify these exemplars—the Bob Doles and Howard Bakers and Richard Lugars of the Senate. Vigorous partisans, yes, but even more important, principled constitutional conservatives whose primary interest was in governing and making America truly great.

Dole, Baker and Lugar? Oh, please. Who is he expecting to buy that?

Well, given his RGS affliction, perhaps his "friends across the aisle."

If so, he is on a fool's errand.

Jim Geraghty at NRO shows that the position Flake has eked out for himself was insufficient for the New York Times to confer its imprimatur:

The New York Times reviews a new book from Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona that rips Trump, and offers an incoherent criticism along the way: 

But Flake has also cast most of his votes in favor of Trump’s policies. Just last week, he voted for the bill to repeal Obamacare without replacing it, and then he voted for the hastily assembled “skinny repeal.” On that point, he seems to be at odds with his book, in which he specifically cautions Republicans against engineering a sloppy repeal of Obamacare behind closed doors. “Legislation executed without hearings and written by only one side is always a bad idea, regardless of who does it,” he writes. The primary intellectual failing of “Conscience of a Conservative” is that it doesn’t untangle the dysfunction in Washington from the dysfunction of his own party. Republicans haven’t just embraced Trump’s nativism and politics of resentment because it’s politically expedient. Many Republicans have peddled anti-immigrant sentiment for years, and a return to Goldwater’s principles probably wouldn’t remedy that; the rejection of free trade agreements also has complex roots.

But Flake doesn’t like Obamacare and the current rickety pileup of broken promises that make up our health insurance system. Why does it undermine his criticism of Trump to vote to get rid of the status quo? And don’t think we didn’t notice that casual use of “anti-immigrant sentiment” to label opposition to illegal immigration, Times editors.

Noah Rothman at Commentary exposes the flimsiness of similar arguments made in other left-leaning outlets:

After months of pushing Republican lawmakers to speak out against Trump’s excesses—as though this president did not already have an antagonistic relationship with the party he acquired in a hostile takeover—you might think Democrats would be satisfied by Flake’s broadside against him. The Arizona senator suggested that conservatives had abandoned their ideals and that years of shallow posturing in opposition to Barack Obama had rendered their voters uncompromising and unrealistic. He said that Trump’s nomination represented a “Faustian bargain” and suggested that his presidency may still represent an extinction-level event for his ideology and his fellow party-members. To this display of vulnerability and introspection, the liberal political class has replied: not good enough.

“Until it is matched by any real action, the Jeff Flake op-ed is just a bunch of Ben Sasse tweets strung together,” wrote Hillary Clinton’s former spokesman Brian Fallon. “Has Jeff Flake done anything to use his powers as a United States Senator to check Trump in any way?” Vox.com’s Matt Yglesias asked earnestly. “Talk is cheap right now,” remarked Mother Jones’s national affairs editor Mark Follman.

These and other liberals give the impression that nothing short of caucusing with Democrats would represent satisfactory opposition to Trump. If the objective Democrats is to secure Republican allies in their effort to safeguard the country from a reckless president, they’re going about it in a counterproductive way. But that’s not the goal. Their design is to tether Trump to the Republican Party and to capitalize on a backlash against the administration next fall, not to allow Republicans to distinguish themselves from the president. Despite all their braying to the contrary, any effort by Republicans to check Trump weakens the Democratic pitch.

Liberal influencers have written off Trump-skeptical Republicans in Congress by citing their voting record in the Senate. According to FiveThirtyEight’s “Trump Score,” for example, Flake “voted with Trump” 95 percent of the time. This is an utterly worthless metric. The majority of votes taken in the Senate so far in 2017 have been nominations, procedural motions, and resolutions of little public-policy consequence. Those votes reveal almost nothing about the nature of Trump’s relationship with Congress. What of conservative legislation, like efforts to relieve the financial stress on the nation’s major entitlement programs? Are Trump-skeptical conservatives to oppose those merely to jam a thumb in the president’s eye, even though he’s opposed to entitlement reform himself? Should conservatives abandon conservative priorities in pursuit of roving Democratic goal posts?

Tallying roll call votes is an awful way to take the temperature of the political environment. Put on FiveThirtyEight’s blinders and you’d miss the fact that Republicans in Congress are beginning to castigate Trump on the record—augmenting the daily torrent of quotes attacking Trump from unnamed Republican lawmakers and their aides.

You’d definitely miss the fact that Republicans in the legislature are putting a temporary hold on efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, despite the president’s public efforts to hector the “fools” and “total quitters” in Congress into sending him something to address health care.

You’d miss the fact that Republicans like Lindsey Graham and Charles Grassley have fired warning shots at the president in the effort to keep him from taking a run at Robert Mueller’s independent probe of the Trump campaign. You’d overlook the fact that Republicans like Joni Ernst and Orrin Hatch have criticized the president for seeking to ban transgender men and women from the services. You wouldn’t see that Congress has failed to fund “the wall,” made no effort to pass an infrastructure bill, and has balked at fast tracking the renegotiation of America’s trade relationships—and all to the sound of grumbling Republican voters.

Most important, the Trump Score utterly fails to ascribe value to votes cast. Not all bills are of equal significance, and last week’s vote is especially profound. By an astounding margin, Congress passed a measure that will reclaim power from the presidency in an area in which the White House enjoys the broadest latitude: the conduct of American foreign affairs.

By votes of 419-3 in the House and 98-2 in the Senate, the legislature sent a bill to Trump that imposes sanctions on North Korea, Iran, and Russia, but also robs the president of the ability to administer those sanctions with the leeway enjoyed by his predecessors. If he wants those sanctions eased, he will have to demonstrate to Congress how Russia is meeting certain conditions—a provision the administration unsuccessfully lobbied Congress to strip from the final bill. This is arguably the strictest imposition of terms on the president’s ability to pursue national security objectives since Congress passed the 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment over the objections of the Nixon White House.

There will be consequences for this, of course, and not all of them of the desirable kind envisioned in libertarian fantasy novels. Hostile regimes will take advantage of an enfeebled presidency that cannot advance their domestic interests. Congress is reclaiming authority for itself that it is too dysfunctional to administer. Republicans know this. Still, they act.

It’s no wonder that Democratic partisans wouldn’t want the public to pay too much attention to this remarkable set of events. Beyond checking the unpopular Trump presidency, Democrats are united on neither message nor platform. Their cheap bluster is unequal to the moment. 

I myself run into this in comment threadson this blog: the expectation that I'm on the cusp of some kind of conversion experience. When it doesn't happen, I'm a poisonous force indistinguishable in kind from Trumpists.

It's not hard to see how this comes about. Since leftists willingly refuse to even attempt to understand the three pillars of conservatism on their own terms, it all looks like some kind of "greed" and "bigotry" to them. Which is interesting, because not even Trumpism, let alone conservatism, is problematic due to "greed" or "bigotry." (Not that there is anything problematic about conservatism! The premise of this blog is that it's a solution, not a problem.)

But those former conservatives who, for reasons that look to me a lot like a lack of confidence in Cruz and Rubio, cast their lot with Trump and championed him in print and on broadcast media, are responsible for the ease with which the NYT, Five Thirty-Eight, Mother Jones et al can sow confusion and conflate actual conservatism with the hot mess we're saddled with in the White House.

And then you have a Senator-author whose case for conservatism is glaringly polluted with RGS, thereby making it easy for the Left to claw his entrails out.

You see, Dennis Prager, and, indeed Kurt Schlichter, whom I hate to cite as anything other than an example of a formerly principled and clear-thinking conservative having turned into nothing short of a moral monster, are not wrong that we are in a civil war in post-America. The Left intends to stomp freedom, dignity, material advancement and worship of God into the dust.

But the question is whether Donald Trump is an effective weapon in that war.

He is not.

But neither is Jeff Flake.

It's really not such a fine line we have to walk. It's actually a rather broad path.

The three pillars of conservatism are well-known:

1.) Free-market economics, which begins with the premise that a good or service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth - period. No other party has any business being involved in that agreement - certainly not government.

2.) An understanding that Western civilization has been a unique blessing to humankind. (Judeo-Christian morality, Greco-Roman model of representative democracy, the great scientific and artistic achievements.)

3.) A foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature. This plays itself out as our allies knowing we have their backs, our adversaries respecting us, and our enemies fearing us.

 All that is necessary to do to pry loose this worldview from Trumpism in the public perception is to be unwaveringly driven by it when opining if one is a pundit, or voting, if one is a legislator. And, yes, speaking up about Trump's unfitness falls into that, since he has no clue what those three pillars are all about.

That's how you expose the hollowness of the Left argument that you have to abandon those three pillars to be a legitimate Trump opponent.

But consistency and clarity are key.

You can't go squishy.

Speaking of Republicans with terminal cases of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome . . .

Head-scratcher move from He Who Hugged The Most Equal Comrade When Looking For Lots of Federal-Sandy-Aftermath Gravy:

Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie signed a bill requiring New Jersey schools use the preferred pronouns of transgender students, according to a Saturday report.

The legislation (S3067/A4652) compels New Jersey to mandate that state schools call transgender students by their preferred pronouns and prohibits them from making transgender students use bathrooms opposing their gender identity, according to NJ.com.

Get back to your private beachfront and leave the world alone, you corpulent malevolent force.

How will 2017 Pubs deal with crunch time should that come about?

And bear in mind that neither of these pieces deal with the latest development: Sean Spicer's resignation, because he refused to have to report to Anthony Scaramucci.

The two pieces are one by David French at NRO, and one by Noah Rothman at Commentary.

Rothman takes us through the dizzying pace of events of the last day and a half:

The events of the last 36 hours unrolled like a cascade. Late Wednesday, the New York Times published an interview in which Trump delivered a stinging rebuke for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, scolding him for recusing himself from the investigation into the campaign’s ties to Russian operatives. In that interview, Trump appeared to warn special counselor Robert Mueller not to dig too deeply into his personal finances, or else.

Hours later, Bloomberg News revealed that Mueller’s probe was investigating Trump’s business transactions and tax records—a leak surely made in response to Trump’s arm-twisting. More leaks from the investigation confirmed that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was being investigated for involvement in a money-laundering scheme, a revelation made more discomfiting by the discovery that he owed pro-Russian interests $17 million before joining the Trump campaign.

With the noose tightening, the lead attorney on Trump’s personal defense team, Marc Kasowitz, and the legal team’s spokesperson, Mark Corallo, resigned. The Washington Post reported that “Trump has asked his advisers about his power to pardon aides, family members and even himself in connection with the probe.” Trump’s spokespeople insist the president has no intention of pursuing the dismissal of the special counsel investigating his campaign, but his every action indicates that this is a lie.

Prominent Republicans reacted to all this incredulously. “There is no possible way anybody at the White House could be seriously thinking about firing Mueller,” Sen. Bob Corker insisted. “We all know the president,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch. “He makes some of these comments that he really doesn’t mean.” Sen. Susan Collins was willing to go a bit farther: “It would be catastrophic if the President were to fire the special counsel.”

Off the record, however, Republican lawmakers are far less circumspect in relaying their fears about what the president is capable of doing to the republic. “Any thought of firing the special counsel is chilling. It’s chilling,” an unnamed GOP senator told CNN. “One gets the impression that the President doesn’t understand or he willfully disregards the fact that the attorney general and law enforcement in general—they are not his personal lawyers to defend and protect him,” another added.

French speaks plainly about a major motivator of Capitol Hill Republicans: fear.

There are very few true-believer Trump allies on Capitol Hill. Sure, there are many folks who are genuinely impressed with the man’s electoral victory and admire his intense connection with his base, but even most of them would admit that he was their last choice in the primaries, that they voted for him because they considered the alternative to be worse, and that the main attraction of his presidency is the chance to pass conservative policies and confirm conservative nominees. They don’t trust him and they don’t like him. But — and this is important — at some level many of them fear him, or at least fear what he could do to their careers.

Fear is a powerful motivator. Here we are, six months into his first term, and aside from the Judge Gorsuch nomination, meaningful conservative victories have been few and far between. Scandals and self-inflicted wounds abound. Planned Parenthood is still funded, Obamacare is still alive, and tax reform is still mainly a pipe dream. Trump has proven that he can and will blow up any and all news cycles at will. He’s proven that he sees loyalty as a one-way street: “You’re for me, and I’m for me.” No matter your record of previous support or friendship, you must do what he wants or face his public wrath. Yet still the GOP wall holds.

Already Republicans have proven their capacity to defend conduct they’d howl about if the president were a Democrat. Trump has lost a campaign chair, national-security adviser, and foreign-policy adviser as a result of deceptions or problematic ties to Russia and its allies. His campaign chair, son, and son-in law took a meeting with Kremlin-linked Russian officials in furtherance of a professed Russian-government plan to help him win. He impulsively shared classified information with the Russian ambassador to Washington. He fired FBI director James Comey, unquestionably misled America about his reason for doing so, and trashed Comey’s reputation in front of our Russian foes. He and his team have made so many false statements about Russia that an entire cottage industry of YouTube videos exists to chronicle them.

It's the same kind of fear that prevents them from putting economic liberty front and center in the quest for the way to the repeal the "A"CA.

You will notice who the most truly confident Republican federal lawmakers are. They are the ones who are willing to come in for not only howls of derision from the Left, but the Left's signature absolute viciousness. And they do it with smiles on their faces, because they know what their principles are, and they know those principles are right.

You don't have to wrap yourself in wonkish terminology and flimsy platitudes when you are right.

But the biggest test of whether there's enough of that confidence to matter may be upon us.

In any event, can anyone say that either the Republican-controlled White House or the Republican-controlled Capitol is knocking out a bold, historic agenda, undistracted by arcane investigations, petty turf battles and political fear?

No, and that doesn't speak well of the party that's the ostensible repository of free-market principles, solid moral grounding and an unflinching view of the world stage.

Which might mean handing back the reins of power to the party that is the agent of pure darkness in post-America.

The shameful squishiness of House Republicans

There is the moral cowardice of what the House did regarding transgender surgery for military personnel, but I'd like to pursue an auxiliary angle: Reportage of this abysmal turn demonstrates that words matter.

Before we get to the semantic monstrosity committed by the Washington Post in this headline, let's go back up a couple of layers and establish a few facts.

1.) Transgendered people have a mental illness. They can carve up their crotches and load themselves up with hormones, but they will always have the DNA they were born with.

2.) It is ill-advised to have people known to be mentally ill entrusted with the defense of this nation against foreign enemies.

3.) It is also ill-advised to have the nation's defense apparatus's focus on its core mission diluted by accommodating people with this particular affliction.

4.) Government funds allocated to the mission of defense, just like government funds in general, should not be used to meet the needs or wants of particular individuals.

Now, consider the mentality required to come up with a headline like "House Rejects Attempt to Ban Transgender Surgery for Troops."

Now, given that, at least for the time being, the military is proceeding with the acceptance of people with this particular mental illness into its ranks, such people are as free as anyone to carve up their crotches and otherwise mutilate the bodies God gave them - on their own dimes. Such mutilation is a practice confined to an infinitesimal portion of those serving. What Missouri Representative Vicky Hartzler's amendment to existing health-care provisions for military personnel would have done is prevent tax dollars from being used.

The same Post article also covers another disgusting Congressional decision to indulge the military's distraction from its mission:

The House also shot down an amendment aimed at getting the Pentagon out of having to submit a report to Congress detailing the impact of climate change on the armed forces. Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., said the requirement puts an unnecessary demand on the military at a time when it should be concentrating on defeating the Islamic State group and countering other serious threats.

With this kind of poltroonery manifesting itself in legislation having to do with the most essential Constitutional function of the federal government, it's no wonder these pitiful excuses for statesmen don't seem to be capable of framing the repeal of the "A"CA in free-market terms.

If the House of Representatives as presently composed lacks clarity about three of the most basic principles under attack today - health care not being a right, the global climate not being in any kind of trouble, and transgenderism being a mental illness - it's not of much use for anything other than joining the Freedom-Hater party in nudging this once-great country right over the precipice.

Saturday morning roundup

How neurotic are the demands of the cultural Left? This neurotic: Cosmopolitan magazine publishes an article maintaining that the sensitive guy who really tunes in to his woman's holistic array of needs and wants during intimacy is actually a sexist pig. Bookworm unpacks:

 . . . one of feminism’s chief complaints starting in the 1960s was that too many men had a “wham, bam, thank you, ma’am” approach to sex. Women, said the feminists, were complicated and therefore needed delicacy and attention in order to get sexual pleasure. Meanwhile, men were single celled amoebas would could pop out their own orgasms and then just walk away.

For the last forty or fifty years, the message to American men has been that, to be a good partner in bed, it’s not enough to say, “This is great, wasn’t it?” Instead, men need to be attentive, skilled, caring, compassionate, empathetic and, above all, patient so that their partner can get as much pleasure from sex as men routinely do. No wonder that men, most of whom really can orgasm through very simple stimulation, feel proud when they delay their own pleasure, and make the extra effort and take the extra time to see to their partner’s pleasure. I applaud those men.

Modern feminists, though, do not applaud those men. The problem, you see, is that, to the extent that men get pleasure from pleasuring women, those evil men are robbing women of control over their own orgasms. And no, that is not bad writing on my part. That is utterly appalling thinking on the part of Sara Chadwick and Sari van Anders, the *ahem* researchers behind the study:

In a separate statement from Chadwick and van Anders, they explained why it’s a bad thing for men to gain masculinity points for bringing female partners to orgasm. “One reason is that it might pressure some heterosexual men to feel like they have to ‘give’ women orgasms, as if orgasm is something men pulled out of a hat and presented to women,” they wrote. “This ties into cultural ideas of women as passive recipients of whatever men give them.”

They also mention another sexist orgasm trope: women feeling pressured to fake orgasms in order to appease a male partner, or in their words, “to protect men’s feelings.” For women who have sex with male partners, the pressure to orgasm is a relatable feeling. Hence all the faking that we know is going down in hetero bedrooms all over the country.

[snip]

The researchers draw a fairly frightening conclusion from the research findings. When women’s orgasms begin to serve as a masculinity achievement for male partners, the orgasms cease to be about women’s liberation or sexual pleasure. They just become another opportunity for men to flex, or “shore up their sense of masculinity.”(Emphasis mine.)

North Korea is set to conduct another nuclear-weapon test. All relevant personnel are just waiting for Kim to give the go-ahead.

Obviously, I've perused a lot of reactions to yesterday's repeal-and-replace fiasco. So far, Philip Klein at the Washington Examiner has the best take, for my money.  His piece is titled, "GOP Cave on Obamacare Repeal is the Biggest Broken Promise in Political History."

Here's the bottom line: Republicans didn't want to repeal Obamacare that badly. Obamacare was a useful tool for them. For years, they could use it to score short-term messaging victories. People are steamed about high premiums? We'll message on that today. People are angry about losing insurance coverage? We'll put out a devastating YouTube video about that. Seniors are angry about the Medicare cuts? Let's tweet about it. High deductibles are unpopular? We'll issue an email fact sheet. Or maybe a gif. At no point were they willing to do the hard work of hashing out their intraparty policy differences and developing a coherent health agenda or of challenging the central liberal case for universal coverage. Sure, if the U.S. Supreme Court did the job for them, they were okay with Obamacare going away. But when push came to shove, they weren't willing to put in the elbow grease.

I'll have more to say about this dark episode.


Count on the indispensable Kevin Williamson at NRO to deliver just the right perspective on the head of Squirrel-Hair's National Trade Council:

n the collected works of Peter Navarro, there is a peculiar paradox: Some of the dullest prose imaginable challenges the sharp edge of Hanlon’s razor, the aphorism that advises us: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Professor Navarro of the University of California at Irvine has hanging on the wall of an office or a den somewhere a doctorate in economics from Harvard; barring some Forrest Gump–level chain of coincidence, it does not seem likely that anything as innocent as stupidity explains his literary output, which consists of a few how-to-make-money-in-the-stock-market books (an actual title: “If It’s Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks”) from earlier in his career and a half dozen or so low-minded books about China with such talk-radio-ready names as “Death by China” and “The Coming China Wars,” two books that contain 80 exclamation points between them, as well as several pamphlets summarizing the main points of his books.

He is President Donald Trump’s house China intellectual, the only one of his close advisers who is a credentialed academic economist, albeit one whose area of specialty is utility companies, not international trade. (Our most famous scholar of trade economics, Paul Krugman, apparently was not available for service in the Trump administration. Pity.) Navarro has been named head of the newly created National Trade Council, a position in which he is well positioned to do a great deal of damage to the Trump administration, to the United States and its economic interests, and, possibly, to the world. That’s quite a step up for a man who was teaching undergraduate econ to business students until a few months ago.

The decline of US naval power isn't front-and-center on the public's radar screen, but it should be.

Let's end on a positive note: The State Department makes it official - issues a permit to TransCanada for the Keystone XL pipeline.

I carry no party's water; I remain an immutable-principles guy to the end

I am so glad I no longer consider myself a Republican.

Of course, I'll continue to vote nearly exclusively Republican for the foreseeable future, given that the main alternative is evil and the rest are silly.

But this repeal-and-replace impasse makes me want to throw up.

Consider who is lining up for the House bill and against it.

Against: the good guys and the smart guys:

Heritage Action, Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity -- three of the biggest groups that Republicans will need to help them whip their right flank into voting for this thing -- have all come out hard against it. Avik Roy and Michael Cannon, two of the leading opponents of Obamacare in the policy community, have both panned it. You’re not exactly seeing enthusiastic cheers from the journalists who opposed Affordable Care Act, of which I am one. See? This is me, emphatically not cheering. If such a thing is possible, I am actively failing to cheer.

Squirrel-Hair claims to be open to modifications, but says that has to be done through the amendment process. Like that is going to bring more clarity to the whole enterprise.

And Mike Pence has squandered a great deal of credibility in this matter:

The White House on Tuesday cast the GOP bill as a "work in progress," a sign that changes may be necessary in order to move it through the House. Pence acknowledged that reality by saying as the legislative process goes forward, the GOP plan "is the framework for reform and we are certainly open to improvements and to recommendations in the legislative process."

But he also warned the GOP, "this is the bill" backed by President Trump.

Mitch McConnell seems anxious to have the Senate vote on it.

Nice work, you clowns.

Yes, the cabinet appointments, the reversal of the EPA's tyranny, and the new US tone at the UN are all marvelous developments made possible by last November's election results.

But failing to stand on the side of liberty on this crucial issue would negate those gains.

A whole lot of citizens of this land would feel that there was now truly nowhere for them to go.

I'm not at the point of total hopelessness, but I am at the point of total disgust.

A party that claims to stand for what I stand for and then gets the vapors when it's time to prove it is no party of mine.

We can be eternally grateful we didn't get John Kasich as president

There was a time when the guy was considered a solid conservative. In 2016, he obliterated that notion to smithereens - right up to the present moment:

On December 27, 2016, Ohio Governor John Kasich vetoed House Bill 554, an energy bill designed to ease state restrictions on electric utilities. Currently, power companies in Ohio must meet increasingly strict annual standards for investing in renewable energy, such as solar, wind, etc., and for helping customers reduce energy use.

Environmental special interest groups are ecstatic over Kasich’s energy bill veto. They probably especially like the part where the state tells utility companies they have to fund their own suicide by showing customers how to use less of their services or products, a bad habit government is increasingly applying across many industries. Nevertheless, Kasich justified the veto by claiming it would have weakened the state's clean-energy standards, which in turn would have hurt the state’s near and long-term economic competitiveness.

The energy bill veto was joined by Kasich’s veto of Senate Bill 329, a bill that would have set up a process for lawmakers to regularly review certain state agencies for possible elimination. Kasich said Senate Bill 329 needlessly duplicates an aspect of the budget process.

When governments promote “clean” or “renewable” energy bills, you get neither the economic competitiveness of a free market or smaller government. And simply relying on the budget process to rein in government has little basis in history. Thus, Kasich’s reasoning for his vetoes falls under Orwellian logic, somewhere along the lines of “Ignorance is Strength.”

There's nothing surprising about this now, given his pronouncements about Medicaid expansion ("I'm sure when I get to the pearly gates they're gonna be less interested in what I did to shrink government than in what I did for my fellow man") and government coercing Christian wedding service providers to take the business of homosexual couples ("It's a done deal now. If it bothers you, say a little prayer for 'em on their way out the door.")

Friday morning roundup

Kimberley Strassel at the WSJ on the two moments in FBI director James Comey's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday that prove he intended to pass on recommending indictment for Madam BleachBit. Who has been leaning on him, and what form has it been taking?

Just when you thought maybe the south Asian subcontinent was no longer a place of hair-raising tension, the following chain of events has occurred: an Indian military base in Kashmir was attacked, leaving 18 soldiers dead. India retaliated with "surgical strikes." And now the Pakistani defense minister is threatening India with nuclear destruction.

The Stupid Party's lack of a spine is nearly as big a factor in the flatlining of post-America as the machinations of the Freedom-Haters:

The big story of the new Continuing Resolution is of course that Congressional Republicans caving to President Obama and affirmatively funding Planned Parenthood.

But there's a lesser-known story that's almost as big of a Republican failure: in addition to failing to protect the unborn, they also failed to protect the Internet.

Michael Brendan Dougherty  at The Week coins a term that I think is quite useful: esoteric Trumpism. It's the notion that Squirrel-Hair is an emblem of something much bigger than himself, that he embodies some kind of supposed recognition that the ideological fault lines that characterized American - indeed, Western - political life are now obsolete. Dougherty takes four arguments one hears from esoteric Trumpists and shows them to be utter hooey.

Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome: the disease that killed the Republican party

The "Affordable" Care Act is an obvious, abject failure by any measure. It has been consistently underwater, public opinion-wise, since before it even became law. Exchanges and co-ops have been going kabust left and right. Networks keep narrowing. Premiums keep going up. Everyone can see that it is nothing but rank redistribution and tyranny.

So Pubs are still as hot for full repeal as ever, right?

Stop laughing.

Two pieces at Hot Air today show how pathetic the GOP is with regard to this debacle, how utterly given over to moral cowardice they have become.

In Washington, federal legislators are looking at a package of smallish bills designed to nibble at the edges, fooling with such features as grace periods for enrollees, premiums for older people and the requiring of documentation. These are nothing more than a sop to the big, unwieldy bureaucracies that health-insurance companies have become, enticing them to stay in the game even though they're losing money.

I would like to think that at least a few - one, two, whatever - of those signing on to this know in their hearts of hearts that this crap runs counter to a free-market basis on which to construct an alternative to the "A"CA. Health insurance companies are like farmers. They dread a day of reckoning when they would have to operate according to free-market principles, even though it would actually lead to a situation in which they could make a real profit, not a funny-money one.

But maybe Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome has consumed the entire beings of each and every one of them.

And in the Alaska state legislature, this is going down:

he death spiral has finally hit Obamacare, at least in one state. GOP politicians in Alaska who say they are opposed to the law are creating a new fund to prevent it from collapsing.

Alaska has already lost several of the insurers on its Obamacare exchange. Next year it will be down to just one remaining company selling policies. That company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, will need to raise premiums substantially in order to cover costs. Faced with the possible collapse of the state’s exchange, which currently insures 23,000 people, the state’s Republican governor recommended passing a law to use state funds to keep prices down. Politico reports on the surprising turn of events:

The legislation, originally proposed by [Gov. Bill] Walker, sets up a $55 million fund — financed through an existing tax on all insurance companies — to subsidize enrollees’ costs as the state struggles with Obamacare price spikes and an exodus by all except one insurance company…

Republican state lawmakers, who sued Walker for expanding Medicaid under the health law, swear they remain opposed to Obamacare. But they say they’re doing what’s necessary to prevent health insurance premiums from spiraling out of control and letting thousands of people lose their coverage.

“What I’m getting — and I guarantee what the Alaska Legislature’s getting — is constituents pleading with them for help,” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) told POLITICO. “There’s been no state in the union more negatively impacted by Obamacare than Alaska.”

Alaskans already faced high costs but their Obamacare prices are the highest in the nation:

An analysis of average 2016 Obamacare premiums from Avalere Health, a consulting firm, showed that the lowest-cost “silver” level plan in Alaska cost $956 per month before any subsidies were factored in — the highest rate in the nation. That amount is 40 percent higher than the year before.

Alaskan Republicans face an unenviable choice. They can either put the program they didn’t want in the first place on state life support or they can let the market take its course, which will create more disruption for tens of thousands of Alaskans. Republican state Rep. Lance Pruitt tells Politico, “Are we trying to maintain ACA? I think what we’re trying to do is live within the new reality that’s out there.” In other words, they don’t really have much of a choice since the federal law mandates this.

This is the kind of dog vomit that gave us Squirrel-Hair. If the supposed champions of liberty and common sense aren't making even a feeble attempt to make the case, voters, who are routinely opening panic-inducing mail from their insurance providers or the damn government "marketplace" are going to flock to a snake-oil-hawking charlatan, just because he appears to stand in opposition to the totalitarians currently gripping post-America's throat.

Not my party anymore.