Tuesday roundup

Andrea Ruth at Red State has a piece entitled "The Nunes Memo Was a Dud and the Trump Apologia is Pathetic."  The summation of her overall point comes in the third paragraph:

Those on both sides providing commentary leave out critical words and phrases or screw up the timeline. The ignorance comes across as willful.

She goes on to look at the way DJT's slavish devotees claim that the memo proves that the FISA warrant was based entirely on the Steele dossier. One problem: Trey Gowdy clearly says otherwise.

She then makes clear that the Very Stable Genius make much of this mess himself:

Perhaps the Trump campaign was innocent of any collusion with the Russians. But Trump, Nunes and others have now created more animus between Trump Republicans and those in the Department of Justice, which is what they’ve done since day one. Trump, his campaign, and subsequent administration are in a situation of their own making. They created the situation, not a bunch of rogue FBI and DOJ employees hell-bent on Trump’s destruction for Hillary’s benefit.

The first FISA warrant issued for former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was issued on October 21, 2016. These warrants are required to be re-upped every three months.

Before the applications for the Page warrant could be submitted to the FISA court, it had to be endorsed by the FBI director or his deputy. After that, it required approval by one of three people: the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, or the Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s National Security Division.
The FBI director at the time, James Comey, signed three of the Carter FISA warrant applications. One was signed by his deputy director Andrew McCabe. Then-deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, then-acting DAG Dana Boente, and DAG Rod Rosenstein each signed one or more of the applications.

Look at those names. Democratic appointees all.

Trump had every opportunity to clear out the Democrat holdovers immediately upon taking office. If he was so concerned the investigation into Russia was a political scheme aimed to take down his campaign and presidency and knew it was ongoing, why on earth would he take nearly five months to fire Comey because of a failed loyalty test, consider Andrew McCabe as Comey’s replacement for FBI director and appoint Rod Rosenstein as Deputy Attorney General?

If the people Trump blasts on a daily basis were so bad, why would Best People Picker consistently choose so poorly?

It was Donald Trump who had Carter Page and Paul Manafort on his campaign. To say nothing of the debacle over Mike Flynn’s short-lived position in the administration.

It was Donald Trump who had his son and son-in-law as campaign staff, who were ultimately dumb enough to meet with Kremlin toady Valerie Veselnitskaya.

It was Donald Trump who had George Papadopolous on his campaign.
And it was Donald Trump who kept James Comey, et al. on after he became president and even later nominated Rod Rosenstein for his post.

When does the Trump apologia army admit the President created the situation he and his administration are now in? That the Nunes memo did not clear up anything and it definitely didn’t vindicate Trump or his campaign?

Don’t hold your breath. 

In the course of a piece at NRO looking at how the Catholic Church in China appears to be on the verge of involving the  Communist Party in its appointments of officials, in order for the Vatican to pursue full diplomatic relations with Beijing, George Weigel reviews similar past instances of Church acquiescence to totalitarian regimes:

As an integral part of the 1929 Lateran Accords (which also created an independent Vatican City State while recognizing the Holy See as a sovereign actor in world politics), Pope Pius XI made a concordat with Mussolini’s Italy — a treaty that was thought to guarantee the Catholic Church’s freedom of action in the fascist state. Two years later, with blackshirt thugs beating up Catholic youth groups and the state media conducting a viciously anticlerical propaganda campaign, Pius XI denounced Mussolini’s policies with the blistering 1931 encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno, in which he condemned fascism’s “pagan worship of the State.”

In 1933, as Hitler was consolidating Nazi power, Vatican diplomacy negotiated the Reich Concordat in another attempt to protect the Catholic Church from the totalitarian state through a web of legal guarantees. The strategy worked as poorly in Germany as it had in Italy, and in 1937, after many attacks on churchmen and Catholic organizations, Pius XI condemned Hitler’s race-ideology in another thunderbolt encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge, which had to be smuggled into Germany to be read from Catholic pulpits.

Then came the Ostpolitik of the late 1960s and 1970s. Faced with what he once described as the “frozen swamp” of Communist repression behind the iron curtain, Pope Paul VI’s chief diplomatic agent, Archbishop Agostino Casaroli, began to negotiate a series of agreements with Communist governments. Those agreements were intended to provide for the sacramental life of the Church by facilitating the appointment of bishops, who could ordain priests, who could celebrate Mass and hear confessions, thereby preserving some minimal form of Catholic survival until Communism “changed.” And another disaster ensued.

The Catholic hierarchy in Hungary became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hungarian Communist Party. In what was then Czechoslovakia, regime-friendly Catholics became prominent in the Church while the underground Czechoslovak Church of faithful Catholics struggled to survive under conditions exacerbated by what its leaders regarded as misguided Roman appeasement of a bloody-minded regime. In Poland, Holy See envoys tried to work around, rather than through, the heroic Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, in a vain attempt to regularize diplomatic relations with the Polish People’s Republic. And while all that was going on, the Vatican itself was being deeply penetrated by the KGB, the Polish SB, the East German Stasi, and other East Bloc intelligence services, as I documented from first-hand Communist secret-police sources in the second volume of my John Paul II biography, The End and the Beginning. 

Don't hold back, Daren Jonescu, tell us how you really feel about Canada:

Canadians, taken collectively, are not only the smuggest bunch of self-righteous dimwits ever to waste a beautiful piece of geography with their empty existence, but they also have the distinction of comprising the first and only semi-functioning democracy in world history which has made the overt rejection of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness its defining essence and raison d’être.

Canadians, again taken collectively — that is, leaving aside the surviving minority of us who were merely unfortunate enough to have been born in a nation aggressively transitioning into communism, and who have not yet found a satisfactory means of escaping that free man’s living hell — are very proud of not being Americans, although they have no idea what America is. They are very proud of being socialists, although socialism is the single most discredited political philosophy in the history of this planet, and presumably any other. They are very proud of smoking more pot, drinking more beer, and having more late-term abortions than anyone else on Earth. They are proud like nobody’s business of actively promoting the spread of Islamism, the epidemic of welfare-dependency, and the growth of that grand mechanism of global tyranny, global human trafficking, global warming propaganda, global anti-Semitism, and global globalism called the United Nations.

But above all else, Canadians are proud of being free. Free of moral principles. Free of any guiding political philosophy. Free of any reservations about stealing other people’s property, other people’s labor, other people’s rights to life, or other people’s freedom of speech. Free of any shame about repeatedly electing as prime minister Pierre Trudeau, an avowed admirer of Mao, apologist for the Soviet Union, and personal friend of Fidel Castro. Free of any compunction about compounding that world-historical idiocy by electing as prime minister Trudeau’s foppish son Justin, the world’s first brain-free head of government.

His rant is a buildup to his thoughts on Canada making its national anthem gender-neutral.

David Solway at PJ Media writes about the Jordan Peterson phenomenon:

Peterson is clearly filling a gaping spiritual vacuum experienced by a vast community, primarily young men, who have been deprived of agency, self-confidence and life-meaning. And he is doing so by representing the insights of his sources to readers and viewers unfamiliar with these magisterial texts and cultural giants — a privation owing in large measure to poor upbringing and an anorexic education. Pajama Boys living in their parents’ basement drinking hot chocolate rather than the Castalian water of knowledge, and men young and old who have been infected and oppressed by the feminist preaching of toxic masculinity, are in desperate need of moral revitalization and intellectual supervision.

The Peterson phenomenon, then, testifies to the deep sense of spiritual emptiness in our culture. Confronting the abyss, he argues that nobility is possible despite the recognition that life inescapably involves suffering, evil and death, and contends that male vigor, fortitude and resilience are essential to cultural survival. In a culture obsessed with group rights, Peterson points out that absent its necessary counterpart, individual responsibility, social collapse is inevitable.

Solway examines a couple of really lame, half-cocked attempts by lefties to take Peterson down: Tabatha Southey at Maclean's and Ira Wells at The Walrus.

Speaking of courageous cultural observers and those who would take them down, Katie Roiphe's essay at Harper's, about how a certain kind of feminism has set itself up as the social-media arbiter of whether #MeToo is jumping the shark is garnering a lot of blowback. I link to the essay itself. You're a busy person; I'll leave it to you to decide how much response you want to look into.



Indianapolis Colts linebacker Edwin Jackson and his Uber driver Jeffrey Monroe were killed by an illegal alien from Guatemala, who was using an alias, didn't have a driver's license, had been deported multiple times, and had a blood alcohol level of .15.