Saturday roundup

 I had a bit of a notion when I got up today to write a post about the inevitable tradeoff between whacking the coronavirus once and for all and how the price is too steep for society to undertake what would be required. Alas, G. Patrick Lynch at Law & Liberty has handled the matter impeccably:

Back in March, before the world got weird, the argument for lockdowns and restrictions was simple and powerful. In the wake of the Italian healthcare system’s catastrophic failure to handle its first major Covid outbreak, public health officials and political leaders across the globe almost unanimously decided to pursue a lockdown for what they claimed would be a few weeks in order to “flatten the curve” and avoid overwhelming hospital systems. Trust me on this, you didn’t dream it.

Now more than eight months into those “few weeks,” the Great Barrington Declaration is forcing us in the developed West to answer a question that we have needed to discuss honestly and publicly for a while: what’s the goal now? What are we trying to accomplish with the myriad of frequently changing collections of Covid policies that are still in place in some locales and may be reimposed on others?

We don’t hear about curve bending, let alone flattening anymore. Instead, we hear about “public safety,” “protecting Grandma and Grandpa,” mask wearing, and social distancing. There have been recent threats of more “targeted” lockdowns because of increasing cases. None of these are goals—they are practices without a clear end in sight. No one in the White House, Congress, state legislatures, or governors’ mansions is articulating a clear goal or timeline. What’s more, the trade-offs associated with this messy collection of policies have been significant and deadly.

Public health experts talk about “excess deaths,” which are essentially additional deaths in a place over a time period above what you would have predicted under normal conditions. Since the beginning of the year, the US has experienced about 300,000 excess deaths, which is a lot. The number directly attributable to Covid is “only” about 200,000. So Covid has killed 200,000, but another 100,000 Americans have died while these policies have been in place. Health officials widely point to higher rates of serious health problems that aren’t being treated because of fear associated with Covid. For example, the heart attack death rate has doubled since the pandemic began. Many of those other excess deaths might be attributable to our Covid policies, not the virus. That’s a failure on both counts. We haven’t prevented 200,000 deaths from Covid, and our lockdowns and draconian approaches lasting for months have at the very least contributed to another 100,000. Individuals who cannot afford to do so are forgoing basic health services. Heart attacks, strokes, and many other significant health problems are occurring and not being treated because of fears related to the pandemic. And perhaps most dangerously, these extra deaths not directly attributable to Covid are occurring among younger Americans between 30 and 60 who are not at high risk of dying from the virus, but are foregoing treatment because of misplaced fear.

This is to say nothing of the suffering the virus and the containment policies have caused in the developing world where millions of people live from day to day. They aren’t rich enough to stay at home, watch Netflix, and chill. There are no virtual classes in poor public schools in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. We in the US are rich enough to temporarily get away with this odd, bifurcated world where many of the wealthy work from home and their children receive private tutoring online, while other “essential” workers continue to work in their jobs and accept more risks.

Constructing public policy takes not only expertise, but a proper balance between risk and reward. Aaron Wildavsky’s work on this topic points out two reasons why public officials, in conjunction with citizens, must accept tradeoffs in the creation of safety policy. As Wildavsky argues, and the discussion of excess deaths clearly illustrates, seeking safety will inevitably increase danger in other areas. For instance, Wildavsky discusses attempts by the city of Los Angeles to promote the demolition of many older buildings throughout its metropolitan area because they were deemed unsafe in the event of an earthquake. City officials were trying to be proactive against possible deaths from older buildings collapsing. But as he notes, displacing 17,000 residents from those buildings and disrupting the commercial activity in many of them had consequences for health and safety. The same is true when new drugs are placed on the market. Many citizens benefit from the drugs, but a few can have severe side-effects.

Conversely, Wildavsky argues, somewhat paradoxically, that accepting risks can promote safety. Take any standard table or floor lamp. At the time that electric lamps were invented, people were somewhat concerned about running electric current right to their fingertips, but compared to burning gas and candles, it turned out to be much safer. The tradeoff was worth it and only through risk-taking experimentation did we discover that it was safe.

The problem with our current regulatory environment, as Wildavsky sees it, is twofold: resilience is not valued, and regulators and policymakers seek what he calls “perfect safety.” Our policymakers today are rejecting resiliency, making us poorer, less socially stable, less well-educated, and more divided. The second problem is that our health experts also seek some sort of ideal or perfect safety when it comes to Covid mitigation. When policymakers compete in a race to the bottom for draconian measures that fight Covid outbreaks only with brute force, they are lauded as being proactive without careful consideration of the harm these policies inflict.

More fundamentally, what have all of these Covid mitigation policies done for human flourishing? If we could reach the perfectly safe Covid life, would it be worth it? Aristotle reminds us of the problems that arise when individuals do not live socially. As he notes in the Politics, our natural state is in a social order like the city, the center of the ancient Greek world. He famously noted that the man not suited to social life in the city was either “a beast or a god.” But what often gets left out is the next sentence, where he writes, “There is then in all persons a natural impetus to associate with each other in this manner, and he who first founded civil society was the cause of the greatest good.” Our end goal should be the promotion of human flourishing, which requires the maintenance of civil society—the social world where we practice politics, associate freely, and achieve justice through the rules that evolve from our regular interactions. This process is halted in the Covid world.

But it’s not merely our rules and sense of justice that come from social life. Our friendships, described by Aristotle in book 8 of the Nicomachean Ethics, are profoundly important not only because of the good they do for us and our friends, but also because friendship is a substitute for state-enforced justice. When friendship is rich and deep in a political system, leaders do not need to resort to coercion and force. By instilling fear among all of us, politicians are fracturing friendship and subjecting us to lives that are not natural. We can easily see the roots of our recent civil unrest, rioting, and lawlessness during this pandemic in the isolation and breakdown of social and economic life.

None of these forced and consciously chosen disruptions were done in bad faith. However, isolation and separation from our friends, loved ones, and social life is not natural and not without cost. It can fracture our social fabric irreparably. Waiting for months without a clear set of goals decreases cohesion and trust among the governed. At the regime level, this opens up the possibility for a growing chasm between the governed and governors. Such a situation invites potential abuses of power. 

Seth Chalmer at Quillette offers a thought-provoking perspective on our society's ever-ratcheting polarization:

 

When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, many Jews in the Russian Empire hoped for a French victory. Napoleon had eliminated barriers to Jewish integration and advancement in France; the Russian regime and its policies, by contrast, were thoroughly infused with anti-Jewish discrimination and hostility. But one prominent Hasidic leader disagreed with those cheering Bonaparte. Schneur Zalman of Liadi, founding Rebbe of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect, fervently supported Russia’s Tsar Alexander I. Publicly, Schneur Zalman argued that the Tsar served God while Napoleon served only himself. Privately, however, the rabbi had another reason. Writing to a friend, he explained that if Napoleon were victorious, conditions would greatly improve for the Jews and this would weaken their commitment to God, whereas if the Tsar prevailed, Jews would suffer but remain religiously committed as a result. Closing his letter, he quoted Psalm 119: “‘Princes have persecuted me without cause; But my heart stands in awe of Your words.’ And for God’s sake: Burn this letter.”

I thought of Rabbi Schneur Zalman’s secret reasoning while reading Ezra Klein’s 2019 book, Why We’re Polarized. There’s a parallel between the Hasidic master’s conviction that repression of Jews strengthens Jewish commitment and some of the social science Klein discusses. Schneur Zalman’s focus was piety, not identity, yet in a way he seems to have known a truth that research later confirmed, and that all sides of today’s culture wars would be wise to remember: when you attack an identity, you make it stronger. Klein synthesizes decades of social science research about how people relate to group identities. Summarizing these findings, he writes: “The human mind is exquisitely tuned to group affiliation and group difference. It takes almost nothing for us to form a group identity, and once that happens, we naturally assume ourselves in competition with other groups.” Furthermore, “The simplest way to activate someone’s identity is to threaten it.” Threat is such a strong force that it can awaken seemingly dormant identities; for example, Klein paraphrases Professor Ashley Jardina, who studies racial identity: “White political identity is conditional. It emerges in periods of threat and challenges.”

Note the asymmetry of ease between nurturing an identity and weakening one: it takes “almost nothing” for us to form an identity, whereas when someone threatens an identity we hold, that only activates us to claim and defend it, even if it hadn’t felt relevant to us before. Klein is interested in this subject for what it tells us about the two political “mega-identities” that consume America today, how the alignment of political identities with social identities inflames our divisions, and why so many arguments that seem to be about ideology and policy are really about politics as identity. But Klein’s observations lead me to ask a question he doesn’t address: What is the most effective way to uproot an identity?

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air discusses how two law firms pursuing these Hail-Mary efforts of the Trump campaign to find funny business withdrawing their services has unsettling long-term implications. If law firms can be cowed by the forces of wokeness to stand down, an important resource of participants in our democratic process takes a hit:

the timing on Porter Wright’s move seems curious, if so. That exchange in court took place a week ago. Yesterday, however, the New York Times highlighted internal divisions and external pressures on Porter Wright and Jones Day, another storied Ohio legal firm retained by Team Trump, over their participation in election challenges.

Doing business with Mr. Trump — with his history of inflammatory rhetoric, meritless lawsuits and refusal to pay what he owes — has long induced heartburn among lawyers, contractors, suppliers and lenders. But the concerns are taking on new urgency as the president seeks to raise doubts about the election results.

Some senior lawyers at Jones Day, one of the country’s largest law firms, are worried that it is advancing arguments that lack evidence and may be helping Mr. Trump and his allies undermine the integrity of American elections, according to interviews with nine partners and associates, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs.

At another large firm, Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, based in Columbus, Ohio, lawyers have held internal meetings to voice similar concerns about their firm’s election-related work for Mr. Trump and the Republican Party, according to people at the firm. At least one lawyer quit in protest.

Jones Day has earned more than $20 million doing business with Trump, his campaigns, and the RNC over the last five years, $4 million in this year alone. That’s a lot of income, and it pays more than a few salaries. Yet this seems to be the bigger concern among some of its attorneys:

In recent days, two Jones Day lawyers said they had faced heckling from friends and others on social media about working at a firm that is supporting Mr. Trump’s efforts.

A lawyer in Jones Day’s Washington office felt that the firm risked hurting itself by taking on work that undermined the rule of law. “To me, it seems extremely shortsighted,” the lawyer said.

That in itself is nonsense. Pursuing election challenges is not “undermining the rule of law,” but an exercise in law, as attorneys should especially know. I quoted Fordham Law professor Jed Shugerman in my earlier post, but he’s worth quoting again here:

The lawsuits may prove to be the best way to legitimize President-elect Joe Biden’s victory and draw to a close years of bogus complaints about voter fraud. The lack of merit in the legal complaints means they will be dead on arrival in the courts, and while the resounding rejection of Trump’s fantasies by judges will not persuade his fiercest loyalists, it will prevent conspiracy theories from spreading.

It is also a bad idea, as a general matter, to object to election law litigation: In two years, or four years — and possibly in two months in Georgia — the shoe may be on the other foot. It would look hypocritical to condemn the very idea of challenging an election result now, only to turn around and do so in different (albeit more legitimate) circumstances.

Does it undermine the rule of law to appeal a conviction of a murder defendant one knows to be guilty on technical grounds? Should attorneys only take on clients who are popular and whose causes they agree with? The true undermining of the rule of law is the hounding of lawyers based on the clients they accept. Trump can always find law firms that will take him on as a client, but if these social-media mobs and examples of law-firm wokery set these kinds of precedents, unpopular defendants, plaintiffs, and respondents will eventually find themselves locked out of the legal system.

That will undermine the rule of law, not representing a client in futile efforts in legal challenges to election results.

When people criticize attorneys for the clients they have represented, especially in a political campaign, the standard lawyer response is also the correct and true one: every client deserves representation in the legal process. If that ceases to be the standard and the value of the legal profession, then heaven help the lawyers to come, and heaven help us all when we need representation. That matters a lot more than Trump’s futile fights in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Update: I edited the headline for greater precision shortly after publishing.

Update: I missed this earlier, but it’s an important part of the context:

On Tuesday, The Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republicans, said it will spend $500,000 on ads targeting Jones Day and a smaller law firm working for Trump, following a Monday New York Times report citing dissent among Jones Day’s senior attorneys over its election work for Republicans.

In tweets online, the group, co-founded by conservative lawyer George Conway, who is the husband of former Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway, has encouraged lawyers and clients to abandon Jones Day.

Online critics of Jones Day also tweeted at its clients, including Verizon VZ.N and General Motors GM.N, urging them to drop the law firm.

A Twitter post by General Motors on Monday recognizing women leaders at the auto company has garnered more than 40 responses, including “sever ties with @JonesDay or be prepared for a #BoycottGM” and “Are you a Jones Day client? Do you really want your name associated with them?”

That said, the effort to find a sufficient amount of funny business to get the Very Stable Genius a victory is clearly an exercise in futility at this late date. More substantiation here. And here. 

Pfizer's decision to stay out from under Operation Warp Speed's purview allowed the free market to work its wonders:

In a time when capitalism is under attack from the left and the right, this highly promising vaccine is a reminder of what profit-driven markets are capable of. Pfizer chose to go it alone and the company’s reasoning is worth consideration. In an interview, the CEO of Pfizer emphasized that he wanted to liberate his scientists from bureaucracy, that he didn’t want to deal with the strings that money would come with, and that he wanted to keep Pfizer out of politics. In his approach we glean two insights: the importance of forward-thinking corporate leadership and the critical difference between government as a customer and government as an investor.

John Loftus at National Review on the hurl-worthy degree of moral preening and self-congratulation exemplified by “IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE: BLACK LIVES MATTER / WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS / NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL / SCIENCE IS REAL / LOVE IS LOVE / KINDNESS IS EVERYTHING” yard signs.  

 

 

Impeachment hearings: people are concluding what they were inclined to conclude anyway

Yesterday was another grind in the House Foreign Affairs Committee impeachment hearings. Sondland in the morning, Cooper and Hale in the evening.

None of it seems to be moving the needle much. Democrats and leftist journalists and commentators are sure that the record shows a steadily mounting collection of fatally damaging evidence. Trumpists are certain that the whole thing gets proven more of a nothingburger with each new testimony. There are some outliers. Ken Starr believes there's a good chance Republican Senators will soon go to the White House for a Watergate-style intervention.

One can find public opinion polls to confirm sentiment for or against impeachment.

That's the thing, at least at this point: It looks like one big exercise in confirmation bias.

I do think that there's a good chance that Pompeo's desire to exit the administration "in one piece," as Time puts it, is a harbinger of more administration turnover. He has many years left in which to make public service contributions, and he doesn't need the taint of all this. The case of Nikki Haley is indeed curious, though. She's made her exit; there's no apparent reason for her to still be hitching her wagon to the Trump train, which really hampers her options.

I'm reluctant to make predictions, but it does kind of look like the impeachment effort will come to naught and the Very Stable Genius will face one of the collectivists who were on the debate stage in Atlanta last night. He'll take the low road, missing great opportunities to make the case for three-pillared conservatism, instead coining juvenile nicknames and harping, with his signature braggadocio, on the good aspects of the economy (and leaving the bad ones, such as the effects of tariffs on manufacturing and agriculture, out of his message). And we'll probably get four more years of chaos and embarrassment. Post-America is pretty far gone, what with the percentage of millennials who would vote for a socialist, but post-Americans can still do basic math, and the numbers for Medicare for All and the Green New Deal don't add up.

DISCLAIMER: All of the above could be proven wrong next year, or even next week.

Barney & Clyde - episode 19

It's here.

Welcome back to the Libation Station! Pour yourself something bracing, pull up a bar-stool, and get in on the fortnightly exchange of libertarian and conservative perspectives on the weighty matters of the day. Specifically: 1 - Pavlov's Tribalist Dogs - the Utter Predictability of Everybody's Hot Take on the Impeachment Hearing. 2 - Meanwhile, Back in Athens - Red for Ed comes to our City and State 3 - Old News - Jeffery Epstein continues to Mystify even afer Croaking; How Social Media is Keeping the Story Alive. 4 - The Assault on the Second Amendment - The Supreme Court Allows the Families of Sandy Hook Victims to Sue Arms Manufacturers.

The Barney & Clyde podcast - episode four

Welcome back to the bar! Pull up a chair and get in on the fortnightly exchange of libertarian and conservative perspectives on the weighty matters of the day. In this installment of Barney and Clyde, we group the content before us into three categories: 

Tribalism, tribalism everywhere!,

Why a true free market still seems like a distant dream, and

The death rattle of education and journalism

Over ginger beers, we look at the utterly predictable responses to the Mueller investigation, Mayor Pete (making his differences with Mike Pence personal, and also his flimsy understanding of economic liberty), the utter absence of anybody in Washington who can work up any alarm about the debt and deficit, the orchestrated attempt by the media to make the public disparage tax cuts, and the further descent of the American campus into toxic wokeness.

B&C: fortnightly and forthrightly!

The Mueller report - initial thoughts

Everybody's response is exactly what one would predict it to be in this age of tribalism.

The lefties are still calling Barr's four-page summary a coverup and claiming that the full report clearly shows genuine obstruction of justice.

The shills and throne sniffers are saying "no collusion, end of story."

That's basically the Very Stable Genius's response as well, except it involves capital letters and exclamation points. Gotta take that victory lap. Quiet dignity just ain't in his wheelhouse.

And the report makes clear that he got pretty overheated when he first heard there was an investigation, and also that he doesn't have much of a grasp of the constitutionally established role of an Attorney General:

Here’s a screenshot of that section of the Mueller report:

And then there are the level-headed views, such as Guy Benson's:

The more I reflect on the report, the more I circle back to this idea: Often times, Trump is his own worst enemy -- and his worst enemies are his best friends.  If not for his habitual lying and erratic, chaotic behavior,  the president's firing of Comey may not have been as controversial as it was.  His real reason was sound, but White House told a different story.  And if not for their relentless, over-hyped fixation on this story, today's report may feel more damning than it does.  But they chanted 'collusion' and even 'treason' for two years.  Instead, we're discussing the lack of intent behind process crimes.

And Ben Shapiro's:

My one-line takeaway: Trump and his campaign engaged in deeply embarrassing and immoral but non-criminal behavior. In attempting to avoid that embarrassment, Trump engaged in more deeply embarrassing and immoral but ultimately non-criminal behavior.

In other words, it is what it is. Either signing on as a slavish devotee of the VSG or pushing for his impeachment are both non-options for anyone with either moral bearing or a grip on reality.

This guy is the going to be only viable alternative to the totalitarian clown show that is the Democrat presidential candidate lineup.

It could have been different if this were still the United States of America instead of post-America.

 

Saturday roundup

Jeh Johnson, who was Department of Homeland Security secretary under Obama, says that there is definitely a crisis at our southern border.

He told the [MSNBC Morning Joe] panel that during his tenure as Homeland Security Secretary, he would arrive at work each morning at 6:30 and would immediately read the intelligence report.

There would be my Intelligence Book, the PDB, sitting on my desk. And also the apprehension numbers from the day before and I’d look at them every morning…my staff will tell you if it was under 1,000 apprehensions the day before, that was a relatively good number and if it was over 1,000, it was a relatively bad number and I was going to be in a bad mood for the whole day.

On Tuesday, there were 4,000 apprehensions. I know that a thousand overwhelms the system. I cannot begin to imagine what 4,000 a day looks like. So, we are truly in a crisis.

I want to see this exhibit! Brian T. Allen, writing at National Review, has a review of a show that is a collaborative effort between the Toledo Museum of Art and Belgium's Royal Museums of Fine Art. It showcases the work of Frans Hals, a Dutch painter who did most of his work in the 1620s and 30s. You have to look at the examples that accompany Allen's piece. Seriously, Hals was able to capture human moments among family members with photographic accuracy and  relaxed conveyance of their multidimensionality that doesn't much show up again for centuries.

Allahpundit at Hot Air on that truly goofy NYT column by a guy who's "brown" who admits that pressure from his woke peers is forcing him to quit dating white women:

The author’s Latino, he’s been reading Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates, he’s tired of the petty asides he gets about dating white women — from nonwhites, let me stress — he’s positively aching to be properly woke. What’s a righteous free-thinking uncolonized brown-skinned man to do if he wants to move America forward after centuries of racism?

Allahpundit contextualizes the guy's "predicament" by pointing out not only its regressiveness, but placing it alongside a couple of other identity-politics occurrences from this past week:

He ends by observing that “something just doesn’t feel right” about his determination that interracial relationships are wrong or at least that enough other people think they’re wrong that he probably should too. Maybe he’ll do some more thinking and see if he can figure out why internalizing one of the most notorious pillars of America’s pre-civil-rights racist legal architecture might itself be “problematic.” Until then, may I interest you in a charming story out of the deep south about reporters of a certain race being barred from a political event while reporters of another race were allowed in? How about a hyper-woke take from Slate about how Pete Buttigieg, running to become the first openly gay president of the United States, isn’t remotely gay enough?

Your absolute must-read for the weekend: Marc Giller's "I Pledge Allegiance To the Tribe" at The Resurgent in its entirety. That's an order.  He quotes from the WSJ Peggy Noonan column from which I excerpted yesterday, in my post about the VSG's Grand Rapids rally. I knew Noonan's piece would show up elsewhere.

What the hell is Larry Kudlow doing calling for a shoring up of the Ex-Im Bank? 

Fabiana Rosales, wife of the legitimate Venezuelan president Juan Guaido, was in the United States as part of her international tour to raise awareness of what's going on in her country. She explained that the current instability is a national security threat for the US.

The poisonous atmosphere on post-America's university campuses - today's edition

I read an opinion somewhere the other day to the effect that those who are concerned about the rot permeating the education world - and particularly its higher-education component - need to be careful not to indulge in overkill, given the constant flood of examples and the limits on the human capacity for outrage.

I can see the validity of that view, but some of the cases still need to be brought to the attention of as many post-Americans as possible.

Take this case from the University of Georgia:

University of Georgia professor issued an apology to those he had “offended” when he congratulated an old friend on becoming the state’s Republican candidate for governor.

Charles Davis, dean of the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at UGA, sent the offending tweet shortly after Brian Kemp won the GOP primary Tuesday night, noting that he had been friends with Kemp since childhood and considers him a “nice guy.”

“I went to high school with GOP guv candidate @BrianKempGA. We played YMCA ball from childhood. Politics be damned. He is a nice guy, always was. Kind to a fault,” Davis tweeted. “He’s a friend, always has been, and will be when we’re old(er) and grey(er). That’s how all this should work, people.”

Rather than embracing Davis’ call for civility, liberals quickly denounced him for having something nice to say about a Republican, declaring that Kemp is a “racist” who “spews bigoted and dangerous rhetoric,” and insinuating that Davis must therefore be no different.

“You’re a straight white man. Of course he was nice and kind to you. Racists are generally nice to their own kind,” one user replied. “Why don’t you say what you really mean. Politics be damned. You’d never vote for a black woman and would much rather vote for the white racist.”

“It’s the definition of privilege,” another user remarked caustically. “~the dean~ has the luxury of damning politics because no politician is threatening his rights, safety, or survival; he is willing to empower those who would threaten the same of others on account of the candidate being ‘nice’ to him personally.” 

Or this case from the University of Virginia:

Two historians have quit their roles at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, a think tank focused on presidential history and public policy. They are protesting the one-year fellowship the institution has granted to Marc Short, a former legislative-affairs director for President Trump.

Good riddance. The think tank’s director has resolutely defended his decision to hire Short, and should continue to do so.

To call Short’s critics “hypersensitive” is to surrender to the false notion that there is anything at all here to be sensitive about. Short is not being criticized for anything he actually did, whether in his private capacity or as a member of the Trump administration. Rather, he is being attacked merely for being in the administration — especially during the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville, when the president failed to condemn white supremacists promptly.

As for his own opinion about what transpired in Charlottesville, Short has embraced the Miller Center’s strong statement on the matter; regarding the White House’s reaction, he told Politico that the administration “could have done a better job expressing sympathy for the victims and outrage at those who perpetrated this evil.” That, of course, does not satisfy the Resistance.

Academics and alumni have rushed to sign an online petition urging the university to cancel Short’s fellowship — a petition that says the school should not hire “high-level members of an administration that has directly harmed our community and to this day attacks the institutions vital to a free society.” The resigning professors, meanwhile, fault Short for “associating himself with an administration that shows no respect for truth” and thereby “contribut[ing] to the erosion of civil discourse and democratic norms that are essential to democratic governance and that are central to the mission of the Miller Center.”

The professors also point to Short’s prior positions with the Koch Brothers Freedom Partners fund and the Senate campaign of Oliver North, as well as his new position with a conservative lobbying firm, but this is a distraction: The Miller Center routinely hires “practitioners” who have pursued partisan goals, and currently hosts veterans of assorted presidential administrations, Capitol Hill offices, advocacy groups, and ideologically oriented think tanks. Short’s decades of experience in politics and policy are an asset, not a liability.

The core message is clear: Anyone who has served in the Trump administration, in any role, is not welcome to a fellowship at the Miller Center. Never mind the perspective that a member of the Trump White House could bring to an institution that both seeks to understand the presidency and aims to provide competing viewpoints. And never mind that Short doesn’t face a single accusation rooted in his own behavior. 

So far, the Miller Center is standing firm.

I realize that the Trump phenomenon has injected a new element into the Left-Right dichotomy that has characterized American politics, intellectual life and culture for at least a hundred years, but let us not forget that there is still very much a Left, and that it hates conservatism. Hates it. Wants to see it stamped out, permanently silenced.

The Left shares with that portion of the Right that has not succumbed to the Trump phenomenon a disgust with Trump's obnoxiousness, but leftists are so ignorant about what conservatism actually is that they are conflating him and his populism with conservatism. Put another way, they'd still hate an actually conservative president, it's just that Trump's repulsiveness ratchets up their frenzy level a bit past what it would be with, say, a President Cruz, Walker, Rubio or Fiorina.

It's not hyperbolic to call this a war, and it's being waged upon us by the Left.

And if there's anything actual conservatives do have in common with Trumpists, it's an insistence that the Left will not silence us or shove us off to the margins.

That's why instances such as these still need to be pointed out, at the risk of it becoming trite to do so.

The Left has to be defeated. That's still true, even in this time of complications.

 

All the quick fixes leave lingering problems, some folks aren't even interested in a fix, and the long-term solution is up to other countries

The reason the children-separated-from-parents-at-the-border issue doesn't lend itself to a definitive assessment and recommendation for remedy is that it is one tightly bundled thread in  Gordian knot that has been growing and getting more dense for years.

As we can see, it does lend itself to a lot of grandstanding, tribalistic digging in and faux remedies.

The grandstanding takes some pretty nasty forms, such as what this Lavigne character did:

Yesterday, artist and academic Sam Lavigne scraped and released a database of the names of 1,595 people who list ICE as their employer on LinkedIn. “While I don’t have a precise idea of what should be done with this data set,” he wrote on Medium, “I leave it here with the hope that researchers, journalists and activists will find it useful.”

The full data dump, “including profile photos, previous employment info, schools, and more,” was uploaded to GitHub, the widely used development tool recently purchased by Microsoft for $7.5 billion. For a brief window of time yesterday, the Twitter account @iceHRgov, satirically couched as an account celebrating the hardworking employees of ICE, tweeted out names, photos, and other personal details from the data set.

Or what the Democratic Socialists of America did:

Activists with the D.C. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America crashed Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen's dinner Tuesday evening and appeared to chase her from the building.

According to a Facebook Live video posted to DSA's Facebook page, protesters surrounded Nielsen's corner table at MXDC Cocina Mexicana, located just a few blocks from the White House.

The activists chanted about Nielsen and the Trump administration's zero tolerance policy for illegal immigrants, called the DHS secretary a "fascist pig," and said they couldn't believe she had the "fucking gall" to eat at a Mexican restaurant while the administration is separating illegal immigrant families who seek to enter the country outside of certified ports of entry.

They also called for the complete abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency at DHS. 

The tribalistic digging in was pretty blatant, too, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer refusing to even consider Ted Cruz's proposal for resolving the crisis, saying he wanted to "keep the focus on Trump."

So Trump then enters the fray with his signature ham-handedness, saying he'll sign an executive order to keep families together. One has to wonder if he's given any consideration to the legal problem with this:

This is likely illegal; the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled about the Obama-era policy of keeping children together with parents that it violated the 1997 Flores settlement. 

Then there's this factor: not all of these situations are about real families:

Yes, you heard Chief Border Patrol Agent Rodney Scott say human traffickers are "recycling children to different families" in smuggling people across the border. Prior policy has made children a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card and the human smugglers are using it as such. On the front lines border security agents are called to make determinations like this all day long. And mistakes in either direction can have serious consequences.

We're basically back to what has been the essential question all along: how to deal humanely with the immediate situation at the border while shutting off the overall influx of illegal aliens.

And ultimately, the knife that cuts this Gordian knot is the answer to this question: What would be necessary for Mexicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans and Nicaraguans to be able to say, "My country is a great place to raise a family, start and grow a business, and generally enjoy life. I have no need to scramble up to the US border"?

Good Friday 2018: We're as in need of His saving blood as ever

I may have an official Good Friday post later. I'm sure at some point this weekend I'll have a reflection on the weekend it commemorates.

But right now, one thing is clear: If ever a species needed to be absolved of its folly, it's ours.

I think of one situation characterized by layer upon layer of obnoxious people being ever-more obnoxious. The latest salvo in their spiral of obnoxiousness, however, has a truly chilling aspect to it.

Laura Ingraham, a former conservative who, early on, decided to be a "populist" instead, a slavish devotee of the Very Stable Genius, gratuitously noted that David Hogg, the foul-mouthed grandstander who has it in for the NRA due to his utter ignorance, has had his applications to four schools declined. So Hogg, using his newfound star status, organized a boycott of sponsors of Ingraham's show. And it's been somewhat successful. Some are pulling out. And a precedent is thereby set. Mention some indisputable facts on social media, and you may have your career jeopardized.

Then there is Roseanne Barr, she of the infamous remark that people who eat at Chick-Fil-A deserved to get cancer. She jumped on the VSG train some time back, which is reflected in the first episode of her revived sitcom. Said sitcom thereby becomes a major cultural bellwether, allowing people to wear their tribal badges and preen. Sean Hannity has offered to let her host his show some night.

Then there's Pope Francis, further exacerbating divisions within the Catholic Church with his remark - that apparently has to be taken at face value - that there is no Hell.

In all cases, there is sheepish backtracking occurring. Ingraham has issued a mea culpa. The Vatican has tried to explain away the Pope's remark with a technicality.

And lost in the cacophony is any semblance of truth, reason or love.

Another Moore accuser

The gist of her story:

Nelson is 55 years old (she turns 56 this week), and she and her husband supported President Trump. Her account is that she began working at Old Hickory House, a restaurant off of Highway 431 in Gadsden, Alabama, when she was 15. “I worked there after school as a waitress,” she stated. She continued:

Some nights I worked until 7 p.m. and other nights until 10 p.m. Mr. Roy Moore was a regular customer. He came in almost every night and he would stay until closing time. He sat at the counter in the same seat night after night, and I remember exactly where he sat. Mr. Moore was an adult. He was much older than I was. I knew that he was the district attorney in Etowah County, I didn’t understand what that meant, but I did know that he was an important person and I always treated him with respect. He would pull the ends of my red hair … He would compliment me on my looks, and I would think nothing of it. I was accustomed to men flirting with me, because I was well developed and competed in beauty pageants. I did not attach any significance to Mr. Moore’s behavior towards me, and I did not respond to Mr. Moore’s flirtatious behavior.

According to Nelson, she received a yearbook at school, and she brought it to work on the evening of November 22, 1977; by now, she would have been 16. She says that Moore offered to write a note in her yearbook, which she accepted. “I felt flattered and I said yes,” she stated. Moore then allegedly wrote in her yearbook a flirtatious note: “To a sweeter, more beautiful girl I could not say Merry Christmas. Christmas 1977, Love, Roy Moore, Old Hickory House.”
She says that a week or two later, she was working at the restaurant and her shift ended at 10 p.m.; she expected her boyfriend to pick her up, but he was late. Moore offered to drive her home. Her account then continued, as she broke down in tears:

Mr. Moore was wearing brown hush puppies on his feet. He drove a 2-door car. I believe it was an old car, but I do not recall the model. I got into his car in the passenger seat and he began driving. I thought he would get on the highway but instead he drove to the back of the restaurant. I was not immediately alarmed as there was an exit from the back of the restaurant to the street, and he could drive there to my house without getting on the highway…He stopped the car. He stopped the car and he parked his car in between the dumpster and the back of the restaurant where there were no lights. There it was dark and it was deserted. I was alarmed and I immediately asked him what he was doing. Instead of answering my question, Mr. Moore reached over and began groping me, putting his hands on my breasts. I tried to open my car door to leave, but he reached over and locked it so I could not get out. I tried fighting him off, while yelling at him to stop, but instead of stopping he began squeezing my neck attempting to force my head onto his crotch. I continued to struggle. I was determined that I was not going to allow him to force me to have sex with him. I was terrified. He was also trying to pull my shirt off. I thought that he was going to rape me. I was twisting and struggling and begging him to stop. I had tears running down my face. At some point he gave up. He then looked at me and said, ‘You are a child. I am the District Attorney of Etowah County. If you tell anyone about this, no one will believe you.” He finally allowed me to open the car door and I either fell out or he pushed me out. I was on the ground as he pulled out of the parking area behind the restaurant. The passenger door was still open as he burned rubber pulling away leaving me laying there on the cold concrete in the dark. 

Sounds credible. That would be a lot of detail for someone to fabricate. Plus, she's a Trump voter.

Of course, she did herself no favors hiring the notorious Gloria Allred to represent her, and that fact has already figured in to dismissive remarks about her coming forward.

But consider the recollections of Teresa Jones, who says that "it was common knowledge" among the Etowah County prosecutor's office that Moore dated high-school girls and that "everybody thought it was weird." Then there's the lame way Moore handled himself in the Hannity interview.

The plain fact of the matter, and this is why I haven't posted much about this entire situation, is that no one has any way of knowing at this point how much, if any, of any of the allegations is true. Which leaves us with a lot of tiresome digging in of heels on either side of the want-him-to-win / want-him-to-go-away divide.

There's a really foul element on the want-him-to-win side of the spectrum that hangs its justification for its position on a "greater-good" argument. Ann Coulter says it's important to drag him across the finish line because he'd vote for a wall. (You'll recall that she said she'd be cool with Trump performing abortions in the White House if he followed through on his tough campaign rhetoric about immigration.) David Horowitz says he's essential because it's always essential to defeat Democrats.

But this is just a current crystallization of the boneheaded tribalism that passes for political engagement in post-America. The mindset that spurs Hannity and Schlichter to disparage a great mind and leader like Ben Sasse. The kind that gets Paul Ryan labeled a RINO or even a liberal in comment-thread rants. Every frustration or disappointment with any public figure warrants immediate banishment in the current climate.

We don't know enough to draw etched-in-stone conclusions about Moore, but the LITD position is that it doesn't look good. But to those who consider themselves conservatives who are utterly convinced that Bill Clinton was the Harvey Weinstein of politics and are now taking the Coulter-Horowitz position, and, conversely, those who are utterly convinced that we have irrefutable evidence of a tawdry past replete with actual assault when there is the possibility that he is completely clean are blowing smoke.

But, in 2017 post-America, that's no deterrent from weighing in at fevered decibels.