Dark and light, sitting side by side

This exchange encapsulates the dichotomy that permeates everything in post-American life. On one side is the possibility that Western civilization can survive. On the other is the probability that it won't.



As I've stated before, one of the last sticking points for me before committing to a faith walk was that I saw myself as an alright guy, with room for improvement as is true of anyone, but on balance a decent human being.



And it didn't help that most of the invitations to consider Christianity that I encountered were boneheaded turn-offs. Little pamphlets that thought they were winning me over with messages like, "We deserve Hell and death, but there's good news!" or, "Your works are as filthy rags before the Lord."



Might be just the sales job for some people, but my reaction was, "Save it for somebody else, pal." And I continued to let my Bible collect dust on a shelf.



I was a conservative long before I became a follower of Christ. With regard to Questions of a Spiritual Nature, I went years vaguely deferring to the Buddhist and Taoist teachings that resonated for me during my hippie days. But after my ideological conversion experience, I had to admit to myself that I'd become a secular agnostic. The whole notion of what the nature of ultimate reality is was pretty far down my list of important stuff to think about.



And that is what Louis C.K. reveals about himself in the last few minutes of this clip. He sees himself as a good citizen, taking what he sees as harmless measures to keep sane.



Of course, now we know there was more to the story than that.



And that's what I came to realize about my own life, fraught as it was with foibles and habits that I didn't see as being of much consequence, but that I sure wasn't going to speak about in public, or even in most private conversations.



It got to the point where contradictions and tensions got in the way of my basic engagement with the world. The remaining pieces of the puzzle didn't fit.



Meanwhile, as a conservative, and therefore a defender of the notion that people ought to comport themselves with dignity, ought to prioritize cordiality, and ought to eschew rough, crude language and behavior, I saw the culture I lived in going in exactly the opposite direction. And then I had to ask myself, do I contribute to the rot?



And I started to see that one major difference between the Judeo-Christian worldview and the eastern worldview is that the former requires one to take a stand.



I didn't even know what that meant at first, but just for grins I began cracking open the Bible and even attending church services occasionally. I began to seriously consider the notion that the universe is designed in a particular way, and not another way. Everything from the placement of galaxies to the nature of the human man and the nature of the human woman is manifested according to a blueprint.



There's a law that governs it all, if you will.



Then I started seeing that chaos and misery - in the world, and in my own life - arise from a willful disregard for that law. Then I started seeing that free will, left to its own devices, is going to steer a person to such disregard. Then came a better understanding of grace and all the rest.



But cockiness, of the sort Louis C.K. is displaying here, is deadly. Just deadly. It sets the individual up as his own god, and since one is not capable of creating, or even sustaining, oneself, there's nothing to look forward to except an eternity in complete aloneness, basically death.



It's also interesting that a typical modern viewer of this clip - certainly me - has to work through an initial reaction to the woman as a Pollyanna or even a porcelain doll, cartoonishly virtuous and unacquainted with the messy little corners of human life. It's not until the end of the exchange, when Louis C.K begins insulting her and using crude language that we can see by her unfazed response that she indeed completely understands that messiness, and also knows the way to fit together the broken pieces of life that result from cockiness.



In her humility, she displays a strength that Louis C.K. can't even conceive of.



Which is why people like her don't run into the kind of trouble that Louis C.K. has found himself in of late.



None of us is "just an alright guy or gal." We all need grace, and upon realizing that, there's a humbling effect, the onset of a profound gratitude, and one desires to be an agent of the light rather than the darkness.

Saturday roundup

From the Western-civilization-has-gone-certifiably-mad file:

The New York Post reports the Metropolitan Transit Authority has ordered all subway personnel to refrain from addressing riders as “ladies and gentlemen.”
Instead, staffers have been told they must use gender-neutral words like riders, passengers, and everyone according to a memorandum obtained exclusively by the Post.

It's a new day, so there's a new revelation about a high-powered groper, right? Today it's Rolling Stone founder and publisher Jann Wenner.

Lebanese sources say that country's former prime minister Saad Hariri is being forcibly held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has basically claimed that Lebanon is waging war against it. Now, the actual government of Lebanon is so ethnically and religiously diffuse, by constitutional design, that it would be hard-pressed to unify enough to be at war with anybody. The hostility of which Saudi Arabia is actually complaining comes from the machinations of Hizbollah, which has filled the vacuum wrought by disunity with very clear aims for Lebanon and the Middle East generally. How did such a small, prosperous country become a place of such disarray?

There was a time when David Horowitz was in the pantheon of thinkers and activists I admired most in this world. Then he swallowed the Trump Kool-Aid and I began to have doubts. Then he embraced this position concerning Roy Moore and now he is dead to me.

Trump mars the success of his Asia trip on his third stop

He did so well in Japan and South Korea, and then came this:

During his two day visit to China, where the Communist Party holds a monopoly of power in an iron grip, Trump lauded President Xi Jinping as "a very special man," telling him "my feeling toward you is an incredibly warm one." Ignoring China's military campaign in the South and East China Seas, our president claimed that "the military parade this morning was magnificent, and the world was watching ... Nothing you can see is so beautiful."

On Thursday, Trump and Xi failed to take media questions after delivering press statements. Former President Barack Obama made that same mistake in his first visit to China. Other American presidents have used their China visits as a rare chance to put the Communist Party leader before an adversarial press — something that doesn't occur often in that repressive country.

This followed Trump's bizarre Twitter post congratulating Xi on "his great political victory," which was, in truth, an authoritarian power grab.

Realism requires Trump to form effective working relationships with foreign leaders of all ideologies. This is a fact of realpolitik that should be recognized. But there is a difference between Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the Chinese president. China has very little political freedom and still enforces curbs on religious exercise and large families.

Imagine those Chinese dissidents watching Trump's behavior in China. Many of them probably felt America had abandoned them, and they no one could blame them if they did.

Alliances are crucial, and we need China's help on North Korea. Sometimes, foreign policy requires doing business with unpleasant or evil regimes. But the Shining City on a Hill cannot trumpet support for a tyranny's evil deeds.

This is the behavior of someone in love with the sound of his own voice, someone unacquainted with the great speeches of history's great statesmen, yet thrilled to be sharing their platform and coming up with what, off the top of his head, seems to put him in their company.

Since Trump is used to having his ring kissed, he assumes that an obsequious tone is going to impress Xi and pave the way for "wins" and "tremendous deals."

Here's a tidbit for your consideration, President Squirrel-Hair: China intends to supplant the US as the world's lone superpower. That's the point of all this pageantry you found so "beautiful."

That's perhaps the biggest takeaway from the first year of the Trump era: the guy's mouth and keypad undermine his laudable accomplishments at every turn.

The Roy Moore allegations post

The main factors involved:

• Two of the women were over the Alabama age of consent at the time and one was 14. 
• He pulled down an undisclosed $180,000 salary from the Foundation for Moral Law despite telling a jury in 2011 that he didn't.
• He's been married to his wife for 33 years, has four children and several grandchildren. So far, no one is alleging any infidelity.
• He has been ousted twice as Alabama Chief Justice for unconstitutional stunts.

For starters, let's knock it off with the attempt to justify two of the relationships. A man in his thirties dating girls in their mid-teens is unseemly by pretty much anybody's standards.

His wife is set to file a defamation suit against the Washington Post. I guess it's her prerogative, and she must feel strongly about this. However, it strikes me as an inability to read political tea leaves. Would the Post not bring its A game in terms of lawyers?  She had better have every last duck in a row, and at this point it looks like there are a lot of leads to nail down for the purpose of constructing an airtight refutation of the claims.

Regarding those unconstitutional stunts, in each case, it involved displaying the Ten Commandments on courthouse grounds, and for this reason, LITD finds it particularly disturbing. The last thing this culture needs is grandstanding and hot-dogging over sacred texts. Moore is in the mold of Arizona's Joe Arapaio, an embodiment of yee-hawism that appeals to the worst instincts of certain people who happen to vote right of center. It's no surprise that several Breitbart writers have bent over backwards to make excuses for Moore since this broke.

In a society starved for a convincing assertion of the necessity for a Christian foundation to its institutions, there could be no more counterproductive standard-bearer that Moore. He opens every Republican who utters a word about traditional values up to charges of hypocrisy and boneheadedness.

Count LITD on the Moore-must-go side of the ledger.

Why aren't good results translating into enthusiasm for Trump?

A lot is going right.

Numbers for housing sales, jobs and the stock market are all heading in the right direction, and at a robust clip. There is a new seriousness in foreign policy, most recently encapsulated in Trump's very fine speech in Seoul. He is the first president to outline, in the kind of forum in which he spoke (the South Korean legislature) in full, horrifying detail what a human-rights nightmare and economic basket case North Korea is. He balanced the invitation for the North to reverse course and join the normal-people nations of the world that has been extended by previous presidents with an unprecedentedly stern assertion of resolve to do what's necessary if the North chooses to continue posing a threat. The results of trade and security talks in China are not yet in, and Trump still has stops in the Philippines and Vietnam to make, but given the success of this trip so far and his track record for behaving much better abroad than he dies in Washington and New York, it's likely going to go well.

So why is a consensus shaping up that the off-year election results of Tuesday night signal a renewed zeal on the part of the nation's Left, a zeal the intensity of which may portend seismic shifts in November 2018?

Culture, people.

I can't stress this enough.

There are several levels of cultural factors at play here:

1. Leftists love their identity politics. Virginia now has its first transgendered state representative. The linked article is a CNN piece crowing about that and other demographic firsts it considers significant.
2. This love if identity politics extends to portraying any right-of-center bristling at it as bigotry. The most obvious example in the just-concluded campaigns is the Latinos for Victory pickup truck ad trying to tie Ed Gillespie to fringe exclusionary ideology.
3. The ineptitude of a Republican congress that can't get the "A"CA repealed, can't come up with a simple, uniformly pro-freedom tax reform package, and take the initiative on anything else of significance because there is always some special-interest group that will lobby it to death. There is clearly an absence of the spine requisite for dealing with that.
4. Polls show that educational rot has yielded its results. Significant percentages of millennials think socialism is preferable to a free market.
5. The Trump base will not jettison its delusion that the ill-defined populism it touts is the wave of the future.

I harbor no illusions that the tide is with the principles this blog defends daily. They must be defended nonetheless.

Donald Trump sure as hell isn't going to do it. He's not up to the task. Neither are any of his boot-lickers.

It starts with acknowledging that a sovereign God ultimately rules this universe. Out of that comes a respect for the way he has designed His creation. Out of that ought to come an understanding that freedom is the second most precious gift a human being gets after his or her life. From that, it follows that freedom only thrives and endures if it's exercised for godly purposes.

Tuesday turned out as it did because Trump is correctly perceived as a narcissistic blowhard with no set of guiding principles beyond self-aggrandizement (Ralph Northam won 95 percent of the voters who disapprove of Trump's job performance), because our most influential cultural institutions hate God, and because people have become scared of their own freedom.

Reversing this is the task before us.

Not easy, but essential.

Last night's election results - initial thoughts

Ed Gillespie had wondered if his Establishment bona fides were becoming a hindrance, so in recent weeks he'd been tacking somewhat Trumpward, garnering signs of support from Squirrel-Hair himself. All that came to a screaming halt when. the numbers sealed the deal. S-H doesn't like losers:

Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for. Don’t forget, Republicans won 4 out of 4 House seats, and with the economy doing record numbers, we will continue to win, even bigger than before!

Gillespie was also maligned - with really a really stupid charge of bigotry - by the guy I did vote for in the 2016 presidential race, Evan McMullen:

.@EdWGillespie was one of the good guys, but now he peddles fear and white nationalism. It’s better for VA and America that he not prevail.

Is this the moment where I'm supposed to say, "I regret what I did a year ago"? Um, no. I pretty much knew there was something innately goofy about a guy who would make a Hail-Mary run for the world's most powerful office. The lesson that has been hammered into my brain is that post-America is such a fetid place, beginning with its culture, that it can't have good choices in these situations, generally speaking.

Northam has plenty of progressive cred - hiking the minimum wage to $15, "free" community college - but he stops short of endorsing full-tilt single payer for his state, endorsing a "public option" instead. This is what passes for centrism in today's Democrat party.

No surprise at all in NYC. What kind of opponent would have been able to compete with the machine of a guy like DeBlasio? The surprise would have been if the city had turned en masse away from tyranny and cultural rot.

Ditto New Jersey. When it elects Republicans, they are the weakest of tea: Whitman, Christie.

Can't argue with Ben Shapiro's short take on Twitter:

Unpopular president + off-year election + radically energized opposition enraged they lost last time = getting your ass kicked

Or that of John Podhoretz:

So here's the story: Dems are now winning in exactly the manner that portends GOP disaster. Tonight will hasten GOP retirements and accelerate the portents.

All this further demonstrates the point I've been making for over two years: Donald Trump was going to exacerbate the basic and perennial hate Dems have for conservatism by virtue of his repellent personality, and allow Dems to conflate three things that are, in reality, not related at. all: actual conservatism, yee-haw off-the-cuff populism, and boneheaded bigotry.

If one is concerned about really - and you folks know I don't mean this in the Trumpist sense at all - making America great again, there is no substitute for arguing for actual conservatism. Because it is the grown-up's worldview, it lacks the sex appeal of either collectivism or populism, which makes it a harder sell. But maybe events of the present moment will help distill the thoughts of some formerly admirable folks who bought into the frenzy. But then again, maybe they'll just continue to disparage us as ineffectual dweebs.

As it gets ever later in the day, we shall see what they are really made of.

 

 

Roundup of refutations of the newly released climate assessment

It's pretty well established that The Weather Channel has gone full-tilt leftist. The latest example is an article linked to on the homepage of its website, bearing the throbbingly purple title "Blockbuster Assessment: Humans Likely Responsible for Virtually All Global Warming Since 1950s." It's written by one Bob Henson, who has written a book called "The Thinking Person's Guide to Climate Change.

Here's the damn link. Geez, how I hate linking to anti-freedom-and-advancement dog vomit.

But now comes the part I relish: a round up of explanations of why it's a bunch of hooey.

Real Climate Science:

All that red looks pretty scary. Red is the color of fire, and it isn’t hard to convince some people that their carbon sins will lead to hell fire.

What they aren’t telling is that their graph and map are fake. They have no idea what global temperatures were in 1880, 1900, 1920, 1940, or in fact the present,  because outside of the US there is very little verifiable data.

Physicist Steven Koonin, who was Energy Department undersecretary for science in the Obama administration:

The world’s response to climate changing under natural and human influences is best founded upon a complete portrayal of the science. The U.S. government’s Climate Science Special Report, to be released Friday, does not provide that foundation. Instead, it reinforces alarm with incomplete information and highlights the need for more-rigorous review of climate assessments.

A team of some 30 authors chartered by the U.S. Global Change Research Program began work in spring 2016 on the report, “designed to be an authoritative assessment of the science of climate change.” An early draft was released for public comment in January and reviewed by the National Academies this spring. I, together with thousands of other scientists, had the opportunity to scrutinize and discuss the final draft when it was publicized in August by the New York Times . While much is right in the report, it is misleading in more than a few important places.

Climatologist Patrick Michaels, director of the Cato Institute's Center for the Study of Science:

Under the U.S. Global Change Research Act of 1990, the federal government has been charged with producing large National Climate Assessments (NCA), and today the most recent iteration has arrived. It is typical of these sorts of documents–much about how the future of mankind is doomed to suffer through increasingly erratic weather and other tribulations. It’s also missing a few tidbits of information that convincingly argue that everything in it with regard to upcoming 21st century climate needs to be taken with a mountain of salt.

The world is beset by many real dangers, but being cooked due to human advancement isn't one of them.

The Texas church shooting

Facebook and Twitter are full of exactly what you'd expect. Mockery of prayer. Vague calls for "gun control." Attempts to implicate Republicans when, once again, it seems that this guy had no particular political leanings. Improper use of the word "terrorist," which refers to one who engages in a shocking violent act to make some statement about an agenda he wishes to impose on society. We do know he was a militant atheist, but so far no broader plans to scare people into eschewing religion have surfaced. He also had a bad marital track record, and indeed, the fact that his ex-in-laws attended the church seems to be a prominent factor.

Since he wasn't a terrorist, the kinds of measures we take to address jihad are of no use here. Unless somehow he got a dealer at a gun show to sell him his weapon, no gun laws would have prevented this.

One aspect of reality this, like the recent Las Vegas massacre and indeed even the avalanche of jihadist attacks over the last several decades, makes us squarely face is that this fallen realm is no place to look for total safety. An occasional tragedy, whether of an accidental nature or the result of a human weakness like sin or insanity, is a statistical inevitability.

There does seem to be an uptick in this kind of mass-scale indulgence in carnage, and while profiles of perpetrators present some common traits - lack of social connections, difficulty tending to such connection as are made in a healthy manner, some obsessions with matters tangential to the perpetrator's life - in varying degrees, there's something these beasts have in common with a way larger swath of modern society, a swath that is obviously never going to let loose with a barrage of gunfire. That something is a hardened heart.

And this gets us back to the above-mentioned mockery of prayer. The shorthand for the point I'm making, I suppose, is the trite-yet-spot-on observation that we have removed God from every aspect of post-American life: education, business, sports, artistic endeavors, friendship, romance, even religion to a large degree. Fewer people every day see any reason to engage the world from a place of humility. We defend positions we have formulated with no reference to anything larger than ourselves . Hence, we go looking for remedies for ever-more prevalent ills in yet more arcane policies, regulations and laws.

The snide and bitter pronouncements found in such abundance today to the contrary, prayer is exactly what's needed. Certainly prayers for the comfort of survivors of the shooting victims, but also as big a collective prayer as we can muster for the American people to really and truly turn toward the Author of Meaning with contrition and a yearning for reconciliation filling our hearts to their brims.

I'm not a Mark Cuban fan, but he's exactly right on this one

This Green guy needs to develop the ability to distinguish between entities organized as corporations and the concept of the individual person:

Mark Cuban is taking exception to Draymond Green’s comments about team owners.

Green said last week they should be called chairmen, as not to insinuate that they own someone, in the wake of Texans owner Bob McNair’s comment that the NFL “can’t have inmates running the prison.”

Now, Cuban wants an apology.

“For him to try to turn it into something it’s not is wrong,” the Mavericks owner told ESPN. “He owes the NBA an apology. I think he does, because to try to create some connotation that owning equity in a company that you busted your ass for is the equivalent of ownership in terms of people, that’s just wrong. That’s just wrong in every which way.”

Green was one of many athletes who took to social media to express anger regarding McNair’s comment, calling it “Donald Sterling-esque” as part of a longer Instagram post.

“For starters, let’s stop using the word owner and maybe use the word Chairman,” Green wrote. “To be owned by someone just sets a bad precedent to start. It sets the wrong tone. It gives one the wrong mindset.”

Look here, Mr. Identity Politics Activist (Green), are you not able to make fairly routine distinctions? Yes, McNair's analogy was ill-conceived. He obviously came up with it off the cuff and failed to think about how those keenly attuned to the issue of incarceration rates by race (even though those so attuned might want to look at how that's a reflection of the actual rate for various crimes by race as well) might automatically take it as a "trigger." But to leap from that to a suggestion the the term "owner" be jettisoned, even though it refers to a different kind of entity from a legally-defined "person" is to get the sloppy-semantics camel's head inside the tent, leading to its infection of all kinds of situations.

This is so stupid. Anyone who owns the majority of stock in a business of any size is called the owner, on that person's business card, in reportage about that person, and in general conversation. There has to be a designated date by which we're done with trotting out the legacy-of-slavery card as an excuse to radically change the usage of our common language.

Good on ya, Mark. It will be interesting to see what kind of response you get.

 

The continuing shift in Middle Eastern dynamics

Saudi Arabia is front and center among the players of interest at the moment. The crown prince is shaking things up in un precedented ways, and seems unconstrained by family ties:

Saudi Arabia’s future king has tightened his grip on power through an anti-corruption purge by arresting royals, ministers and investors including billionaire Alwaleed bin Talal who is one of the kingdom’s most prominent businessmen.

Prince Alwaleed, a nephew of the king and owner of investment firm Kingdom Holding 4280.SE, invests in firms such as Citigroup (C.N) and Twitter (TWTR.N). He was among 11 princes, four ministers and tens of former ministers detained, three senior officials told Reuters on Sunday. 

The purge against the kingdom’s political and business elite also targeted the head of the National Guard Prince Miteb bin Abdullah who was detained and replaced as minister of the powerful National Guard by Prince Khaled bin Ayyaf. 

News of the purge came early on Sunday after King Salman decreed the creation of an anti-corruption committee chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, his 32-year-old favorite son who has amassed power since rising from obscurity three years ago.

A particularly jarring cultural shift is in the works as well. As of next June, Saudi women will have the right to drive automobiles.


Then there's the ballistic missile intercepted over Riyadh.  The Houthis, which at one time might have been properly called a Yemeni rebel group, but which now control the portion of Yemen that includes the capital Sanaa, have forthrightly claimed responsibility:

"We previously warned that capitals of countries attacking Yemen will not be safe from our ballistic missiles," Houthi spokesman Mohammed AbdulSalam said. "Today's missile attack comes in response to Saudi killing innocent Yemeni civilians."

The Houthis like to downplay ties to Iran, but there is proof that such ties exist and are deadly:

Iran is sending advanced weapons and military advisers to Yemen’s rebel Houthi movement, stepping up support for its Shi‘ite ally in a civil war whose outcome could sway the balance of power in the Middle East, regional and Western sources say.

Iran’s enemy Saudi Arabia is leading a Sunni Arab coalition fighting the Houthis in the impoverished state on the tip of the Arabian peninsula - part of the same regional power struggle that is fuelling the war in Syria. 

Sources with knowledge of the military movements, who declined to be identified, said that in recent months Iran has taken a greater role in the two-year-old conflict by stepping up arms supplies and other support. This mirrors the strategy it has used to support its Lebanese ally Hezbollah in Syria. 

Lebanese prime minister Saad al-Hariri, who comes from a prominent family in that country's politics (his father was assassinated via a bombing), is stepping down to avoid being a casualty in Iranian proxy activity:

Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri resigned on Saturday, saying he believed there was an assassination plot against him and accusing Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah of sowing strife in the Arab world.

His resignation, a big surprise to Beirut’s political establishment, brought down the coalition government and plunged Lebanon into a new political crisis. 

It thrust Lebanon into the front line of a regional competition between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shi‘ite Iran that has also buffeted Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Bahrain. A Saudi government minister said Hariri was in Riyadh to ensure his safety. 

Hariri, who is closely allied with Saudi Arabia, alleged in a broadcast from an undisclosed location that Hezbollah was “directing weapons” at Yemenis, Syrians and Lebanese.

And US policy in Iraq has not adequately considered the marginalization of the Kurds, the world's biggest ethnic group without its own nation-state, and how it serves Iran's hegemonic aims in its neighboring country:

The success of Trump’s strategy for containing Iran now depends entirely on an Iraqi government and military that is closely allied with Iran. In a day, the same Iraqi government that already sent forces to fight for Assad can close the Fishkhabour crossing and thus facilitate Assad’s victory against the most substantial portion of Syrian territory not under his control. The Kurdistan Region in Iraq—much diminished in territory and economic resources, and no longer in control of its borders—does not now have the capacity to counter Baghdad or Tehran. If the US objects to Iraq’s pro-Iran policies, the Iraqis always have the option of asking the US to leave. But that is not in Iran’s interest right now. Speaking as an American, the ousted governor of Kirkuk Najmaldin Karim observed: “The US has already spent trillions to accomplish Iran’s objectives in Iraq. As long as we keep doing it, why would Iran want us to leave?”

So it seems that a Saudi Arabia that sees the benefit of loosening its internal strictures and looking beyond its oil for opportunities for long-term business viability, is one pole of the region's balance of power, and Iran, which remains bent on subjugating as much of the Middle East as possible, so as to rid it of anything even faintly smacking of Western influence, is the other.

These motivations should be at the forefront of US strategic thinking. The second pole mentioned above is fiercely determined to impose its dehumanizing ideology wherever it can. That should give America a strong indication as to what kinds of signs of encouragement to particular players in the region are going to further its interests.

 

 

Saturday roundup

Joseph Epstein has long been one of my idols. His short stories, mostly at Commentary, are unfailingly first-rate. And his seminal 2004 essay for The Weekly Standard, "The Perpetual Adolescent," is something I refer to here at LITD with some frequency. His latest TWS piece is a reminiscence of his acquaintance through the years with the recently disgraced Leon Wieseltier (yet another sexual harasser), who for years was the back-of-the-book editor at The New Republic. Anyone following Wieseltier's career can see that he was a moral preener, a social climber and an aspirant to the most rarified circles of intellectual a activity. Epstein's recounting of his encounters with him over the years, starting with a fawning letter Wieseltier wrote to Epstein in 1977, provides telling details pointing the way to the denouement that is sure to be Weiseltier's irreversible undoing.

Let me state once again a basic sentiment that I have opportunity to assert from time to time: I can't stand Sean Hannity, and that's a position that predates his role as shill for Trump. I've always thought he was the worst polemicist in the realm of broadcast punditry. That said, this film he's had a hand in producing, Let There Be Light, has received favorable views from a few writers I respect to a fair degree. They promised that it was not just one more cornball, heavy-handed exercise in proselytizing. I had my doubts, based on the trailer, and on these reviewers' dropping of hints about the plot contour. Now comes a review in The New Yorker by Dan Peipenbring that while unsurprisingly skewed by identity politics and a touch of Acelia Corridor smugness, gives the fullest account I've seen of the actual storyline, and confirms for me that those other reviews' assurances that it was not just one more cornball, heavy-handed exercise in proselytizing were pretty much wishful thinking. Sorry, fellow righties and Christians, but this ain't the foray into popular culture that is going to give us the solid foothold.

James Rosen is one of those people I see on television who exude cool-guy status whatever they're talking about. (He's the FNC White House correspondent.) The more I read of his written stuff, mostly for NRO (he recently wrote a great piece about the thrill, as a Beatles fan who takes his adulation to scholarly levels, of going to places in London of historical significance, such as the EMI Abbey Road studios), the more my impression is confirmed. Today, he reviews Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith and Life Well-Lived, compiled by the late SCOTUS justice's son and a collaborator. Rosen is just the guy to do such a review. His deep appreciation for those he admires - the Beatles, William F. Buckley - is what allows for his own humanity to grace his examination of his subjects. This one is your must-read for today.

Good on ya, Bob: House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte is the one guy left in the public-policy realm with requisite influence who is willing to call the Renewable Fuel Standard (ethanol subsidies) what it is - government playing favorites in the marketplace and thereby driving up the cost of a whole chain of goods and services. Scott Pruitt, you're so good at so much in this area. Please show that kind of courage here and get on board.

The GOP tax plan: long on wonkery and attempts to please particular groups, short on being driven by the basic principle of freedom

I'm pretty much in the camp of Erick Erickson at The Resurgent in it:

 It is not very bold. I was really expecting more. Yes, I was expecting more even from this group of Republicans. I’d like to say I support it. I very much like the framework the House GOP released and I think even this heads in the right direction. But my initial impression is it kinda sucks and, to be honest, I was going to write here that I still think it should pass despite thinking it kinda sucks. Then I read this. It makes me wonder what else is in the legislation. And, honestly, I hate the idea of this “bubble tax.” So while I’d like to support it and intended to support it here, the article on the “bubble tax” makes me think I need to wait and see what other fine points are in the legislation. Let’s face it, a plan may be great, but the legislation is what matters.

The legislation does not dramatically simplify the tax code. In fact, in some areas it complicates it. It does not boldly shake up tax dynamics in the country. It pulls punches, so to speak, leaving a lot on the table. I think people need to understand that this actually has far less to do with House Republicans and far more to do with Senate Republicans. The House GOP had to pass legislation that can get 50 Senators to support it. The Senate GOP talks a good game, but too few of them really care to help fix our failing tax system.

The linked "this" to which he refers is this Politico article . The "bubble" (Hey, I have a suggestion. Any legislation that involves codification of goofy terms like "tax bubble" ought to be deemed way too convoluted from the get-go. What say?) is an attempt to pursue the aim of deficit reduction while offering advantages to middle-class taxpayers:

Thanks to a quirky proposed surcharge, Americans who earn more than $1 million in taxable income would trigger an extra 6 percent tax on the next $200,000 they earn—a complicated change that effectively creates a new, unannounced tax bracket of 45.6 percent.

It hasn’t been advertised by Republicans, who have described their plan as maintaining the current top tax rate of 39.6 percent. And it goes against decades of GOP orthodoxy that raising taxes on the rich discourages work and reduces economic growth. Reached by phone, Steve Moore, a tax expert at The Heritage Foundation, said the surcharge was news to him. “I was just in a briefing with the White House on this,” he said. “They didn’t mention that. It seems kind of bizarre to me.”

The new rate stems from a provision in the bill intended to help the government recover, from the very wealthy, some of the benefits that lower-income taxpayers enjoy. Under the House GOP plan, all individuals—no matter whether they earn $35,000, $150,000 or $10 million—would pay the lowest rate, 12 percent, on their first $45,000 in taxable income. That’s a normal feature of current American tax law. But in the new plan, House Republicans want to claw back some of that benefit for individuals who earn more than $1 million, or couples earning more than $1.2 million.

Here’s how it would work: After the first $1 million in taxable income, the government would impose a 6 percent surcharge on every dollar earned, until it made up for the tax benefits that the rich receive from the low tax rate on that first $45,000. That surcharge remains until the government has clawed back the full $12,420, which would occur at about $1.2 million in taxable income. At that point, the surcharge disappears and the top tax rate drops back to 39.6 percent. This type of tax is sometimes called a “bubble tax,” because the marginal tax rate effectively bubbles up for a brief period before falling back to a lower level.

According to POLITICO’s calculation, the surcharge could raise more than $50 billion over a decade—money that will help the GOP meet the $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction and required to balance out tax cuts elsewhere. Balancing out those costs means that the bill can pass through budget reconciliation, and Senate Democrats can’t filibuster the bill.

Such sleight-of-hand measures are "necessary" because  no one inside the Beltway, and far too few out in the rest of post-America, are willing to squarely face the glaring fact that annual deficits, as well as the $20 trillion debt, are due to a view of government at odds with the Madisonian vision that held sway until the advent of the Progressives. And the nation is in denial that the main manifestation of unsustainable overreach is the big "entitlements." They remain third rails.

The truly conservative way to deal with tax and budget policy would have a two-fold effect: It would let people keep all of what is theirs save for what's necessary for government to fulfill its basic Constitutional functions, and it would steer the public's thinking away from a view that government ought to be in the business of addressing the universal conditions of human life - namely, that people get sick and grow old.

And now I shall run the risk of coming across as a crank by mentioning the idea that we could go back to a pre-1913 way of raising government revenue. You know, letting people keep the entirety of money that they make.

In any event, like so much that Capitol Hill Pubs want us to get excited about, this plan is underwhelming.

Why did Donna Brazile tell tales out of school?

The Politico piece, excerpted from her new book Hacked, basically lets the modern Democratic Party have it between the eyes. She bad-mouths Obama, Clinton and Wasserman-Schultz like no Republican has, equipped as she is with inside scoops.

Her tone is kind of hard to swallow. Knowing her history, going clear back to the Mondale campaign of 1984, and her prominent role in the 2000 Gore campaign, this "I-stepped-into-the-DNC-leadership-role-and-became-aghast-at-what-I-saw" narrative doesn't quite ring true.

But the details she provides on how Obama saddled the DNC with $24 million in debt, how Clinton kept nearly all contributions for herself, leaving down-ballot candidates with meager resources, and how Wasserman-Schultz let consultants come on board for cushy remuneration are not the stuff of someone interested in repairing frayed relationships.

The question of why she's doing this looms. I don't think she's having a conversion experience to Edmund Burke conservatism. She no doubt would still like to see statism prevail. And she has to know that her provision of debate questions ahead of time to Clinton when she was on the CNN panel is still fresh in the public's mind, which makes her stance of noble manager above the fray ring a bit hollow.

In any event, she has aired Dem dirty laundry at a time of particular weakness. There's not a bench to speak of for the 2020 presidential go-round, save for Bernie Sanders, the geriatric socialist who comes off as the only laudable figure in her story.

Maybe the two of them have plans to start a new party.

Wednesday roundup

How advanced is the civilizational rot? Capitulating to a petition circulated among the snot-nosed, ingrate, West-hating cretins enrolled in it, Yale's English department will no longer require its students to study Shakespeare and John Donne.

This is of a piece with a trend noticed and well-articulated by a couple of the actual scholars remaining at post-America's playpens campuses:

Last year, students at Stanford shot down peers who petitioned to have a Western history survey class reinstated as a basic requirement. The petitioning students cited a Stanford law professor who reported his so-called “best students in the country” are basically know-nothings:

I have taught law students for more than thirty years. In recent years I have noticed that many students have little or no familiarity with the political, intellectual and cultural history that shaped the American legal tradition. I’ve encountered students who have never heard of Hobbes and Locke, do not know the causes of the American Revolution, are unfamiliar with the Lincoln-Douglas debates, haven’t a clue about Progressivism or the New Deal, don’t know what separates Protestants and Catholics, and have only the vaguest sense what race relations were like before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Recently, Camille Paglia, no conservative nor traditionalist, reported the same about her students at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, noting that this kind of brain rot has trickled down into K-12 schools courtesy of teachers’ university mal-educations:

What has happened is these young people now getting to college have no sense of history of any kind. No sense of history. No world geography. No sense of the violence and the barbarities of history. So, they think that the whole world has always been like this, a kind of nice, comfortable world where you can go to the store and get orange juice and milk, and you can turn on the water and the hot water comes out. They have no sense whatever of destruction, of the great civilizations that rose and fell, and so on, and how arrogant people get when they’re in a comfortable civilization, etc. So they now are being taught to look around them to see defects in America – which is the freest country in the history of the world – and to feel that somehow America is the source of all evil in the universe, and it’s because they’ve never been exposed to the actual evil of the history of humanity. They know nothing!

NFL knee-taking has hurt Papa John's pizza sales. 

Another filmmaker, Brett Ratner, is accused by six women of sexual harassment. And another guy from the journalism world. Michael Oreskes, NPR senior Vice President for news, and formerly of AP and the New York Times. And apparently Ratner's thing was, like it was for Weinstein, having a captive audience when wanking.

Three Dem Senators did the right thing:

This morning, the Senate confirmed the nomination of Notre Dame Law professor Amy Barrett as a U.S. Circuit Judge for the Seventh Circuit. The vote was 55-43. 

Three Democrats — Sen. Joe Donnelly, Sen. Tim Kaine, and Sen. Joe Manchin — broke ranks and voted to confirm Barrett. They thus rejected the suggestion by Sen. Dianne Feinstein and others on the Senate Judiciary Committee that Barrett is too Catholic to be an appellate judge. 

You'll recall that, at Barrett's hearing, Feinstein told the professor that she sensed that "the dogma lives loudly within you." Is that anything like witnessing to your faith?

Talk about being ate up with jihad fervor: Sayfullo Saipov, the New York bike-path van driver, bragged to police from his hospital bed that he was pleased with what he'd done.

It took a fresh jihadist attack for a lie-spewing identity-politics group to take down its perilously incendiary political ad

Astute observer of the current scene that you, as a LITD reader, are, you know about the Latino Victory ad that ran on Virginia television in this final stretch of that state's gubernatorial race. The four carefully selected-by-demographic children - Latino, Asian, Muslim and black (four cartoonishly broad categories intended only to be juxtaposed against an equally cartoonishly broad category of "white") - trying to outrun a pickup truck:

The truck is festooned with a giant Confederate Flag, a “Don’t Tread on Me” license plate, and a prominent “Gillespie for Governor” bumper sticker. It runs the children into a dead end, its lights washing out their terrified faces. The children wake up in their beds. We then flash to video of the Charlottesville white-supremacist march, as a voice asks, “Is this what Donald Trump and Ed Gillespie mean by the American dream?”

One need not be a genius to see that the intent was to put Gillespie in a when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife position, a corner of accusation from which he could not escape.

But in the aftermath of yesterday's bike-path jihadist attack in New York, the group has seen fit to stop running it.


Gotcha-level gloating is not what's called for here. Yes, there's rich irony aplenty in the fact that leftist trot out the not-all-Muslims-are-jihadists card whenever the discussion turns to the Western world's peril. Yes, there are signs of slippage in minority support for the Democratic candidate Ralph Northam.

But I think the more appropriate response is a sigh of relief that decency won a victory in this culture-war battle.

How much more gratuitous provocation can our brittle society stand?

Let's send up a prayer that somehow those who would ratchet up the tension ever-further can be appealed to.

No one is expecting a completely healthy society five minutes from now. But stopping the toxicity would be a start in the direction of safety and order, not to mention goodwill and the fostering of civic bonds.

Essential facts surrounding the Balfour Declaration and subsequent developments

Foundation for the Defense of Democracies president Clifford May lays out some indisputable truths surrounding the letter British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour sent to his friend Lord Rothschild on November 2, 1917, in which he said Britain ought to take the lead in reestablishing the ancient homeland of the Jews as their modern nation-state.

too often forgotten or ignored is the fact that it was thanks to Britain and the other Allied Powers that Arab nation-states rose from the Ottoman ashes. Among them: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Yemen.

A related anniversary: On Nov. 29, it will be 70 years since the United Nations recommended partitioning western Palestine (the east became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan) into two independent states, one Arab and one Jewish. Note: In that era, both Arabs and Jews were equally “Palestinian.”

Jewish leaders accepted partition. Arab leaders rejected it. In May 1948, upon termination of the British mandate, those Jewish leaders declared independence and won recognition from the U.S., the Soviet Union and other U.N. members.

Five Arab nations launched what became known as the First Arab-Israeli War. The Arab League’s secretary-general, Azzam Pasha, promised it would be “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”

But the Jews, who had nowhere else to go and the memory of the Holocaust fresh in their minds, managed to hold their ground. In February 1949 an armistice was declared. After that, Arab and Muslim nations might have granted their own Jewish communities basic rights and freedoms. They could then have made the case that the Jewish state was superfluous. Instead and vindictively, those Arab and Muslim governments more harshly persecuted their Jewish subjects, confiscating their properties and, before long, driving them out.

More than 800,000 Jews ended up fleeing Arab and Muslim countries. A majority were resettled in Israel where, over time, they strengthened the nation. Today, roughly half of all Israelis are descendants of Jews from the broader Middle East — Morocco to Iraq (Baghdad was close to a third Jewish as recently as 1945) to Afghanistan. Slightly fewer Palestinians, an estimated 700,000, fled Israel, many going to Arab countries that chose not to assimilate or even integrate them.

A third anniversary: In 1967, Egypt, Syria and Jordan waged another war intended to drive the Jews into the sea. The Israelis not only survived, they seized Gaza from Egypt, and the West Bank (earlier known as Judea and Samaria) from Jordan. Over the years since, the possibility of transforming these territories into an independent Palestinian state — the “two-state solution” — has been the basis for one peace plan after another.

None has succeeded.

And it's not going to until those who self-describe as Palestinians give up hatred of the Jews in their hearts and publicly acknowledge Israel's right to exist, with Jerusalem as its eternal capital.

There is nothing to keep Arabs who self-describe as Palestinians from having their own prosperous and peace-enjoying nation state except the poison in their own hearts.