The banned-words-at-the-CDC meme falls apart

Oopsie:

If you're just joining this flap, here's a short recap: Late last week, it was reported that Trump administration officials at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had sought to "ban" words they deemed to be controversial, including "transgender" and "fetus."  This sparked an immediate outcry, as Orwellian censorship rarely plays well with the American people.  The Trump-hostile media were in full throat, pounding the table against this anti-science outrage.  The original story("forbidden words") appeared in the Washington Post, then spread like wildfire.  Here is CNN's framing of it:

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the very agency tasked with saving and protecting the lives of the most vulnerable, are now under order by the Trump administration to stop using words including "vulnerable" in 2018 budget documents, according to The Washington Post.  In a 90-minute briefing on Thursday, policy analysts at the nation's leading public health institute were presented with the menu of seven banned words, an analyst told the paper. On the list: "diversity," "fetus," "transgender," "vulnerable," "entitlement," "science-based" and "evidence-based."...As news of the word ban spreads at the CDC, the analyst expects growing backlash. "Our subject matter experts will not lay down quietly," the unnamed source said. "This hasn't trickled down to them yet."

Prominent Democrats and leftists quickly piled on, and just a few hours ago, the Baltimore Sun promulgated the story in an op/ed. 

And then, of course, it was showing up in posts from every Freedom-Hater you're Facebook friends with.

But, you see, as you figured, a story that weird-sounding on the surface had more to it:

Writing at National Review, former Bush administration official Yuval Levin did some digging and has now revealed the perfect punchline for this sadly-typical episode of journalistic laziness and confirmation bias.  The anti-Trump narrative was "too good to check," then disintegrated completely when someone finally bothered to check:

These [terms] are “avoid when possible” terms in a style guide specifically intended for budget documents. They’re not words that are banned in the department.  Second, these three terms to avoid apparently came up in the course of a meeting among career officials at the CDC late last week about preparing next year’s congressional-justification documents. That discussion then led to a conversation in the meeting about other terms that might be best avoided...This meeting did not involve any political appointees, and apparently the conversation about terms beyond “diversity,” “entitlements,” and “vulnerable” was not about terms that anyone in the department had said should be avoided but about terms that it might be wise to avoid so as not to raise red flags among Republicans in Congress.   In other words, what happened regarding these other terms (“transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based,” and “science-based”) was not that retrograde Republicans ordered career CDC officials not to use these terms but that career CDC officials assumed retrograde Republicans would be triggered by such words and, in an effort to avoid having such Republicans cut their budgets, reasoned they might be best avoided.

Amazing: The "banned" words were never banned, and were dreamed up as part of a list of suggested guidelines for budget documents by career (non-Trump-appointed) bureaucrats who were trying to avoid 'triggering' Congressional Republicans through the inclusion of those terms.  So this entire freakout was based on comprehensively fake news -- yet it's virtually guaranteed that multiple days of dramatic news stories and breathless social media posts left a widespread and false impression on millions of news consumers.  Many Americans do not trust the press for precisely this reason, and Trump-hostile journalists keep soiling their own reputations by reporting and repeating overwrought or totally inaccurate stories that happen to align with their pre-existing biases.

Not a top-200 story for 2017, but at least it won't be biting our ankles as next year's midterm election cycle gets underway.

 

How badly did Barack Obama want to appease our mortal enemy?

The patty-cake with Iran JCPOA entered into by the P5+1, under the leadership of Secretary Global-Test and Wendy Sherman of the post-American State Department, is perhaps the most reckless agreement ever signed by this nation. It's now so firmly entrenched that there's no way to undo all the business deals entered into by companies in P5+1 countries. But one day, sooner not later, Iran is going to pose as big a threat as North Korea currently poses.

But so hot were Global-Test, Sherman, and the Most Equal Comrade to get it inked - and declare if official, even though it should have been a treaty and thereby been ratified by Congress - that it began upping our danger level even before it was a done deal:

Before Barack Obama decided to pursue the nuclear deal with Iran, the DEA had a major operation called Project Cassandra. This operation had identified Hezbollah as a major supplier of cocaine to the US and other countries, along with its usual terrorist activities on behalf of its sponsors in Tehran. The DEA and FBI had built criminal cases against major players in Hezbollah’s drug and arms networks, succeeding in getting sealed indictments and finding witnesses for prosecution.

And then the Obama administration stepped in to drain it of all resources, just to protect its deal with Iran:

One Obama-era Treasury official, Katherine Bauer, in little-noticed written testimony presented last February to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, acknowledged that “under the Obama administration … these [Hezbollah-related] investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.”

As a result, some Hezbollah operatives were not pursued via arrests, indictments, or Treasury designations that would have blocked their access to U.S. financial markets, according to Bauer, a career Treasury official, who served briefly in its Office of Terrorist Financing as a senior policy adviser for Iran before leaving in late 2015. And other “Hezbollah facilitators” arrested in France, Colombia, Lithuania have not been extradited — or indicted — in the U.S., she wrote. …

Asher, for one, said Obama administration officials expressed concerns to him about alienating Tehran before, during and after the Iran nuclear deal negotiations. This was, he said, part of an effort to “defang, defund and undermine the investigations that were involving Iran and Hezbollah,” he said.

“The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away,” Asher said. “So much of the capability, whether it was special operations, whether it was law enforcement, whether it was [Treasury] designations — even the capacity, the personnel assigned to this mission — it was assiduously drained, almost to the last drop, by the end of the Obama administration.”

Cassandra turned out to be an ironic code name for the operation. In Greek mythology, Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam of Troy, was doomed to utter accurate prophecies that went unbelieved by all who heard them.

This years-long effort to identify Hezbollah’s drug and arms operations and to find their financial resources ended up going the way of Cassandra’s prophecies, too — being utterly ignored despite their truth. (In fact, the project name derived specifically, if indirectly, from this myth.)
Not all of these cases involved international operations, either. The DEA and FBI found Hezbollah operations in the US, and yet the Department of Justice refused to prosecute the cases:

In Philadelphia, the FBI-led task force had spent two years bolstering its case claiming that Safieddine had overseen an effort to purchase 1,200 military-grade assault rifles bound for Lebanon, with the help of Kelly and the special narcoterrorism prosecutors in New York.

Now, they had two key eyewitnesses. One would identify Safieddine as the Hezbollah official sitting behind a smoked-glass barricade who approved the assault weapons deal. And an agent and prosecutor had flown to a remote Asian hotel and spent four days persuading another eyewitness to testify about Safieddine’s role in an even bigger weapons and drugs conspiracy, multiple former law enforcement officials confirmed to POLITICO.

Convinced they had a strong case, the New York prosecutors sent a formal prosecution request to senior Justice Department lawyers in Washington, as required in such high-profile cases. The Justice Department rejected it, and the FBI and DEA agents were never told why, those former officials said.

According to Meyer’s sources, Hezbollah has a lot of tentacles in the US, including in rental car companies on the legal side, and a booming cocaine smuggling and distribution business on the illegal side. It should have been easy to pursue those cases in US courts. And yet the Obama administration wanted nothing to do with cutting off Hezbollah’s economic underpinnings in the US, even while listing them as a terrorist organization. 

This is scurrilous in the extreme. So mad with the desire to have a legacy as visionary usherers-in of a golden era of international harmony were these preening narcissists that they let Iran's worldwide jihad network prosper and expand.

Much of the damage the previous administration did to post-America is now being reversed, but this is one genie it will be daunting at best to put back in the bottle.

Will any of these people ever be held to account?

A humbling revelation in a plate-lunch diner

Pockets of actual America still exist within the desolate landscape of post-America. That was my big takeaway from what I'd anticipated was going to be a routine business conversation a while ago.

It's just a few minutes after noon, and I've already been blessed immeasurably today.

I write for a local quarterly business magazine. When I get assignments from my editor, I generally pop into the establishment to be profiled, introduce myself, find out who I'll want to interview, and leave a card.

That was the plan this morning when I went to Shorty's. It's a short-order lunch place. It was founded in 1930 and has a rich history. It's basically served a blue-collar clientele over the years - shop-floor people from nearby factories, landscaping crews and construction people. It's famous for its take on the classic Hoosier sandwich, the breaded tenderloin.

I wasn't really overly fired up about the assignment. I knew it was under new ownership, but I figured it was still the kind of sleepy, down-home eatery that it had always been.

Nothing in my first few minutes occurred that would have changed my perception. Well, that's not entirely true. The three people operating the place - the guy on the line plating orders up, the cash register gal, and the lady who was overseeing everything  - were far more ebullient than anybody I'd ever seen at Shorty's before.

I explained the nature of my business, and the lady said, "Here, let me text the owners. I'm sure they'll come by in a few minutes." Then she insisted I have a tenderloin - on the house. (It was magnificent, by the way.)

The owners arrived, and between their attire and their general bearing, it was obvious they were introducing a new vibe to Shorty's. The man was wearing a suit sans jacket - a really nice suit. His wife had on a crisply professional business dress. Beaming smiles, high energy.

Here's the short - excuse the pun - version, and I'll try to keep this from turning into a rough draft for what I'm going to write for the magazine. He's from Georgia, she's from Louisiana. He moved to our city out of high school because of family connections. Worked at Wendy's, then studied drafting and worked in a couple of industrial settings. Then went to work for AT&T, which led to starting a cell-phone-repair shop. She is an RN in an Indianapolis hospital. They heard Shorty's was for sale, and had a look.

They have a blended family, eight kids between them, all still under their roof - although one is about ready to start college. The entire family - including some cousins - helped out with remodeling when they made the purchase. Hanging drywall, framing, painting.

They spoke of the sense of stewardship they felt once they bought it, how it motivated them to put in long hours.

Since they bought it, they've added evening hours, as well as some Louisiana touches to the menu.

I hesitated to make note of this demographic fact, but it reinforces how special the whole story is. The  owner-couple is black, and all the employees are white (save the line guy, who is a cousin). The customers, who began pouring in as the time got closer to noon, and who are to a considerable degree old Shorty's regulars, were all white as well. But commerce and camaraderie are the order of the day. The new owners have definitely embarked on the new chapter in Shorty's history with aplomb.

They graciously sat for the entire interview right there and then. I'd expected to merely set up something for later. (The husband did excuse himself to help out on the line for a bit.)

I came away feeling a rekindled sense of hope for America. In a time so blighted by cynicism, bitterness, shrill invective, identity politics, and lust and its destructive aftereffects, here was a real-life portrait in loyalty, entrepreneurial vision, hard but joyful work, and plain decency, an inspiration to everyone stepping in.

An experience like that braces one. At least for the rest of today, I can't allow myself to lapse into cynicism, anxiety or confusion. It would dishonor what I'd been privileged to witness. I must hope. I must act on my inspirations. I must look for the light in my fellow human being's eye.

Thanks to the crew at Shorty's. And thanks to Him for creating them.

On the policy level, 2017's been a year of moving the needle - in a very good direction

No, it doesn't give LITD a case of cognitive dissonance to continue to point out the ways in which Donald Trump is objectionable and unlikeable and simultaneously point out that remarkable strides have been taken on myriad fronts in our country this year - strides that surely look a lot like those we'd probably have seen with an actual conservative as president.

You see, as the hackneyed saying goes, conservatives deal in facts, not feelings. There's fact one from the preceding paragraph, and there's fact two. It is entirely possible to acknowledge both.

Andrew Klavan at PJ Media provides a paragraph-sized summary of what's been accomplished:

After a year of Trump, the economy is in high gear, stocks are up, unemployment is down, energy production is up, business expansion is up and so on; ISIS — which took more than 23,000 square miles of territory after Obama left Iraq and refused to intervene in Syria — is now in control of a Port-o-San and a book of matches; 19 constitutionalist judges have been appointed and 40 more nominated; the biggest regulatory rollback in American history has been launched (boring but yugely important); the rule of law has been re-established at the border; we're out of the absurd and costly Paris Accord; net neutrality, the most cleverly named government power grab ever, is gone; our foreign policy is righted and revitalized; and a mainstream news media that had become little more than the information arm of the Democratic Party is in self-destructive disarray. If the tax bill passes before Christmas, it will cap an unbelievable string of conservative successes.

How can a conservative not be delighted with that?

Now, with regard to fact number one - Trump's personal repulsiveness and outsized ego - it has led to far more White House staff chaos than we should have see. The brief stint of Anthony Scaramucci encapsulates that. Byron York at The Washington Examiner says that for big strides to continue in 2018, attention to personnel is going to be paramount. Steady hands and mature characters are going to have to increase their influence.

Of course, there were those who were shills for DJT from the outset, and we've named them here many times - to enumerate Hannity, Ingraham serves as sufficient shorthand - and then there were those who had strong misgivings about him, and tried, through their activity as pundits to persuade the voting public to choose another course as long as that was possible, but then, once he was elected, started to opine, "You know, what? I'm actually starting to like the guy, rough edges and all." Think Schlichter and Bookworm. To reiterate the LITD position on those folks, they've made it hard to ever respect and admire them the way we had previously.

Then there is the I-hate-Trump-so-much-I'll-change-positions-on-policy-matters-if-I-have-to-in-order-to-adhere-to-that-one-constant camp, most notably exemplified by Jennifer Rubin.

Of course, the entire left side of the spectrum is characterized by this kind of blind hatred, but it doesn't require any change of policy position on their part. That's because they have conflated Trumpism with conservatism, and since much of what's been achieved is laudable by conservative standards, it gives them double the bang for their buck.

And, as LITD has said all along, that's the danger of having DJT's signature on 2017's fine track record. As the midterm cycle gets underway, leftists are going to run on a theme of, "Low taxes, deregulation, defeat of jihadist groups, restoration of the alliance with Israel, and ramping up of fossil-fuel energy production are the policies of loudmouth buffoons."

Just sayin'.

This is why actual conservatives are going to have to have their argumentation chops in A-game order. The yee-haw contingent is no better able to articulate the basic principles involved than its idol.

You see, that contingent is content to trample the Left and move on to further policy victories without so much as a glance over their shoulder.

The problem with that is that, as polls in recent years, even preceding the Trump phenomenon, have shown, the country as a whole is not as conservative as we'd assumed.

That means some power of persuasion is going to have to be applied in our encounters with those with whom we still have social - and family - ties. Not everyone is so ate up as to be hopeless. I myself have had people tell me that I had provoked them to consider facts and perspectives that had not previously shown up on their radar screens.

For such engagement, the sharpest of knife edges, capable of parsing the most intricate demarcations between ways of looking at various matters, is going to be needed. We must invite our fellow citizens to discern, and discernment is at a premium like never before.

It's a lot more work than ad hominem attacks and sound-bite slogans, but it can swell our ranks, while mud-slinging can't.

In the meantime, we undeniably have a track record making a real difference in daily life on the ground to help us out.

Sunday roundup

Michael Walsh at PJ Media asserts that the pending purchase of most assets of the Murdoch empire related to the movie business - that would be 20th Century Fox - by Disney confirms the death of the American cinema industry as we have known it since the 1890s. I don't always align with Walsh's positions 100 percent, but he's a fine writer, having honed his chops at Time magazine as a classical-music critic and foreign correspondent. And those chops are on full display here as he takes his time to build his case.

There's this:

The death of the motion-picture business as founded has been on the horizon since the Industry learned all the wrong lessons from the success of Steven Spielberg's Jaws back in 1975. Whereas theaters had once touted air-conditioning as the prime means of putting fannies in the seats when the weather outside was steamy, the "summer blockbuster" now enticed them with chills and thrills. When Jaws begat Star Wars and the customers were shelling out record sums of money to watch what used to be called "B" movies, the moguls were quick to respond.

[A word to our younger readers: once upon a time in a galaxy not far away at all, there were "A" movies and "B" movies, so called because they were two halves of something called a "double bill," in which for the price of a single ticket you got two movies: a big-budget picture (in color!) with famous stars, and a cheaper film, usually in black-and-white, plus a couple of short subjects and maybe a cartoon or two. Similarly, 78-rpm records had an "A" side -- the song you wanted to hear -- and a "B" side, which you got more or less for free. You could look it up.]

In due course, the summer blockbusters morphed into "tentpole" movies -- mega-productions around which the studios would hang their entire yearly schedules, until at last the tentpoles became  the schedules, with a few voguish pictures chucked into theaters just before Christmas in order to qualify for "awards season" Oscars. Civil-rights dramas, coming-of-age movies (by which read: first sexual experience), and gay coming-of-age movies -- this is how a movie that nobody you know actually saw, Moonlight, won Best Picture last year.

And so it has come to pass that, at what's left of the multiplexes in what's left of shopping malls, you can see just about any kind of movie you want as long as it's a "franchise" movie -- in other words, a sequel or a remake of something you've already seen -- or a superhero movie -- in other words, based on a comic book; you know, the kind of thing you gave up reading when you were 14 years old. Just about every other genre -- westerns, dramas, thrillers, action-adventures, romantic comedies, slapstick comedies -- has been subsumed into the maw of the Things That Ate Hollywood. 

He goes on to discuss how the old studio system gave way to hot dogs from just about any old industry getting in on the game.

He doesn't say anything about the visionary - Walter Elias Disney, a failed advertising-graphics artist from Kansas City with a fondness for anthropomorphically imbued common animals -  whose name will now be the emblem for an unprecedentedly influential media giant, but it's the natural leap to make from Walsh's piece. What would Walt and his brother Roy think?

The actual piece I'm linking to here - one at The Resurgent by Peter Heck on pornography - is a worthwhile read, but for me, its main value was making me aware of a magnificent witness to the redemptive power of the Lord: one Rosaria Butterfield. She started her professional life as an English professor, which position permitted her to also teach gender studies and queer studies. She also was living as a lesbian, and had a longstanding relationship and a nice house with her partner. In 1999, she discovered the Truth, became a Christian, ended that relationship and only lasted another three years as a professor, even though she'd earned tenure. She's now married to a Reformed Presbyterian minister, is a mother of three and a homeschooler. I've bookmarked her and intend to export further.

We know about alpha males and beta males. Derek Hunter at Townhall coins a useful term - the zeta male - to describe guys like the Harvard student who, while out at a pub with some buds one evening, participated in a discussion of who the hottest chicks were in some class they all had together, and the guilt then consumed him to the point of public self-flagellation:

“During Orientation Week in August of 2016, I was out late drinking in Harvard Square with two classmates. The topic switched to the women in our class. Over the drunken hum of the bar’s collective conversation, one guy proposed the ‘hottest’ girls in our class. The other did the same. They both then asked me to rank the girls in our cohort in the order I wanted to get with. My alarmed heart bolted blood to my cheeks. I crossed my arms, unable to speak. ‘Are we making you uncomfortable?’ one asked me. I cannot remember my exact response. But it was not: ‘Yes. Objectifying women, even though it seems harmless to you, demeans them and creates an environment that makes sexual assault more likely.’ Instead, I uncrossed my arms, I shook my head, and yes, I discussed which girls were hot.”

Look, we are in the midst of a painful societal eye-opening regarding the magnitude of the problem of powerful men acting like brutes, but, dude, if men and women do not acknowledge their attraction to each other, the whole business of more human beings coming along to keep society going comes to a screaming halt.

Jonathan Haidt at City Journal has a consideration-worthy take on why post-American society is so hobbled by raw tribalism.

Everybody likes to say, in. response to the pointing out of the hair-raisingly alarming state of the North Korean crisis, that China must play a key role in walking the world back from the brink. Ain't gonna happen, according to several prominent world-affairs scholars in China. The situation, they say, is too far gone, and it's time for their country to prepare for apocalyptic war.

 

Trump enthusiasts always forget this kind of conservative who finds Trump objectionable

John Fonte of the Hudson Institute, writing at American Greatness, has a piece that is worth your while.

He revisits the role of National Review in the birth of modern conservatism. He reminds us that its mission was nothing less than the confronting the American Left with a war footing:

the founding fathers of modern American conservatism in the mid-1950s at National Review also envisioned, not the give-and-take of bread and butter politics, but an existential conflict over the regime, i.e., over the “American way of life.” 

In the premier issue of National Review, William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote that liberals “run just about everything….Radical conservatives in this country [among whose numbers he  included himself and the NR editors]…when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by the Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those on the well-fed Right.” 

This sounds familiar.

In response to the “profound crisis of our era” the new magazine would “defend the organic moral order” and stand “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’” These are not exactly examples of political rhetoric as usual, certainly not in 1955. 

One year later, National Review senior editor Frank Meyer charged that “contemporary Liberalism” regarded “all inherited value—theological, philosophical, political—as without intrinsic virtue or authority” and, therefore declared, “Liberals are unfit for the leadership of a free society.” 

In those early days at National Review, the adversary was modern Liberalism itself, often spelled with a capital L. At the same time, of course, classical liberalism was part of what was labeled conservative “fusionism” alongside cultural traditionalism and militant anti-Communism. 

Willmoore Kendall, another National Review senior editor and Buckley’s mentor at Yale, declared: “the question ‘Is Liberalism a revolution?’ can have only one answer. Since it seeks a change of regime, the replacement of one regime by another, of a different type altogether, it is, quite simply, revolutionary.” Kendall further asked, “Is the destiny of America the Liberal Revolution or is it the destiny envisaged for it by the Founders of the Republic? Just that.” 

James Burnham, National Review’s foreign policy guru and Buckley’s closest advisor, posited that liberal ideology thoroughly undermined not only the American regime, but the entirety of Western civilization itself. He wrote in Suicide of the West, “Liberalism permits Western Civilization to be reconciled to dissolution.” The “principal function of modern liberalism,” Burnham tell us, is to facilitate the suicide of Western civilization. Moreover, this suicide would be rationalized “by the light of the principles of liberalism not as a final defeat, but as a transition to a new and higher order in which Mankind as a whole joins a universal civilization, that has risen above the parochial distinctions, divisions, and discriminations of the past.”

The fact that the Left is still not only around but is still shaping both the way the formal levers of power are used and every last cultural institution (he dubs these, respectively, as the administrative state and  the cultural leviathan) makes it clear that conservatism hasn't yet achieved a decisive victory:

In the second decade of the 21st century, the twin pillars of the ongoing progressive-liberal revolution to fundamentally transform the American “regime” are the administrative state and the cultural leviathan. In recent years the foremost observers of “regime conflict” are associated with the “West Coast Straussians,” students of Harry V. Jaffa, and centered in or around the Claremont Review of Books. 

How in the pocket of the cultural leviathan is our society?

Today the facts on the ground tell us that the progressive Left dominates major institutions of American life: the universities, the mainstream media, the mainline churches, the entertainment industry, and the human resources departments of the Fortune 500. Thus, Harvard, Yale, CNN, the Episcopal Church, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley (all private sector institutions of the often vaunted civil society) are part of a nexus that I will call the “cultural leviathan,” which is allied to the administrative state.

What is the purpose of this death grip? To prune perspectives and expressions thereof until all that is left is what gets the Left's seal of approval:

The rarely stated, but clear function of the cultural leviathan is to enforce the boundaries of the Overton window, or what the Swedes call the “opinion corridor.” In other words: what is acceptable public discourse, and what isn’t; what is tolerable and intolerable, within the context of political correctness, with the goal of promoting the overarching “diversity” project. 

Year after year, the opinion corridor narrows. Larry Summers was forced out as president of Harvard University for angering the forces of the diversity project on campus. Brendan Eich, a major high-tech pioneer and innovator, resigned under pressure as CEO of Mozilla, after it was disclosed that he contributed $1,000 to the pro-traditional marriage campaign in California. James Damore, an engineer at Google, was fired by the Silicon Valley giant after he wrote a reasoned, well documented memo challenging some of the major assumptions of gender and ethnic group preferences. The vestry of Christ Church(Episcopal) in Alexandria, Virginia announced that after 147 years they would remove memorial plaques of their most famous parishioners George Washington and Robert E. Lee. The church vestry told the congregants that a plaque that simply states, “in memory of George Washington”—“make[s] some in our presence feel unsafe.” 

I gave three examples (but could have presented 300) of efforts to enforce and/or manipulate the opinion corridor or the Overton window. Every day our history and our culture are under assault. 

The California NAACP denounces the National Anthem as “racist,” and another speaker is shouted down on our nation’s campuses. Clearly, George Washington and the national anthem are de-legitimized and denigrated by the cultural leviathan, because America’s past and America’s common culture must be repainted in negative colors, if the progressive future is to be achieved. Decades ago, George Orwell famously reminded us in Nineteen Eighty-Four that “he who controls the past, controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” 

Another thread running through the piece is the establishing of a dichotomy between the way Yuval Levin sees the current state of the confrontation of Left and Right, and the way Victor Davis Hanson sees it. Based on the quotes he has chosen from each, any conservative still roused to the urgency felt by Buckley, Burnham et al is going to go with the Hanson take. Hanson employed the "war-for-the-soul-of-America" language I used above.

Fonte draws an interesting parallel between those in the 1950s claiming to be solidly right of center, but who were actually go-along-get-along center-straddlers, and those figures writing today who are the token righties at cultural-leviathan outposts:

We should remember that it was not only the leadership of the John Birch Society and Ayn Rand who were “expelled” from the mainstream conservative movement in those early days, but also some faux New York Times style “new conservatives” including Clinton Rossiter and Peter Viereck who condemned the National Review circle for “thought-control nationalism” and described the magazine’s writers as “rootless, counterrevolutionary doctrinaires.” 

Clinton Rossiter declared that America was “a progressive country with a Liberal tradition” and “a liberal [political] mind.” The goal of his conservatism was “to sober and strengthen the American liberal tradition, not destroy it.” Peter Viereck proclaimed conservatism as a “centrist philosophy” that was not intrinsically hostile to liberalism. He touted the liberal Democrat Adlai Stevenson and progressive Republican Senator Clifford Case as exemplars of a genuine American conservatism.

Needless to say, NR editors hit back. Frank Meyer mocked the “new conservatives” as unprincipled, focused mostly on “tone” and “mood,” and anxious to be received into “polite society.” He continued, “This is not a problem of tone nor attitude, not a difference between the conservative and the radical temperament; it is a difference of principle.” (italics in the original) In a similar vein, Willmoore Kendall wrote that Viereck and Rossiter explained “how you can be a Conservative and yet agree with Liberals on all not demonstrably unimportant.” In an interview Buckley told historian George Nash that the phrase “new conservative” was “a way in which liberals designated people they thought respectable.” It was a means, Buckley contended, by which liberals separated “approved” conservatives (Viereck, Rossiter) from National Review writers. 

Today, history repeats itself, as neither tragedy nor farce (pace Marx), but in an eerily familiar manner. A gaggle of liberal “approved conservatives” essentially play the role that Rossiter and Viereck played sixty years ago. They parrot what National Review called the “Liberal propaganda Line,” whose “fons et origio,” Professor Kendall noted, was the New York Times.

These “approved conservatives” are permitted (actually, enthusiastically welcomed) to use the columns of the New York Times and the Washington Post for two purposes. First, in general, to support a type of conservatism centered on tone and temperament that does nothing to challenge and, on the contrary, everything to reinforce, progressive ideological-cultural hegemony among the chattering classes. However, like the original “approved conservatives,” the contemporary breed, pretends a conservative temperament while hyperventilating in the Times and Post about other conservatives (and, of course, the president.) Second, and most importantly, these writers help promote the foremost immediate goal of American Liberalism—the removal of Donald J. Trump from the Presidency of the United States. 

On the contemporary conservative continuum Yuval Levin stands between the Never Trump “approved conservatives” and Trump-friendly right of center intellectuals at the Claremont Institute; among social conservatives; immigration hawks; defense specialists; and the editors and writers of American Greatness. Levin emphasizes Burkean gradualism with a genuine restrained style. Unlike, the hysterical, gratuitous, and sanctimonious language of Never Trump New York Times-Washington Post “approved conservatives” (Max Boot, Michael Gerson, Jennifer Rubin, and Bret Stephens come to mind), Levin’s critiques actually are sober, reasoned, and worth answering. 

He then cites once again Hanson to drive home his point that "approved conservatism" is utterly ineffectual against the determined onslaught from the Left.

LITD completely agrees with the Fonte / Hanson diagnosis, but they miss one element of the forces arrayed on the battlefield: Those who object to Trump but also understand that the Levin - Rubin -  Gerson - Pete Wehner (not someone Fonte mentions, but definitely in that group; David From could have been included as well) camp is starkly different from a right-of-center segment that most definitely understands the stakes but still finds Trump objectionable. That would be the camp represented by Red State, The Weekly Standard, The Resurgent, Brittany Pounders, Charlie Sykes and Ben Shapiro - and, if it's not too presumptuous, LITD.

And one organ the absence of which in this portion of Fonte's piece is most surprising: the current iteration of National Review, which in spring 2016 devoted an entire issue to the case against Trump. The contributors to that issue were not Beltway squishes. They were red-meat, three-pillar, scrappy figures who understood the magnitude of the war.

This camp's point is borne out daily by events on the ground, the most notable recent example being the Roy Moore defeat.

We can and should applaud the great developments of the year about to end: judicial appointments, pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord (and the removal of "climate change" from the list of national security threats), the steering of the tax-policy discussion to consensus on lower corporate rates, the education focus on charter schools and homeschooling, and a renewed foreign-polcy coherence. But the fact remains that Trump himself is not popular beyond his slavishly devoted base. With midterm elections coming up, an energized Left is going to remind the public of every wince-inducing utterance from Trump, and is going to take every opportunity to associate him with such clown-car leaders of the post-American yee-haw tendency, such as Moore, Bannon, Hannity and Coulter.

There will be continued conflation of yee-haw-ism with the actual conservatism that Fonte ostensibly wants to preserve and see thrive. The task of correcting the record on that is not make any easier by the fact that some major figures associated with the Judeo-Christian-morality pillar of three-pillared conservatism have bought into the delusion that Trump is a worthwhile standard-bearer. Let's name some names: Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffers, Jerry Falwell, Jr.

I can't say whether there is any disingenuousness among Fonte's motives in the conspicuous leaving-out of the Trump-objectors who do indeed understand that this is a war. He may just dismiss them as inconsequential.

But hear this, Drs. Fonte and Hanson, this war we all agree on as being real and high-stakes cannot be  won with Trumpism.

Donald Trump is, while not completely useless, an ineffectual weapon against the foe.

Quite simply, he turns too many people off. Trampling on the edifices the Left has erected is one part of the equation, and quite important. The other part is winning converts, achieving a true majority. That can't be done with a figurehead so widely deemed unlikeable.

R.C. Sproul, RIP

One of the most prolific writers of our time period, but certainly in the realm of reformed theology.

He was just a sports-and-fun loving Pittsburgh kid, a secular agnostic who didn't really give much thought to ultimate truth until a fortuitous jaunt in search of a pack of Lucky Strikes gave him an upside-the-head insight about his relationship to his Creator:

R.C. was reborn in September of 1957 during the first weekend of his first semester at Westminster College, a progressive Presbyterian school an hour north of Pittsburgh. Following freshman orientation, R.C. and his roommate (whom he had played baseball with in school) wanted to leave their dry campus to go to a neighboring town to drink. When they got to the parking lot, R.C. reached his hand in his pocket and realized he was all out of Lucky Strike cigarettes. They returned to the dorm, which housed a cigarette machine.

As he started to put his quarters in the machine, the star of the football team invited them to sit down at a table with him. He began asking them questions. They ended up talking for over an hour about the wisdom of God. What struck R.C. was that for the first time in his life, he was listening to someone who sounded like he knew Jesus personally. The football player quoted Ecclesiastes 11:3 (“Where the tree falls in the forest, there it lies”) and R.C. saw himself as that true: dead, corrupt, and rotting. He returned to his dorm that night and prayed to God for forgiveness. He would later remark that he was probably the only person in church history to be converted through that particular verse.

R.C. was biblically and theologically illiterate. Within the first two weeks of his Christian life, he read through the entire Bible, and was awakened for the first time to the holiness of God, especially through the Old Testament.

His basic message, that the entire universe, including our own souls, is constantly under God's spotlight, is one that is just sinking in with real relevance for me.

We are so blessed to have such a vast and rich body of work to mine for the rest of our lives. It is now complete, as is Dr. Sproul's journey back to the embrace of the Most High.

The silly, ginned-up outrage over the FCC 86ing "net neutrality"

First, there's the term itself. There's been this trend on our society in recent years of the Left coining terms for laws and edicts it would like to see enacted for the sake of "fairness." They are crafted so as to confound the average citizen and obscure what is really going on. "Single payer" is another. It means the government "caring" for your health, but no one wants to state it that bluntly.

And then there is the over-the-top level of outrage that the Left brings to everything and anything anymore. Ajit Pai has been getting death threats against his entire family. A security alert at the FCC delayed yesterday's vote.

Here's the dirty little secret: "Net neutrality" is a solution in search of a problem.

People cannot tell you why the rules were necessary. They can only offer hypotheticals as to why the rules are necessary. But that’s like a cop pulling over a person with a new sports car and writing them a ticket because they might drive 125 mph in a 70 mph zone two weeks from that moment.

The internet didn’t require the nanny state before 2015. The system thrived in a competitive environment. People have so many choices in determining what content they want to watch and how they want it delivered. Everybody benefits. Everybody will continue to benefit once the rules get lifted.

If the ISP’s do what the fearmongers claim, then the government can deal with it if necessary. Until then, sit back, relax and enjoy.

And let's not forget that one of the major principles involved here - arguably the most important principle - is that "net neutrality" was about government telling private organizations how to conduct their affairs:

The idea that internet service providers should be forced to provide unlimited access to content transmitted indiscriminately whether it is old episodes of Sesame Street, pornographic videos of simulated rape, or a column at The Week, makes as much sense as saying that a brewing company should be able to suck up all the water in a river so long as people like drinking it. We do not force bookstores to stock certain volumes or restaurants to prepare every conceivable dish. The prospect of a segregated internet in which much of the crap now gumming up the works remains legal but available only to those willing to pay a premium to access it is a welcome one.

Andrew Leonard at Rolling Stone lets the cat out of the bag many paragraphs into his argument that "net neutrality" is a good thing:

In a truly competitive marketplace, corporate moves such as these would be suicidal.

He goes on to cite an FCC stat that 50 million US homes have access to only one high-speed broadband provider.

Sounds like a situation for which the free market can provide a remedy.

That's the same kind of argument "single payer" advocates put forth. They throw. up the smokescreen of Big Pharma and big hospital conglomerates elbowing out possible competitors - hence, the need for government to step in and show us all how a "humane" monopoly can save the day.

In both cases, the word "greed" gets employed.

But never forget one of the very most important principles of economics: "greed" pretty much instantly prices itself out of the marketplace. You can't charge more for a product than the market will bear for very long without going out of business.

"But these big players will lobby Congress and federal agencies to give them special advantages," argue the leftists.

That's not the fault of the free market.

Which gets us back to the matter of the dire need for public officials who are driven by principle. Politicians who put economic liberty front and center in their campaign speeches, and continue to do so once elected and crafting legislation.

The Internet is the finest example of how elegantly simple freedom makes life better. Kudos to the majority voters at the FCC for seeing that.

Thursday roundup

Bernie Marcus at The Hill on how the Left's attempt to portray the latest iteration of the tax bill as an evisceration of the middle class is a whole lot of hooey.


Abigail Tracy at Vanity Fair says that Nikki Haley's response ("they should be heard") to a question about DJT's sexual-predation accusers is a deft blend of principle and political ambition.

Trey Gowdy rips assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein six ways from Sunday when the latter testifies before the House Judiciary Committee:

Gowdy opens this way:

There are a lot of issues I’d like to ask you about, Mr. Deputy Attorney General. We had the terrorist incident in New York this week. We have 702 reauthorization that is pending in Congress. Gun violence. The opioid epidemic. Criminal justice reform. But when I go home to South Carolina this weekend, trust me when I tell you that no one is going to ask me about any of those issues. They’re going to ask me what in the hell is going on with the Department of Justice and the FBI.

And then he launches:

The reason we have special counsel is because of a conflict of interest…We don’t like conflicts of interest because it undermines people’s confidence in both the process and the result…There was either a real or preceived conflict of interest that would either impact the result or people’s confidence in the process…And then, lo and behold, those that are supposed to make sure there are no conflicts of interest seem to have a bit of their own.

The Senate's vote to confirm Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett as a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judge is an excellent, excellent thing. Great life story, great education path, great sense of humor and a solid track record of fealty to the Constitution.


The "A"CA turns out to be not so A: 36 percent of the program's enrollees without subsidies ar set to pay $1000 in premiums or more.

Further thoughts on the Alabama election

• Yesterday, Moore confirmed his place in history as a complete jackass, first with the horse ride to his polling place, and then refusing to concede.
• His uttering the phrase "God is in control" was an exquisite bit of damage to the cause of truth regaining any kind of foothold in post-America. The phrase, in and of itself, is completely true, but his employment of it in the service of his blind-ambition-based delusion allows secular/agnostic/embracing-of-blanket-hatred-of-Republicans progressives to have a field day mocking that truth, as I've already seen happen on Facebook.
• Alabama has not gone blue. When this seat comes open again in 2020, a truly principled conservative can win it.
• Along with the pro-fetal-death position I mentioned in the last post, Jones hates basic human advancement. He is on record as saying coal miners should be retrained (and you know that means by government) for "21st-century jobs". 
• Mitch McConnell has been given some breathing room to prove he's capable of being a viable Senate leader. Whether this bracing wakeup call inspires him to see that remains to be seen.
• Any Trump-camp tribalist reading this is going to dismiss me out of hand for not dismissing McConnell as a RINO squish.

The Jones victory - initial thoughts

A disciplined yet passionately-invested-on-the-level-of-prionciple observer of the political scene has to guard against the flood of emotions that splash at the gate of one's mind following a decision among voters. When a hoped-for victory has been achieved, less-than-noble sentiments like gloating and schadenfreude are the big temptation. When confronting defeat, blind rage must be guarded against.

In the wake of the Alabama decision, LITD has to worry about neither. Since both candidates were so undesirable that, had I been an Alabama citizen, I would have stayed home, I'm just left shaking my head at the spectacle of post-America swirling ever-further down the toilet.

Actually, let me backtrack. I feel a great deal of gloating and schadenfreude regarding Steve Bannon. A singularly toxic figure in contemporary politics, it is sweet indeed to know his exhortations have been rebuked, and that even Trump is reportedly furious at him.

Let us remember, though, that that signals the further fracturing of the sociopolitical landscape. We now have a major rupture within Trumpism. Actually, maybe that will wind up being a blessing, if it seals the deal on Bannon's marginalization.

The most glaring of Jones's repellent traits, of course, is his support for the extermination of fetal Americans, right up to the point at which the crowns of their heads are emerging from their mothers. While he'll no doubt quickly join forces with his kindred spirits on the Hill, they are still in no position to move the needle further in their direction at present.

One thing that can be said is that a whole lot of folks have had a learning experience thrust in their faces.

Maybe even me. To the question I often ask as I drift off to sleep at night - "Is this realm really hopelessly fallen and defiled?" - I've been given a resounding "yes."

Media bias, moral relativity, cultural rot, and living an illusion

It takes a bit of oomph to resist being inured by the current revelations of bias on the part of television networks and prominent print organs. The problem has been long recognized. Accuracy in Media was founded in 1969. The Media Research Center was founded in 1987. Poll data has abounded for years showing that most journalists, certainly along the Acela Corridor, but really, nationwide, vote Democrat. The exposure of the Dan Rather - Mary Mapes slander of President Bush occurred in 2004.

Add to that the threads that must be untangled from the Gordian knot that is our current sociocultural juncture. There is the unfortunate linguistic habit of the current president, by which any opponent, perceived or real, acquires a nickname, usually juvenile, and by which terms are coined, such as "fake news." That fake news is a real thing gets obscured by the rush to derision on the part of the legions of hate-him-so-much-we'll-take-any-opportunity-to-hobble-him crowd. Then there is the fact that the Acela Corridor media bubble is part of the larger bicoastal celebrity milieu, the moral rot of which was fully and disgustingly exposed by the recent bringing to light of the 2005 Friars' Roast of Matt Lauer. The culture's arbiters of not only taste but what ought to concern the everyday citizen were shown to be the modern equivalent of the Roman sybarites who writhed in orgies as invading hordes from the north were descending.

As with so much else these days - from North Korean missile and nuclear-bomb tests to revelations of sexual predation in a variety of societal sectors - the momentum of revelations about the journalism world's ethical compromise is gathering.

 CNN has given us a couple of doozies.

There's the Jeff Sessions matter that cast a taint over his appointment as Attorney General last spring which the network has been forced to walk back:

The original report back in May blared that Sessions hadn’t listed those two meetings with Russia’s ambassador on his FBI disclosure forms prior to his Senate confirmation hearings. Now CNN admits that the FBI told Sessions not to list any of his dozens of meetings with other countries’ diplomats as part of his senatorial duties.

To be fair, the May story did note the Sessions camp’s claims about the FBI’s guidelines. But it also quoted a Beltway “expert” as saying that Sessions should’ve listed every meeting anyway.

What forced CNN to “clarify”? A right-wing group’s Freedom of Information request produced an FBI e-mail from March that proved Sessions right.

There's the matter of the date on which Donald Trump Jr. was offered encrypted Wikileaks information. It was actually September 14, 2016, after Wikileaks had made the files public, not September 4.

Speaking of getting dates wrong, that kind of blunder has caused a great deal of career damage for ABC's Brian Ross, who had told viewers that the Flynn meeting with Russians occurred while Trump was a candidate. Wrong. It occurred after the election. He's been suspended by the network.

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough tried to make his viewers think that Senator Orrin Hatch, who helped author the Children's Health Insurance Program, was talking about that very program when he remarked that he's irked by people who, having had trillions of government dollars lavished on them, "won't . . . lift a finger for themselves."

He was not saying that about CHIP. He was saying it about other programs that he was claiming take money away from CHIP, which is a point with which journalists are welcome to take issue, but is different than what they reported. 

Victor Davis Hanson makes a point that really ought to chill our spines. What all this boils down to is that journalists - those whose profession is ostensibly about giving the public the unvarnished, meticulously detailed truth about any given development - are driven by fealty to a "larger truth":

On the one hand, larger “truths” exist of cosmic social justice; on the other, bothersome so-called “facts” are largely predicated on the prejudices and resistance of the powerful who unduly give them authenticity. In such a postmodern environment, the “truth” that Donald Trump is purportedly a reactionary sexist and bigot is what mostly matters, not the bothersome details of counter-progressive narratives or stories that in one-dimensional fashion claim to follow rules of evidence, but instead serve an illiberal reality over a liberal one. What do a few dates on the calendar matter, concerning when Michael Flynn consulted with the Russians—given the larger truth that they surely once sought to deny Hillary Clinton the presidency?

These people know that for all the polarization between left and right - well, since 2015, make that among (rather than between) left, right and populist - most post-Americans have a superficial grasp at best on the daily workings of government and  politics and will rely on what they consume at a glance to provide them with an accurate take on reality.

And therein lies the ultimate dissonance. This is a swath of people completely sure of its moral superiority, its "noble" vision of a collectivist and secular future for the world, yet upon examination of, say, any of the above recent examples, or, for a full gaze at the essence of the matter, that 2005 Matt Lauer roast, we see that its core is nothing but relativism. Lies in service of the "grand vision" are perfectly acceptable. There is no absolute standard that demands adherence in this formulation. It's a bit like nailing Jell-O to the wall. The metaphor of the moving goal post also applies. You can't demand anything fixed from this crowd.

Yet trust in their product is still above zero.

Living a lie gets harder for defenders of this vision, but they haven't given up trying.

A greatest-hits rundown of DJT quotes that tell us what we need to know about his view of women

Nancy French compiled it on Twitter.  Herewith is an abbreviated version.

While carrying on a public extramarital affair with a former beauty queen Marla Maples, he said, ‘Not bad. Beautiful wife, beautiful girlfriend, everything beautiful. Life was a bowl of cherries,’ @RealDonaldTrump said.


During his divorce depositions with Ivana, he pled the fifth 97 times when asked about adultery. He brags about this as a savvy strategy of a powerful man unbothered by the constraints of marriage. /3

He said this about his then 1-year-old daughter Tiffany: ‘I think she’s got a lot of Marla in her. She’s a really beautiful baby and she’s got Marla’s legs. We don’t know whether or not she’s got this part yet but time will tell.” [motioned to suggest breasts]


‘You know, it doesn’t really matter what [they] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass,’ @RealDonaldTrump told Esquire magazine in 1991. /5

Beauty queen Carrie Prejean wrote that @RealDonaldTrump made pageant contestants parade in front of him so he could separate the attractive from the unattractive, which caused the girls to sob even before the contest began. /23

To Howard Stern about 22 year old Ivana, @realDonaldTrump said: ‘You know who's one of the great beauties of the world, according to everybody? And I helped create her. Ivanka. My daughter, Ivanka. She's 6 feet tall, she's got the best body.’ /22

In a ’94 interview, @RealDonaldTrump said he was a ‘starmaker’ who married women and made them famous. ‘Unfortunately, after they're a star, the fun is over for me. It's like a creation process. It's almost like creating a building. It's pretty sad.’ /21

Female employee Louise Sunshine (who worked for Trump from ‘73-85) said Trump kept a 'fat picture' of her and would take it out when she disappointed him to remind her she wasn’t perfect. /19


.@RealDonaldTrump described pedophile Jeff Epstein: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. A lot of fun to be with. It’s even said he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” /16

As I say, this is a truncated version of what she has compiled.

Look, I realize that this collection of remarks is not going to significantly affect his poll numbers (his base will ensure that he at least maintains the 37 percent at which he usually hovers). None of it rises to the level of egregiousness that can get him in legal trouble. So the I-hate-Trump-so-badly-I-must-vent-about-it-any-opportunity-I-get crowd sets itself up for disappointment it it's looking for such a review of his boorishness to move the needle.

But what it says to two types of - what would you call them? There was a time when both types could legitimately claim actual-conservative status - Trump enthusiasts (those, like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Wayne Allen Root, Jim Hoft, Janine Pirro, Conrad Black, John Nolte) who forthrightly began shilling for him at the outset of his campaign, and those who started out looking askance at his character, but now want us to prioritize his administration's good moves over that character, such as Kurt Schlichter, Bookworm and Victor Davis Hanson - DJT supporters is that they have cast their lot with a inarguable lowlife (who is not even a conservative).

There will no doubt be some more great policy-level moves - on the order of pulling out of the Paris climate accord, renewing the focus on charter schools and homeschooling in education policy, drilling for oil on federal lands, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and appointing great judges - coming our way, and that is without a doubt marvelous.

But, as I've said before, we'd have had all or most of this with a man or woman of true character, like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, or Carly Fiorina.

Anybody who calls the above utterings mere "locker room talk" or who engages in whataboutism, comparing him to John Conyers or Bill Clinton is engaging in tribalism of the rankest, most juvenile kind.