Now that the three basketball players are out of China and saved from years in jail, LaVar Ball, the father of LiAngelo, is unaccepting of what I did for his son and that shoplifting is no big deal. I should have left them in jail!
Yes, LaVar Ball is a hotdog and a grandstander. Yes, his son and the son's teammates did indeed shoplift in China. And, yes, given the legal aspect of it, personal magnanimity on Trump's part, even if it was for publicity purposes, which it probably was, was a factor in their release.
But Donal Trump is 71 and has not the first subatomic particle of humility in his entire being "(I don't think I need forgiveness"), so the defining characteristics of his personality are very unlikely to change. And one of those characteristics is letting slights, from anyone, in any circumstances, get under his skin and responding in kind.
There's a foreign-policy element to this as well. China is a rival, an adversary. Its system of justice is severe. Does Trump's tweet not send a message to the Chinese government / Communist party along the lines of, "We want our people back in situations like this, if they genuflect before me while still in your custody. If they don't, you can have 'em"?
This man-child has established a pattern over the course of his first year: do one or two positive policy-level things, then ruin the effect of it with a petty, childish tweet. Repeat the cycle.
On Wednesday, NPR Board Chairman Roger LaMay announced that he was stepping down at the end of his second one-year term. LaMay, who remains on the board, said he needed to devote more time to running the popular Philadelphia public radio music station WXPN, where he is general manager.
However, according to a knowledgeable source, LaMay is the subject of a complaint filed with NPR alleging past inappropriate behavior. Few additional details are currently known.
The resignation comes after Politicoreported that six women had complained about Bittel leering at them and making comments of an explicit, sexual nature. He also, apparently, kept a lot of breast-related paraphernalia in his office that made the women feel uncomfortable:
“There was a lot of boob stuff in his office,” said a woman who was a fundraiser years ago and had to interact with him. “I was told by other women not to go into his bathroom. I was warned.”
In a written statement, a spokesman for Bittel didn’t dispute the women’s accounts and acknowledged he had the breast-shaped stress balls. But, he said, they were a gift “from a former female general counsel of his company years ago as a joke for his birthday. He keeps them in a drawer with other gag gifts.”
None of the women accused Bittel of touching them in any way, but it seems they didn't like the way he let his eyes do the walking:
“He’s just so f----ng creepy,” said a former female party staffer, anger palpable in her tone. “He just leers at you, and stares. I don’t know if you know what that feels like, but he just leers at you. I don’t know how to describe the feeling.”
It's probably a lot like being trapped on a plane with Al Franken.
And then there's Ohio state legislator Wes Gooden. This one is particularly scurrilous. The damage he has wrought to the cause of traditional morality is huge. At what point did this guy give his soul over to his kind of depravity - and I don't just mean the shenanigans in his office. The chasm between his public persona and his real self was nearly infinite. How does one hide the cognitive dissonance? What the hell motivated the guy to keep talking the talk about social conservatism? Did he ever come close to cracking? Was he relieved when he got caught? Will his wife stay with him?
An Ohio lawmaker who routinely touted his Christian faith and anti-LGBT views has resigned after being caught having sex with a man in his office.
Wes Goodman, who is the Republican state legislator for Ohio, is married to a woman who is assistant director of an annual anti-abortion rally known as March for Life.
The right-wing legislator, who pushed “family values”, was reportedly witnessed having sex with a man inside his office who was not employed by the legislator.
According to the Columbus Dispatch, the observer told Ohio House Chief of Staff Mike Dittoe what had happened on Tuesday afternoon. Mr Dittoe responded by telling House Speaker Republican Cliff Rosenberger who in turn met with Mr Goodman.
The 33-year-old, who has been branded the “conscience of the conservative movement”, resigned for “inappropriate conduct” shortly after the meeting took place.
Mr Goodman, whose Twitter biography describes him as “Christian. American. Conservative. Republican. Husband to @Beth1027”, has regularly claimed "natural marriage" occurs between a man and a woman.
"Healthy, vibrant, thriving, values-driven families are the source of Ohio's proud history and the key to Ohio's future greatness,” reads his campaign website which has now been taken offline.
“The ideals of a loving father and mother, a committed natural marriage, and a caring community are well worth pursuing and protecting."
The glaring question as this cascade's momentum increases, is, is this a recent phenomenon, or is the fact that society is finally seriously investigating it bringing a seaminess that has always been with us to light?
If it's the latter, the gossamer thread by which civilization hangs is thinner than we'd been presuming.
Denise Young Smith had had the position for six months. In October, she said the following at the One World Summit in Bogota, Colombia:
“There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation,” the inaugural diversity chief said.
“Diversity is the human experience,” she said, according to Quartz. “I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.”
That was it. Boom. She's gone.
It's the same mentality that will not tolerate the phrase "all lives matter."
Ideas don't have intrinsic merit, according to this mindset. It depends on the demographics of the person expressing them.
And the next puke-worthy development was that she sent out an email apologizing. No standing by her position. She has to live with her cowardice every day for the rest of her life now.
That would be the son who had several relatives, influential figures in business, government and the royal family, arrested. The son who has instigated a loosening of longstanding strictures on Saudi society, most notably letting women drive cars.
But it's his agenda for the region in which his country is situated that ought to get our attention:
The high level source said once crowned king, the prince will shift his focus to Iran, a long standing rival oil empire to Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, with fears military action is possible.
He will also enlist the help of the Israeli military to crush Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia supported by Iran, according to the source.
'MBS is convinced that he has to hit Iran and Hezbollah,' he said. 'Contrary to the advice of the royal family elders, that's MBS's next target. Hence why the ruler of Kuwait privately calls him "The raging Bull".
'MBS's plan is to start the fire in Lebanon, but he's hoping to count on Israeli military backing. He has already promised Israel billions of dollars in direct financial aid if they agree.
'MBS can not confront Hezbollah in Lebanon without Israel. Plan B is to fight Hezbollah in Syria,' said the source.
Saudi Arabia has heretofore not really been at the forefront of the shaping of Middle Eastern dynamics - not in the way that Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Yemen, the Kurds, and, of course, the above-mentioned Iran, have.
And a development like this is going to have implications for outside players with a stake in how things go down there. Think Russia. Think the United States.
In our modern world, nuance is in short supply, and that's going to be a danger here. While the most obvious level of what's unfolding - Saudi Arabia leaning more toward the West, reaching out to Israel for a deepened alliance, and going nose-to-nose with Iran - might make it a no-brainer as to what US policy should be, there are secondary considerations that must be dealt with. For instance, Trump, per his "haters-and-fools" tweet, thinks it's possible to basically wipe the slate clean with Russia and, by golly, solve problems like Ukraine and North Korea. But there's that nagging strong alliance Russia has with Iran. It has been a principle shaper of developments in Syria, and would surely be so in any conflagration - proxy or direct - between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
In fact, Trump has already taken to Twitter to express what sure looks like an unequivocal position, saying he has "great confidence in King Salman and the Crown Prince . . . they know exactly what they are doing." Did he run this by his foreign-policy advisors first?
I'm not saying that one can't size up the situation on a moral level. In a fallen world, it's all going to be relative in a certain sense, but there are clear good guys and bad guys in this. But there are also delicate arrangements that have prevented the always-volatile nature of mideast affairs from reaching cataclysmic proportions.
This is going to require a degree of finesse that I'm not at all sure the present US chief executive is capable of. I pray that I'm underestimating him.
What I would say at this stage is, easy does it on tweets about this, Mr. President.
Francis Menton at the Manhattan Contrarianhas a piece called "The Climate Alarmists Definitely Don't Believe Their Own Propaganda." In addition to pointing up the hypocrisy of that crowd's jetting off to conferences to tell the rest of us to drastically alter the way we live (an ongoing exercise effectively done many times before, but here with fresh examples), he makes an important point: Yes, nuclear power would answer the climatistas' demand for a clean energy source (even though they continue to oppose it), but let's not go subsidizing that or otherwise giving it an artificial advantage in the marketplace. The plain fact is that a free market is going to ensure that fossil fuels remain predominant for several more decades at least. And that's fine.
Two views on what is to be done re: the vexing North Korea menace. Compare and contrast:
Joseph Bosco at The Diplomat says that Henry Kissinger, at age 93, is still coming up with fresh ideas on world problems, and has one for this situation to offer Trump. Kissinger's take is that the mutual respect established between Trump and Xi can ensure that there will be an ongoing economic squeeze on North Korea, with a Plan B in the wings that China will not stand in the way of:
Xi’s success in achieving Mao-like supremacy at the 19th Party Congress has given him the freedom to act more boldly in preventing Pyongyang from further souring Beijing’s relations with Washington. His private assurances to the U.S. president may well account for Trump’s comments, which were both upbeat and firmly expectant of positive results. With Xi at his side, he stated:
China can fix this problem easily and quickly, and I am calling on China and your great president to hopefully work on it very hard. I know one thing about your president: If he works on it hard, it will happen. There’s no doubt about it.
It is not unreasonable to conclude that Trump expects Xi to deliver in one of two ways. Under Plan A, China will continue its financial and economic squeeze until Kim agrees to scrap his nuclear and missile programs. If that does not yield the desired outcome, Plan B is for Beijing to stand by as the United States and South Korea “surgically” destroy those capabilities.
In fact, no less an authority on Chinese thinking than Trump adviser Henry Kissinger has suggested that kind of Washington-Beijing cooperation on a kinetic solution. During a 1994 interview, in one of his many defenses of China’s tolerance of the North Korean problem, Kissinger speculated that Beijing was passive “because they figure we will take care of the problem and they can take a free ride.”
Kissinger went further, saying that he himself once believed the United States should unilaterally “knock out the nuclear capability of North Korea, if necessary even by aerial strikes.” But he said he now thought it would be “too dangerous for us to do this alone given the general mentality that now exists in Washington and unwillingness to support it.” Nevertheless, Kissinger went one, we should “tell China that we are willing to go as far as you are willing to go in doing away with the nuclear capability… including a blockade and total economic isolation.”
Thomas Donnelly at The American Enterprise Institute says that, because China would insist on calling the shots on any new regime arrangement should Kim fold, under the weight of either Plan A or Plan B, it's best to get on with Plan B, and do so quickly:
In sum, we find ourselves in a Macbeth-like situation: “If it is done when ‘tis done, ‘twere well it were done quickly” and cold-bloodedly. A war on the peninsula would “trammel up” many consequences, and the more we might summon a “blow [that] might be-all and end-all”—or at least the most powerful possible—the better. A less literary but more historical frame of reference might well be the invasion of the Japanese home islands, in which case a “reasonable” outcome also seemed to exceed America’s conventional military grasp.
Kevin Williamson at NRO says that Capitol-Hill Republicans' fears of the reactions of various factions and special interests regarding how any bold, simple, pro-freedom moves on matters like taxation and health care keep legislative efforts so convoluted and wonky that nothing is going to get done.
Inspired by Trump, the Republicans have declared themselves agents of chaos, and have taken up the least conservative sentiment there is as their motto: “Hey, how could it get any worse?”
It can always get worse.
There is not going to be any certainty on the big domestic-policy items — taxes, health care, the entitlements, and much else — until there is a reasonable, sober, sustainable settlement on our national fiscal challenge. So long as the charade of ten-year sunsets and CBO-satisfying accounting shenanigans rule the day, there is not going to be any predictability — and that is going to impose real costs on economic growth, employment, wages, and future prosperity.
We don’t have regime uncertainty. We have a regime of uncertainty. And it is time to change that.
In other words, this supposed new era under Trump hasn't moved the needle at all. Yes, some of that is due to the inertia bias of legislative Pubs, but Trump has not exactly forged a productive relationship, based on a strong and consistent vision, with them.
Ted Cruz is squaring off against fellow Republican senators Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley over ethanol subsidies. This is a perfect illustration of the principle at work in the Williamson piece. Those two Iowa senators, Ernst especially, are supposed to be solid conservatives, but they're scared to death of the power of King Corn to jeopardize their jobs. It also proves once again that Ted Cruz is a man of consistent principle, and that it is nothing short of a tragedy that he's not our president.
The Alamo is a shrine to human valor, the notion of choosing to die with honor. When the famous 1836 battle occurred there, it was an outpost surrounded by wilderness. Within a few short years, the city of San Antonio grew around it. The Menger Hotel, still very much in operation, was built across the street in 1859. It may not occur to the average citizen that the site's upkeep needs a boost, but we can be encouraged that some folks are focusing on just that:
We finally have the leadership and the plan that we need. Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush has made preserving the Alamo his top priority. He has brought a talented team together to focus on saving the Alamo. His plan is simple: Preserve the Alamo's 1836 structures; close Alamo Street and recover the Battlefield; build the world-class museum that the Alamo deserves. Commissioner Bush is a son of Texas, and he will ensure that the Alamo always tells the story of 1836 faithfully.
Great short Erick Erickson video - looks like it was taken on the lawn of his home - about contemporary post-American Christianity's golden-calf problem.
Not in the sense of self-satisfaction over any exceptional accomplishments. As a matter of fact, the case could be made that I've recently been experiencing something of a lull. I had a spate of magazine pieces recently published, and I am somewhat active musically, but it all falls short of heyday status. I've been busier.
No, it's all the churchy stuff. Three years ago, I was just a guy, depending on my own dispositional resources to see me through the challenges attendant to this life. Now I regularly attend a small rural Methodist church, the demographic profile of which skews older. I provide special music for that portion of the service every few weeks, and I help out with vacation Bible school. On recent Tuesday evenings, I've been participating in an eight-week discussion series at a community church here in town. The structure is provided by a book and video series called Starting Point. It's for those new to a faith walk, as well as those who are coming back to one after a hiatus. I pray, fervently, all day long.
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.
There was actually one other sticking point, and it was really basic: We can't see God. I even read Michael Novak's No One Sees God, and it provided a helpful nudge. (I think I started flirting with church attendance - at the local Catholic parish - about the time I was reading it.) Still I was vulnerable enough that I found the avalanche of cynical dismissals of the Judeo-Christian model that inundate us all daily tugging at me, inviting me to consider the possibility .that it was all a fairy tale.
Another helpful nudge was what C.S. Lewis had to say about the nature of reality - that the things of this universe had jagged edges, that scientific discovery was by definition the stuff of surprise, that irregularity characterized the way it is all put together. I started to see what he was saying about how it would actually be odd if the universe conformed to our expectations for uniformity of patterns. The example he cites is our solar system. The planets' orbits aren't perfectly circular, they're not equally spaced, the planets's sizes don't progress from smallest to largest, and the number of moons revolving around each vary considerably.
So the human being's relationship to the Creator of it all is going to be surprising as well.
But the invisibility of God still nagged me. To compound my sense of reservation, there was all this talk of angels and devils.
But then the stuff that comprises most of the content of this blog became so egregious that I could find no word that more effectively characterized it than "demonic." 1 Peter 5:8 hit me right between the eyes. I saw it as far more than metaphor. America and Western civilization generally were indeed being devoured by the Devil.
I'd already had this blog for some time when this came together for me, and the more I looked at what needed to be addressed, the less adequate I found my resources as a secular polemicist for doing so. The first question I now had to ask myself was whether I was contributing to the cultural rot, and in what way.
The resulting inventory of what I was about as a blogger showed up in small ways. I narrowed my criteria for the applicability of snarky monikers for public figures. I was less inclined to offer pat solutions to vexing policy dilemmas.
And then the Trump era got underway, and I took extra care to make sure I was not engaging in naked tribal turf-defense. And I saw a number of pundits I'd formerly admired doing just that, which brought on the ongoing fracturing of conservatism. It was becoming more clear by the day that a label, even one with as noble a pedigree as conservatism has, was going to fall short of ameliorating all this world's ills.
One could say God was backing me into a corner. I had to take Him seriously, since everything else, around me and inside of me, was broken. He and His laws would not be mocked.
But I saw that grace is available for the deliberately humble. And community - a commodity on which there is a premium in fragmented post-America - is available for those who want to give and receive encouragement on the faith walk.
So on pretty much any Sunday morning, you'll find me in the pew at my little country church. And in my office you're nearly as likely to find me with folded hands at my desk as banging away at my keyboard.
I still like cocktail hour, I still let loose with flurries of blush-inducing expletives during lapses in my reverence, and I still have my moments of confusion and doubt. I still size people up on the basis of standards of appearance and speech that I now understand don't amount to much if anything.
But there's a hope I couldn't conceive of five short years ago that leavens the daily life wrought by my foibles.
I understand the actual purpose of what I've been doing. The question of how to be an effective human being has an answer.
As a result of these battles [the Ten Commandments monument and the defiance of Hodges v. Obergfell], Moore became something a martyr to some social conservatives, who mistakenly believed he was standing athwart history in the name of religious freedom, or moral clarity, or something. Too many conservatives conflated Moore’s crusade against the federal judiciary with the persecution that Christian cake bakers, florists, and pro-life groups now face at the hands of progressive state governments in California and elsewhere.
But they’re not the same thing. Moore’s fundamental claim that a state supreme court can ignore a ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court is anything but conservative. That question was settled by the Civil War and the constitutional amendments that followed in its wake, and no one who claims to be a conservative would argue otherwise.
But Moore’s moral grandstanding about the Ten Commandments monument and the Obergefell ruling weren’t just wrong as matters of law or history, they were fundamentally anti-American: Moore elevated himself, on more than one occasion, above the law. This is the sort of thing conservatives rightly accused former President Barack Obama of doing with his “pen and phone” approach to governing by executive fiat.
The excuse that Moore was on “our side” of the culture wars should never have been enough to forgive this behavior. That it was enough—and among some die-hard supporters, still might be—to elect Moore as the GOP candidate in Alabama’s special election next month is a sign of just how dysfunctional and deleterious our political tribalism has become.
It can be hard, here in post-America where every last cultural institution has gone completely off the rails, for three-pillar conservatives to avoid hair-trigger responses to the glaringly egregious assaults on civilization. It can, in certain cases, require nerves of steel. But once the underlying principles have been jettisoned for defending the supposed brand's viability in the marketplace, the whole conservative exercise becomes pointless.
It's heartening to see that even tribalist pseudo-conservatives are now strongly encouraging Moore to consider dropping out. The cleanup effort is going to be plenty daunting as it is.
A school in England suspended a teacher after he accidentally referred to a transgender boy student as a girl.
Math teacher Joshua Sutcliffe, 27, said “well done girls” to two students at an Oxfordshire secondary school. He apologized to the transgender student, however, Sutcliffe faces a disciplinary hearing this week and officials could charge him with misconduct for misgendering, the Evening Standard reported.
“While the suggestion that gender is fluid conflicts sharply with my Christian beliefs… I have never looked to impose my convictions on others,” Sutcliffe, who is also a Christian pastor, said according to BBC News.
The teacher was suspended six weeks after the incident when the student’s mother complained.
Sutcliffe thinks referring to someone by their birth gender isn’t wrong or unreasonable, according to the Daily Mail.
The Oxfordshire school told BBC that it would be “inappropriate” to comment on the investigation into the teacher’s conduct.
More than 2,000 children aged three to 18 in the U.K. were referred to a gender identity specialist last year, BBC reports.
The teacher’s suspension comes after similar events in the U.S. An 8-year-old transgender student and his parents recently sued a California school for failing to let him express his identity as a girl and another set of parents filed a lawsuit against a school in New York, alleging the school created a hostile environment for their five-year-old kid, according to The New York Times.
How many heartbreaking, nauseating levels are there to consider here?
Let's start with the kids mentioned in the last paragraph of the linked report. 8 years old and 5 years old. Like their brains, sense organs, hair, bones and muscles, these kids' genitals and hormone-producing glands are in the very earliest stages of development. They barely have the faintest idea what it means to be the gender identity with which they were born. Additionally, they are social neophytes. Their experience with observing and interacting with opposite-gender people has barely extended beyond parents, aunts and uncles and any siblings they have. In short, no five-year-old is qualified to say anything about feeling like a boy or a girl.
Then there is the mother of the student in the British school. In late 2017, to even ask, "What kind of parent supports this kind of tragic delusion on the part of her precious offspring?" is to open oneself to responses along the lines of, "Boy, is your worldview hopeless antiquated and bigoted." Again, this inflection point has occurred only in the last three or so years. For the ten thousand-plus-year history of our species prior to that, it would have been the key question in such a situation.
Then there is the school system's position. The school system is ostensibly in the business of educating. Imparting knowledge of how the universe is constructed. You know, things like, there are two genders for humans and most other species: male and female. These are permanent identity traits determined by the DNA in each cell of a person.
We have institutionalized delusion. We are well along the path to atomizing what had been our society. Each individual defining what heretofore had been recognized as objective reality for himself or herself - or itself, as the case may be.
This not only flies in the face of basic understanding, it is a middle finger to almighty God.
Nelson is 55 years old (she turns 56 this week), and she and her husband supported President Trump. Her account is that she began working at Old Hickory House, a restaurant off of Highway 431 in Gadsden, Alabama, when she was 15. “I worked there after school as a waitress,” she stated. She continued:
Some nights I worked until 7 p.m. and other nights until 10 p.m. Mr. Roy Moore was a regular customer. He came in almost every night and he would stay until closing time. He sat at the counter in the same seat night after night, and I remember exactly where he sat. Mr. Moore was an adult. He was much older than I was. I knew that he was the district attorney in Etowah County, I didn’t understand what that meant, but I did know that he was an important person and I always treated him with respect. He would pull the ends of my red hair … He would compliment me on my looks, and I would think nothing of it. I was accustomed to men flirting with me, because I was well developed and competed in beauty pageants. I did not attach any significance to Mr. Moore’s behavior towards me, and I did not respond to Mr. Moore’s flirtatious behavior.
According to Nelson, she received a yearbook at school, and she brought it to work on the evening of November 22, 1977; by now, she would have been 16. She says that Moore offered to write a note in her yearbook, which she accepted. “I felt flattered and I said yes,” she stated. Moore then allegedly wrote in her yearbook a flirtatious note: “To a sweeter, more beautiful girl I could not say Merry Christmas. Christmas 1977, Love, Roy Moore, Old Hickory House.” She says that a week or two later, she was working at the restaurant and her shift ended at 10 p.m.; she expected her boyfriend to pick her up, but he was late. Moore offered to drive her home. Her account then continued, as she broke down in tears:
Mr. Moore was wearing brown hush puppies on his feet. He drove a 2-door car. I believe it was an old car, but I do not recall the model. I got into his car in the passenger seat and he began driving. I thought he would get on the highway but instead he drove to the back of the restaurant. I was not immediately alarmed as there was an exit from the back of the restaurant to the street, and he could drive there to my house without getting on the highway…He stopped the car. He stopped the car and he parked his car in between the dumpster and the back of the restaurant where there were no lights. There it was dark and it was deserted. I was alarmed and I immediately asked him what he was doing. Instead of answering my question, Mr. Moore reached over and began groping me, putting his hands on my breasts. I tried to open my car door to leave, but he reached over and locked it so I could not get out. I tried fighting him off, while yelling at him to stop, but instead of stopping he began squeezing my neck attempting to force my head onto his crotch. I continued to struggle. I was determined that I was not going to allow him to force me to have sex with him. I was terrified. He was also trying to pull my shirt off. I thought that he was going to rape me. I was twisting and struggling and begging him to stop. I had tears running down my face. At some point he gave up. He then looked at me and said, ‘You are a child. I am the District Attorney of Etowah County. If you tell anyone about this, no one will believe you.” He finally allowed me to open the car door and I either fell out or he pushed me out. I was on the ground as he pulled out of the parking area behind the restaurant. The passenger door was still open as he burned rubber pulling away leaving me laying there on the cold concrete in the dark.
Sounds credible. That would be a lot of detail for someone to fabricate. Plus, she's a Trump voter.
Of course, she did herself no favors hiring the notorious Gloria Allred to represent her, and that fact has already figured in to dismissive remarks about her coming forward.
But consider the recollections of Teresa Jones, who says that "it was common knowledge" among the Etowah County prosecutor's office that Moore dated high-school girls and that "everybody thought it was weird." Then there's the lame way Moore handled himself in the Hannity interview.
The plain fact of the matter, and this is why I haven't posted much about this entire situation, is that no one has any way of knowing at this point how much, if any, of any of the allegations is true. Which leaves us with a lot of tiresome digging in of heels on either side of the want-him-to-win / want-him-to-go-away divide.
There's a really foul element on the want-him-to-win side of the spectrum that hangs its justification for its position on a "greater-good" argument. Ann Coulter says it's important to drag him across the finish line because he'd vote for a wall. (You'll recall that she said she'd be cool with Trump performing abortions in the White House if he followed through on his tough campaign rhetoric about immigration.) David Horowitz says he's essential because it's always essential to defeat Democrats.
But this is just a current crystallization of the boneheaded tribalism that passes for political engagement in post-America. The mindset that spurs Hannity and Schlichter to disparage a great mind and leader like Ben Sasse. The kind that gets Paul Ryan labeled a RINO or even a liberal in comment-thread rants. Every frustration or disappointment with any public figure warrants immediate banishment in the current climate.
We don't know enough to draw etched-in-stone conclusions about Moore, but the LITD position is that it doesn't look good. But to those who consider themselves conservatives who are utterly convinced that Bill Clinton was the Harvey Weinstein of politics and are now taking the Coulter-Horowitz position, and, conversely, those who are utterly convinced that we have irrefutable evidence of a tawdry past replete with actual assault when there is the possibility that he is completely clean are blowing smoke.
But, in 2017 post-America, that's no deterrent from weighing in at fevered decibels.
Will probably have a longer, more singularly focused post or two later today, but I've run across some stuff so far this morning that is definitely recommendation worthy.
Herewith:
Jay Cost at NRO has a piece on how Revolutionary War veterans fared as the years went by. Short answer: not well.
After the war, the national government did not have the cash to pay the troops, because it lacked the power to tax. It was dependent on requisitions from the states, which were not forthcoming. The soldiers were therefore paid in debt certificates, commonly known as Pierce Notes. The problem was that nobody really believed that the government would ever actually pay back the Pierce Notes in hard currency. Lacking a taxing power, how could it? So veterans, desperately in need of cash, began selling their certificates in 1784.
This created a glut of certificates, which drove the value down to less than 20 cents on the dollar, and the certificates tended to migrate into the hands of a relatively small number of eastern speculators. Fast forward to 1790. The new Constitution was established, the government had implemented a national tax, and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton was ready to make provisions for repayment of the national debt. Who was to benefit? Not the soldiers who had sold their certificates, at least not under Hamilton’s scheme. Instead, most of the bounty went to the speculators who had bought the certificates and now stood to reap a windfall profit.
Once the Constitution became the law of the land and the government gave itself the power to tax, the question of how to make this situation right arose. That moment marked a significant rift between Hamilton and my main man, James Madison. With Hamilton at the helm of the Treasury, there was still a dearth of a plan to compensate these men.
Madison, who had not served in combat, was outraged by this. It was the first moment he and Hamilton really broke on an important matter of public policy. He proposed to split the repayment equally between the speculators and the veterans. Unfortunately, this was totally impractical — the government lacked the resources to figure out who should be paid what. Moreover, imposing such a massive haircut on public creditors would have had extremely bad effects on the economy. Madison’s proposal went down to a lopsided defeat, and rightly so. But the fact remains that the Revolutionary War veterans never got the support they deserved. Forget about the Veterans Affairs Administration — that did not exist. Forget about the kinds of pensions that the Civil War veterans enjoyed — they reaped no such bounty. In fact, the Revolutionary War veterans did not even get paid the salary they were promised. Granted, some of them were taken care of by their states, including with generous options on land in the West. But compared with today’s veterans, Revolutionary War veterans were simply taken for granted.
Jed Babbin, writing at The American Spectator, says there are three festering wounds that 2016 inflicted on America: the "Russian dossier," the Uranium One scandal, and the Hillary Clinton-Huma Abedin mishandling of classified information. He says the common factor to all three is James Comey. As LITD has said before, Comey is one heck of an enigmatic figure. It looks like he's not only been vulnerable to moral compromise, but that he's succumbed. But it's incongruous with his demeanor. He comes across as an earnest, mild-mannered career prosecutor trying to do the right thing. Babbin's piece seems to confirm for me the LITD thesis: that one or more players in these three developments has leaned on him, hard.
Joanna Weiss at Politicoexamines why it is that network television sitcoms and dramas rarely feature non-rich, or at least economically comfortable, people.
If there are any two nation-states that he ought to be handling with the utmost responsibility, it would be North Korea and Russia, right?
Well, during a couple of moments of idle time on the Vietnam stop of his Asia tour, he foreclosed on that possibility.
How's this for some measured, mature rhetoric?
Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me "old," when I would NEVER call him "short and fat?" Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend - and maybe someday that will happen!
You see, DJT can never let a slight, from anyone in any circumstance, go unaddressed. Even if the source is an unstable dictator on the verge of being able to deliver a thermonuclear device to any US city.
And it seems he has deleted the long list of buzzings by Russian planes of US ships and US reconnaissance aircraft, the cyberattacks, the clearly steadfast sense of alliance that Russia has for the Assad regime in Syria (including the installation of an S-300 missile system), participation with China in war games in the South China Sea, and ongoing threat to Ukrainian sovereignty from his memory bank. The guy apparently thinks he can start from a blank slate with a regime whose interests clearly diverge from those of the US:
When will all the haters and fools out there realize that having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. There always playing politics - bad for our country. I want to solve North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, terrorism, and Russia can greatly help!
Spin that, slavish devotees. A principle reason you gave for voting for, and exhorting the rest of us to vote for, this guy was that he would bring an American-interests-first resolve to matters of foreign policy. It turns out we get the patty-cake-ism we would have gotten with a President BleachBit. Expressed with exclamation points and choppy syntax as a bonus.
If Trump is this easily taken in by the alpha-male charm of a grand-scale schemer who has as his aim the sidelining of the US on the world stage, we have not entered into any kind of new era of security.
And recall that this comes on top of his calling the military parade in Beijing "beautiful" and Xi's consolidation of Communist Party power on the scale of Chairman Mao a great accomplishment.
This is what you get when there is no discernible core, no consistent set of principles, in the guy currently holding the most powerful position in the world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Polls show that educational rot has yielded its results. Significant percentages of millennials think socialism is preferable to a free market.
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.
