There is no "Arab world" consensus that the Israel-Palestinian question is the central Middle East issue

Great Zev Chafets piece at Bloomberg today about how, in an age in which Iran poses a dire threat to the entire world, Israel is not the crux on which Middle East stability and security hinges.

He contrasts the recent announcement that the US will make good on the 1995 act passed by the US Congress declaring Jerusalem as the Israeli capital with the policies of the two most notorious anti-Israel US presidents, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama:

Neither of those former presidents actually came out and said that Israel was the cause of all the Middle East’s problems. But they both based their regional diplomacy on the assumption.

In 2006, while promoting a book that likened Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians with South African apartheid, Carter opened a window on his real thoughts. "The heart and mind of every Muslim is affected by whether or not the Israel-Palestine issue is dealt with fairly,” he told an interviewer. He added that the U.S. is hated by "former close friends" such as Egypt and Jordan, "because we won’t do anything about the Palestinian plight."

This is what the American-Israeli scholar Martin Kramer calls “linkage” -- the myopic tendency to see Israel as a wrench in the wheel of America’s Arab policy. In that interview, Carter even called it the "linkage fact." But, to be fair, the concept didn’t originate with him.

In the mid-1940s, an on-balance pretty good Democrat president, Harry Truman, demonstrated far more vision and understanding of an overarching West than his State Department:

 This is what the American-Israeli scholar Martin Kramer calls “linkage” -- the myopic tendency to see Israel as a wrench in the wheel of America’s Arab policy. In that interview, Carter even called it the "linkage fact." But, to be fair, the concept didn’t originate with him.

It goes back at least to the end of World War II. In 1945, the State Department sent newly inaugurated President Harry Truman a memo warning of “continual tenseness in the situation in the Near East largely as a result of the Palestine question.” State’s recommendation was to avoid Zionist activists and think about America’s long-term interests.

Truman (like Trump) had a low opinion of expert advice. In 1947, he ordered a reluctant U.S. ambassador vote “yes” in the United Nations General Assembly on the creation of the Jewish state. The contrary assessment among the diplomats Truman derided as the “striped pants boys” was, I think it is fair to say, misguided.  

More recently, we see that much of the "Arab world" actually has had a "meh" response to the Jerusalem announcement:

When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey called an emergency summit of the Organization of Islamic States to protest Trump’s Jerusalem decision, more than half of the invited heads of state and prime ministers didn’t bother to show up.

And then there is the approach of the Most Equal Comrade. As we've learned in the last few days, the MEC's administration apparently was letting Iranian proxy Hezbollah run cocaine into the United States, because it was more important to the MEC - and his State Department - to get a worthless "deal" in Iran's nuclear program. That kind of emphasis on appeasement of a mortal enemy was on full display in his answer to a question about the Israel-Palestinian issue:

In an appearance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he was asked if reining in Iran’s nuclear ambitions was a necessary precursor to reviving the peace process. “If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way,” he replied. “To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians -- between the Palestinians and the Israelis -- then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat.”

With the recent Jerusalem announcement, and the presence of Nikki Haley, who has, over the course of this year proven to be a national treasure, America seems to finally be getting its head on straight regarding what actual problems are in the Mideast, and what phenomena aren't really such a being deal.

 

 

Memo to Senate Pubs: back away from this poisonous EEOC renomination while there's still time

J. Christian Adams at PJ Media tells the eye-opening tale of how a nature-denying, civilization-wrecking agent of toxicity insinuated herself into an influential government agency, and how Republicans on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee are asleep at the wheel as the opportunity to remove her arises:

In 2010, conservative powerhouses like the Family Research Council, American Family Association, Liberty Counsel, and Traditional Values Coalition vigorously opposed the nomination of Chai Feldblum to a seat on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Their opposition to Feldblum in 2010 was based on the belief -- later proven correct -- that Feldblum would use her perch to radicalize conceptions of family, gender, and who should be in which bathroom.

So what about in 2017?

Feldblum has been renominated for an EEOC slot as part of a package deal, and those who know Feldblum best are saying that Republicans have been hoodwinked into renominating her.

Some Republicans, apparently including some inside the White House, think it’s fine to put an activist radical on the EEOC in order to get two more Republicans confirmed to the EEOC.

But Feldblum is no ordinary radical. As one lawyer familiar with EEOC practice tells me, “she’s worth three Republicans” because of her radicalism and willingness to fight to transform notions of gender, family, and life.

Paul Mirengoff aptly points out at Powerline:

It seems obvious that getting a GOP majority on the EEOC a couple of months early is not worth five more years of Chai Feldblum, plus the likelihood that she will become Chair of the Commission if Democrats win the presidency in 2020. It’s not even close.

So who is Chai Feldblum, and how did we arrive at a point where an activist left-wing radical was appointed by the president for a commission that has the power to interfere with small businesses' freedom?

Feldblum is the ideological architect of all of the most radical LGBTWHATEVER agenda items of the Obama presidency: transvestites in girls locker rooms, lawless expansion of federal employment oversight, you name it.

So why would Feldblum be renominated?

There is backstory on Feldblum that hasn’t been fully reported. All of the normal clearance and vetting procedures usually used for Senate-confirmed nominees were short-circuited. Her nomination was rushed through the Senate HELP Committee. Feldblum even bragged to some that her goal was to trick Republicans before they knew what was happening.

The goal was to get Feldblum’s nomination in front of the Senate as fast as possible. Why would Republicans play along?

Three main reasons. One is cluelessness:

The answer: To get the EEOC nominations of Republicans Janet Dhillion and Daniel Gade confirmed, which highlights a curious connection in this saga we will revisit in a moment.
Getting Dhillon and Gade confirmed were seen as the most important goals. Keeping a radical activist off the commission -- one who has bent concepts of gender and was the author of the most extreme transgender policies of the Obama era -- was not considered to be as important as getting Dhillon and Gade on the Commission.
So many of President Trump’s supporters ask me how something like this can happen. Let’s try to decode it.

First, ideological illiteracy is to blame. Too many Beltway insiders are illiterate when it comes to the radicalism of the Left, and in this case the radicalism of Feldblum. They don’t understand the zealous creative destruction that animates activists like Feldblum. They think two Republicans beat one Democrat. Paper covers rock. They don’t understand that radicals like Feldblum are soldiers in the "fundamental transformation" that was part of the Obama age. 

Some with knowledge tell me a young, inexperienced staffer was almost entirely responsible for cooking up the Feldblum bargain. The staffer was more interested in getting Dhillon and Gade confirmed and couldn’t be worried about keeping the transgender/gay radical agenda of the Obama administration alive at the EEOC. More perhaps on that another day. For now, it’s not too late for the Senate to demand a better dish, one that doesn’t feature Feldblum. There are plenty of other Democrats out there who aren’t radical change agents. Go find one.

 

The  second is the desire to try to get a seat at what they perceive as the cool kids' table:

Second, too many Republicans are still afraid of what Chuck Schumer and National Public Radio think. 

Also, they have residual symptoms of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome. They have not fully considered how ugly someone like Feldblum can get in the pursuit of the obliteration of recognition of how nature is designed.

Third, they don’t understand how a vocal Leftist in the minority on the EEOC can drive the entire agenda of the EEOC, especially one with so many connections at the New York Times and NPR. Passive majorities afraid of ideological brawls can’t beat a streetfighter.

She's been in a position to do damage more than long enough. Time for an entirely different way of viewing this situation.

 

 

 

Don't go to - or send your offspring to - these gulags

Institutions of higher learning used to be the world's premier environment for the free exchange of ideas. Now they are sewers of rank tyranny:

Over 90 percent of the America's top colleges maintain policies regulating campus free speech, with one third employing severely restrictive policies, according to a study released Tuesday.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reported in its annual end-of-year analysis on campus speech and harassment policies—what FIRE terms "speech codes"—found that over half of the 461 schools included in FIRE's study continue to use methods that have some "chilling effect" on expression.

One in nine campuses continue to preserve "free speech zones," or limited strips of campus to which administrators at public institutions restrict demonstrations, pamphleting, and other public expressions of views, according to the report. These zones can make up less than 1 percent of a campus, according to FIRE.

Samantha Harris, vice president of policy research at FIRE, said such policy is "blatantly unconstitutional."

They also have served, since the Middle Ages, as the repositories of the best Western civilization has produced in the way of literature, art, philosophy and science, thereby ensuring that there would noble cultural advancement. We are going to have to look elsewhere for such preservation of the best that has been thought and written.

Congress ends the year with a solid achievement - and it's on its signature issue

There's one more hoop to jump through after the Senate's passing of what has turned out to be a pretty darn nice tax bill.  Due to an arcane procedural glitch, the House has to vote on it again, which may be taking place as I write this. Then it's off to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue for a presidential signature.

Over 80 percent of US taxpayers will see that they are keeping more of their own money. Corporations get to keep a lot more of their own money. Positive economic effects will manifest themselves in short order.

Of course, the Freedom-Haters are howling in existential anguish. That may make for a post unto itself, but I don't want to make it the main point here, other than to reiterate the basic truth that needs to be the first rejoinder whenever they start in with their statist rhetoric: The money belongs to individual citizens and various private organizations, not the government.

And there is still the issue of the $20 trillion-plus debt, which cannot be solved without making major changes to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

But freedom and prosperity are getting a major boost, and that's a fine thing.

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.