Wednesday roundup

Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion in Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, the recent SCOTUS decision declining to review an Indiana statute prohibiting abortion on the basis of race, sex or disability, appears at First Things. He delves into the ugly truth about the relationship between abortion and eugenics.

Some parsing is required in the case of self-help guru Tony Robbins' fall from grace. The charges of sexual harassment? Definitely must be looked into. The use of the n-word in the 1980s? For cryin' out loud, his point was that the word could be defused of its charge.

Apropos yesterday's post about the VSG and North Korea, an insightful article today at New York Times / MSN by Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker on how the VSG is also undercutting Bolton on Iran:

Mr. Trump suggested that he did not share Mr. Bolton’s enthusiasm for trying to overthrow the government in Iran. “It has a chance to be a great country with the same leadership,” he said. “We’re not looking for regime change. I just want to make that clear. We’re looking for no nuclear weapons.”

Mr. Bolton did not address the matter afterward, and a spokesman declined to comment on Tuesday. Speculation arose when the national security adviser skipped the state dinner, although it was not clear why. But rather than fly home with the president, as an aide worried about his position might do, Mr. Bolton flew directly to the United Arab Emirates for meetings, a sign to his allies of the confidence he has in his relationship with Mr. Trump.

“Ambassador Bolton works for the president, and the president sets the policy,” said Fred Fleitz, the president of the Center for Security Policy who was Mr. Bolton’s chief of staff until last year. “Bolton has said for years: ‘Look, I work for the guy who won the election. He sets the policy.’ That’s always been his approach under any president he’s worked for.”

For his part, Mr. Bolton has privately expressed his own frustration with the president, according to several officials, viewing him as unwilling to push for more transformative changes in the Middle East. At the same time, his allies said he had been misunderstood, cast as favoring military action in Venezuela, for instance, when in fact they say he does not.

This is yet another example of how flaky the VSG's approach to foreign policy. You're not going to get "no nuclear weapons" with the current Iranian regime. It hates the West and has since 1979.

And ain't this a dandy development? China is sending strong signals that it could well weaponize the sale of rare earth minerals.  

It's this kind of stuff - today's edition

Okay, so Ian Bremer had to eat some crow over the tweet, in which he quoted Trump as saying, in Tokyo "Kim Jong Un is smarter and would make a better president than Sleepy Joe Biden," that he clearly hoped to fool the public into believing was from the Very Stable Genius, and the VSG got to do some crowing.

ian bremmer‏Verified account @ianbremmer

My tweet yesterday about Trump preferring Kim Jong Un to Biden as President was meant in jest. The President correctly quoted me as saying it was a “completely ludicrous” statement. I should have been clearer. My apologies.

6:02 AM - 27 May 2019

But don't you think the "should have been clearer" business was a nice touch? Kind of reminiscent of AOC's attempt to weasel out of meaning that we literally had 12 years when she said it (repeatedly).

And here's the VSG's gloat-back:

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

.@ianbremmer now admits that he MADE UP “a completely ludicrous quote,” attributing it to me. This is what’s going on in the age of Fake News. People think they can say anything and get away with it. Really, the libel laws should be changed to hold Fake News Media accountable!

1:57 AM - 27 May 2019

Ah, but the case can be made that he might as well have said it.

. . . hours later, at a joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump came damn close to replicating the contents of Bremmer’s invented quote.

In response to a question about North Korea’s recent missile tests, Trump glowingly praised Kim, saying that “Kim Jong Un, or Chairman Kim, as some people say, is looking to create a nation that has great strength economically.”

He also called Kim “a very smart man” who “gets it well.”

Later in the same press conference, Trump slammed Biden on both of the issues for which he praised Kim, agreeing with the dictator that  “Joe Biden is a low-IQ individual,” and that as vice president, “Joe Biden was a disaster.”

“His administration, with President Obama, they were basically a disaster when it came to so many things, whether it was economy, whether it was military, defense.  No matter what it was, they had a lot problems,” Trump said. “So, I’m not a fan.”

In explicit terms, Trump said that Kim is “very smart” and Biden is “low I.Q.,” while the part about Kim making “a better President than Sleepy Joe Biden” was left as an inference.

Bremmer later apologized for and deleted his tweet, but perhaps he now owes Trump a “thank you” for so promptly replacing it with real quotes.

And then there's this VSG tweet, which is indeed from his own stubby fingers:

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

North Korea fired off some small weapons, which disturbed some of my people, and others, but not me. I have confidence that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me, & also smiled when he called Swampman Joe Biden a low IQ individual, & worse. Perhaps that’s sending me a signal?

6:32 PM - 25 May 2019

The grownups in his administration definitely have their hands full, don't they? Kudlow has to play cleanup after the boastings about tariffs, and Pompeo and Bolton have to deal with the likes of this.

But jobs numbers and judicial appointments!

 

By golly, there was a time when adverse weather had the sense of decorum to dress appropriately!

In a sense, Sandy from Westchester is the gift that keeps on giving, but she's also a sadness-inducing reminder that post-America now routinely venerates utterly unserious public figures.

Fresh off of her proclamation that planting cauliflower in community gardens has colonialist implications comes this. You see, there was a tornado warning in Washington, DC, which could not remain bereft of commentary imbuing it with ideological significance:

Ocasio-Cortez discussed how tornadoes were part of the threat of climate change. 

“The climate crisis is real y’all,” she said. “Guess we’re at casual tornadoes in growing regions of the country?” 

“Other regions deal with wildfires, tornadoes, droughts, etc. But ALL of these threats will be increasing in intensity as climate crisis grows and we fail to act appropriately,” she said.

I don't know how clever my retort actually is. It basically writes itself, doesn't it?

Within recent memory, tornadoes used to have enough sense of what was appropriate to give notice, confirmed by email, that it was coming to call, and would arrive attired in a tuxedo or evening gown!

Like a lot of opinion venues, I don't want LITD to become preoccupied with all the low-hanging fruit that Sandy provides, but this one was too good to pass up on.

Friday roundup

Stacey Abrams, the poster girl for delusion chic:

Speaking at the Center for American Progress’s Ideas Conference, Abrams said: "The notion of identity politics has been peddled for the past 10 years and it’s been used as a dog whistle to say we shouldn’t pay too much attention to the voices coming into progress. I would argue that identity politics is exactly who we are and exactly how we won."

Why is this guy still drawing a breath instead of suffering Hell's eternal torment? 

John Walker Lindh, the man convicted of helping the Taliban following the September 11 attacks, was just released from federal prison in Terre Haute.

Lindh’s case began in November of 2001 when he was fighting alongside the Taliban. The California native had converted to Islam as a teenager and eventually traveled overseas to fight alongside radical Islamists.

Not two months after 9/11, Lindh was captured in Afghanistan, detained and interviewed by a CIA officer, a former Marine named Mike Spann. Just hours later, Spann was killed in a prisoner uprising at the same facility. In the aftermath of that uprising, Lindh was brought back to the U.S. and charged with conspiring to kill Americans and engaging in terrorism.

A conviction could have meant life in prison. Instead, attorneys accepted a plea deal approved by President George W. Bush. Those charges were dropped and Lindh only pleaded guilty to serving in the Taliban army and carrying weapons while doing so. That resulted in a 20-year sentence. With good behavior, Lindh will be released on May 23 after serving 17 years.

AOC finds the ideological significance of cauliflower:

 In a stream-of-consciousness discussion of composting, the Green New Deal, and community gardens, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lamented cauliflower as symbol of colonialism.

“Looks like they’ve got composting going on, which is so awesome, too, because composting is really hard to do in a neighborhood like this. We just don’t have the pick ups and the ease of it that a lot of other communities have. So that’s really how you do it, right, that is such a core component of the Green New Deal, is having all of these projects make sense in a cultural context. And it’s an area that I — we get the most pushback on, because people say, like, why do you need to do that? That’s too hard. But when you really think about it, when someone says that it’s too hard to do a green space that grows yucca instead of, I don’t know, cauliflower or something, what you’re doing is that you’re taking a colonial approach to environmentalism, and that is why a lot of communities of color get resistant to certain environmentalist movements, because they come with the colonial lens on them. And it should be no surprise that sometimes a lot of these projects don’t work out occasionally because our communities are naturally attuned to live in an environmentally conscious way.”

Or, you know, the decision to grow cauliflower might be a reflection of what plants will grow best in a garden with that temperature range, soil types, and rainfall level. Some yucca varieties can handle a range of temperature and rainfall, some can’t. All of this information is a Google search away, and one can fairly wonder why a U.S. congresswoman is weighing in on what vegetables should be grown in citizens’ gardens.

I always wonder about these situations in which a nation nearly immediately sours on a leader it has just elected. Such is apparently the case in Brazil:

Earlier this month a procession of Brazil’s military cabinet ministers came to President Jair Bolsonaro with the same clear message: muzzle your far-right keyboard warriors or your government will implode.

Propelled to the presidency by a vociferous army of online ideologues, including his sons, Bolsonaro’s government comprises an uneasy mix of radicals, pragmatists and economic liberals. In his five months in office, Bolsonaro has done little to rein in the extremist fringe, even when they target Congress, the Supreme Court and members of his own administration. The former members of the armed forces, who make up a third of his cabinet and constitute the moderate faction, have endured particularly vicious abuse.

Since the retired generals’ intervention, the public mud-slinging has ebbed a little, but the sense of division and improvisation in government has not. Bolsonaro’s approval ratings are sliding fast, while prominent erstwhile supporters who hoped for clean, decisive government have recanted, and legislators are beginning to jump ship. Even in financial markets, which helped carry the retired paratrooper to office, hope is fizzling. The real earlier this week reached an 8-month low. The presidency did not respond to a request for comment.

"I’m amazed by how weak Bolsonaro is politically. The government has everything going for it but sabotages itself with controversy and insults," said Renato Nobile, a Bolsonaro voter and the CEO of Genial Advisory, which manages over 30 billion reais ($7.4 billion) in assets. “Many people want the military, Mourao is more skilled than Bolsonaro,” he said in reference to Vice-President Hamilton Mourao, a four-star general.

The saving grace of the Trump administration is the grownups on board. Sohrab Ahmar interviews one of them in the New York Post:

“White House Reviews Military Plans Against Iran, in Echoes of Iraq War” screamed a New York Times headline.

“When you see that headline, it’s flashy, but it doesn’t begin to reflect the depth of the work that’s been done,” Pompeo says as we sit down for an interview at the plush Palace Hotel in Midtown.

Yes, the Pentagon updated a military contingency plan in case the Tehran regime escalated its attacks against US assets and interests in the Persian Gulf. But the plan was one of several options presented to the commander in chief. To go by that Times headline, and others like it, you would think Team Trump is driving America to war, willy-nilly; that Washington is the aggressor and Tehran the victim without agency.

Fact is, Iran has a “revolutionary, theocratic regime that is intent upon the destruction of the United States and Israel,” Pompeo tells me. “That’s the backdrop to all this.”

President Trump hasn’t boosted the risk of a confrontation by ratcheting up sanctions. “The risk is the same” as ever, and it comes from Iranian leaders who “have made the decision that they’re willing to contemplate attacks — kinetic, military attacks — against the United States.”

What’s new is that the United States under Trump will no longer entertain the fiction that Iran’s various militias and terror proxies are somehow independent of the regime.

Pompeo warns the Iranians: “Whether you subcontract, or you partner, or you train, or you equip, or you operate it, or you lead it, if you allow it to engage in attacks against Western interests — we’re not going to allow you to create public deniability. Because we’ll know full well what’s happening. That’s not going to stop us from attacking those who made the decisions to put Americans at risk.”

Theresa May resigns as UK Prime Minister. I realize that a move like Brexit is fraught with arcane considerations, but it seems to me that that just argues for the cleanest, most decisive break that can be accomplished, and she just spent a little too long in the realm of if-this-then-we-have-to-consider-that.  Stock up on popcorn for the Boris Johnson-Jeremy Corbin scramble to succeed her.

Great Sarah Hoyt essay at PJ Media on why the Left has to gin up alarm about "white supremacy."

It's this kind of stuff - today's edition

There's obviously nothing becoming, let alone productive, about Nancy Pelosi's call for someone in Trump's inner circle to stage an intervention, but count on the most embarrassing president in history to confirm the basis of her lambasting.

Pelosi went first, with demure shrugs and practiced sass. Then, as a tornado warning blared across Washington, Trump followed with a derisive nickname — something he had declined to give her, up to now.

“She’s a mess,” Trump told reporters at an afternoon news conference in which he lined up White House staff to testify to his calmness the day before when he walked out after three minutes at a meeting with Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer.

“Crazy Nancy. ... I watched Nancy and she was all crazy yesterday.”

As for himself, he declared, “I’m an extremely stable genius.”

People of little depth are also generally people of little imagination, as evidenced by the increasing mediocrity of the nicknames he confers.

I read this and thought, I don't even have to speculate that the spin will commence pretty much instantly. And sure enough, the next item I read was a post about it by the once-singularly-incisive-and-now-routinely-dismaying (she not only digs Trump, but Kurt Schlichter and Paul Joseph Watson as well) Bookworm.

How's this for lame and flimsy?

Yes, I know it’s tacky when he talks about “Crazy Nancy Pelosi” or “Dumb as a Rock” Rex Tillerson, but we are living in tacky times, with a political party now devoting its entire energy and political capital to destroying a president. Dems have no other goals than to thwart Trump. Abnormal times seem to call for abnormal measures.

Here’s the way I see it: Being tacky is not an impeachable offense. 

That's shameful. But it captures the essence of how Trump's shills views the lay of the land. They've completely lost sight of the fact that the waging war against the Democrats - and, to be sure, we must wage war against the Democrats - can be done far more effectively, in a way that presents a compelling case to those remaining citizens who are not ate up with tribalism. But as it is, you see, we have forfeited an essential arrow in our quiver: the conservative insistence on dignified bearing - on basic maturity.

It's still early in the day. I haven't checked out too many outlets yet, but I'm sure more "defenses" of this nature are being posted even now. For instance, I'll bet the daily lineup at Townhall will include an ample share of gleeful fist-pumping. If anyone out there has the stomach for how it's being treated at Gateway Pundit and American Greatness, let us know.

The dilemma for actual conservatives remains what it has been for four years. Leftists can hold this guy up and say, "Behold the face of the Right in modern America," and the Trump throne-sniffers will actually be in agreement with that basic utterance.

Jobs numbers and the GDP are in excellent shape, but culturally and spiritually, post-America is in the same state of rot it has been in for decades. And the economic good times are going to be fleeting, too. The number of people in a position to craft, implement and defend policy based on really and truly addressing this nation's $25-plus trillion debt is too few to matter.

Again, I say, I wish that someday I'd awaken to find that this blog's name had become obsolete, but such a bright morn still eludes me, and us.

A ringing defense of priesthood

Sohran Ahmari has a piece today at the Catholic Herald into which he launches by describing a Catholic men's gathering at Cape Cod that went like this:

They kicked things off with some hiking, they relaxed by a fireplace, they lunched. Then they read the Bible and “headed into the kitchen and gathered around a table, a processional provided with some liturgical oomph as Peter opened his mobile phone [and] played the ‘Glory Be’ he created by layering multiple recordings of his own voice”. But oops: “We forgot to plan a sign of peace. Vincent reminded us, and there followed 72 hugs.” Eventually, they performed a pseudo-consecration and took something like Communion. Then they went home.

After some more fleshing out of the contour of his argument, he makes this point:

Many faithful Catholics would no doubt agree that clericalism, in the pejorative sense of a privileged and unaccountable ecclesiastical class, bears some of the blame. But it doesn’t follow that Catholic priests should be “abolished”, any more than parents, teachers and the other population groups that include abusers.

Why is priesthood such an indispensable feature of Christianity?

Jesus’s main business is sacrifice, giving up his body and shedding his blood on the Cross for the redemption of humankind.

Sacri-fice (literally, “sacred work”) by definition requires a priesthood. Pagan civilisations the world over, seeking divine favours and expiation of sins, designated priests to carry out this important work, often in unspeakably gruesome ways. The people of Israel, to whom the one God first made himself known, also performed sacrifices. All those rams and heifers and lambs and turtledoves of the Old Testaments didn’t offer themselves on the altar; someone had to do it, a class of people set aside for God, the descendants of Aaron and the tribe of Levi.

Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled all sacrifice by making of himself the everlasting offering. As St Paul puts it in the Letter to the Hebrews (2:17), “he had to be made like his brethren in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and high priest in service of God, to make expiation for the sins of the people.”

Before making his expiation, Jesus Christ designated a class of people, all of them men, to commemorate his sacrifice and allow us to participate in it (Matthew 26:26-28). He also charged these men to teach and baptise all nations (Matthew 28:19) and granted them authority to forgive or retain sins (John 20:23; Matthew 16:19). A male priesthood, one that depended totally on the one high priesthood of Jesus, thus took form while he was still fulfilling his public ministry on earth.

It’s thus error bordering on dishonesty for Carroll to claim that the origins of “clericalism” – by which, again, he means the priesthood itself – “lie not in the Gospels but in the attitudes and organisational charts of the late Roman Empire”. Yes, the Catholic Church inherited some of the governance structures and forms of imperial Rome, but there is nothing inherently Roman about the celibate priesthood. And those Roman structures which the Church appropriated she transfigured and repurposed, as she always does, redirecting them to the salvation of souls.

Why has the Church survived countless splinterings and scandals for two millennia? Because, as Sohrabi says, there's always been a critical mass of priests who understood the real nature of their authority and bravely safeguarded it.

This isn't just a Catholic concern, by the way. The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, an evangelical organization, focuses much of its energies on defending the role of preacher as necessarily being filled by a man.

It's bracing, to be sure, to take an unflinching look at orthodox Christian doctrine. But it doesn't go away just because a given culture mocks and belittles it and tries to stamp it out. That's impossible to do to the Truth.

 

Booker makes government invasion of the family and ghoulish delight in fetal murder a campaign pillar

Dems creating new government bureaucracies is nothing new, but the one Corey Booker has in mind is a doozy:

Senator Cory Booker (D., N.J.) announced on Wednesday that he will create a “White House Office of Reproductive Freedom” if he triumphs in the expansive Democratic primary field and is elected president in 2020.

According to a plan released by Booker’s campaign, the office would coordinate with officials from multiple agencies to ensure the fulfillment of his administration’s reproductive-health priorities, including, among other things, access to abortion, contraception, paid family leave, and pregnancy care.

“Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country are mounting a coordinated attack on abortion access and reproductive rights,” Booker said in a statement. “A coordinated attack requires a coordinated response. That’s why on day one of my presidency, I will immediately and decisively take executive action to respond to these relentless efforts to erode Americans’ rights to control their own bodies. I will also pursue a legislative response, including legislation to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law.”

As part of this effort, Booker also vowed to reinstate funding for the United Nations Population Fund, which focuses on promoting global reproductive health. He also would reverse the Trump administration’s Mexico City policy, which prohibits clinics that receive federal funding under Title X from providing or promoting abortion overseas.

It checks off a lot of cultural-poison boxes, that's for sure: celebration of the killing of people who aren't born yet, perpetuation of the falsehood that contraception is hard to obtain, government telling private organizations how to conduct their affairs, and ceding US sovereignty to the hopelessly rotten United Nations.

Post-America is a weird place, but its voting population is not so far gone that it would put someone with this agenda in the Oval Office.

Thoughts on the VSG's handling of the infrastructure meeting with Pelosi and Schumer

It was classic VSG, that's for sure. Why did he agree to set such a meeting up in the first place? I suspect it was to stage what he did for maximum effect. Storm out just as it's beginning and immediately call an impromptu presser in the Rose Garden.

I would imagine that Pelosi's "coverup" remark hours earlier was the deal-breaker. From what we know of the way his mind works, he's fine with meeting with people with whom there is a track record of exchanged insults - the Kim summits come to mind - but he couldn't abide by one more after the meeting had been scheduled.

I do think he's on solid ground saying "no meetings about anything as long as you people are investigating me." It just would have been advisable to have that be the hard and fast rule as soon as the post-Mueller report Dem desperation began. After all, how can any negotiations be in good faith when it's clear that Dems are laser-focused on taking him down?

But the way he handled this reinforces the image of a petty and impulsive figure.

It does bring into sharp relief the extent to which post-America's government reflects the overall nation's brittleness. Deep hate is just part of the context now.

Post-American "education" is nothing but an arena of jackbootery - today's edition

Two examples.

This one demonizes one of the most useful plants on Earth:

This doesn’t appear to be some sort of spoof:

A cotton plant growing at Campbell Elementary School [in Arlington, Virginia] drew criticism online today, but Arlington Public Schools said allegations that staff were going to make kids “pick cotton” was a misunderstanding.

“At no time, never, was the school going to have students pick cotton,” said APS spokesman Frank Bellavia.

That prompts me to ask the following question: If the staff had said they were going to make only the white students pick cotton, would those same now-outraged people have applauded them?

Continuing:

Catherine Ashby, the Director of Communications for APS, tells ARLnow that a teacher planted cotton seeds in pots as an experiment to see how they would grow. Social media posts about the experiment from the teacher prompted objections from other educators.

“She tweeted about her experiment and what she was growing, and that’s what got other staff members upset about what she was doing,” said Ashby.

Social media again. The center of our outrage age.

More [emphasis mine]:

Community members started talking online about the incident after an email circulated from Campbell Principal Maureen Nesselrode, who called a staff meeting to discuss what to do with the plant. Bellavia said the plant was destroyed after the meeting.

So the modern Red Guards aren’t content with just destroying reputations of living people or statues of dead people. Offending plants must be destroyed.

And this one demonizes the right of the accused to representation in court:

A dean at Harvard Law School has come under attack by social justice warriors, and finally “relieved of his position” by Harvard University, for offering his skills in the defense of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. The poor little flowers are objecting to a Harvard professor participating in the legal defense of a man accused of sexual crimes. 

But wait! Isn’t that what defense lawyers do? Isn’t that, in other words, precisely what Harvard Law School is supposed to be teaching its students — the future top lawyers of America — namely that justice in a civil society demands that everyone be entitled to a defense, entitled to have his day in court? Doesn’t the rule of law specifically define the lawyer’s role as representing clients to the best of his abilities, in accordance with the law’s objective procedures, and on the principle that everyone is innocent until proven guilty? Should Harvey Weinstein (or anyone else) be denied legal representation and the presumption of innocence because the crimes of which he is accused are especially revolting. On the contrary, is it not precisely such a case that tests and proves the nobility of a civil society’s principles of justice? 

The social justice warriors (read my explanation of that concept here) in both Harvard’s student body and its administration, are demanding that the essential premises of criminal justice in America be suspended in cases that they personally find distasteful or “triggering.” In other words, they are placing their subjective emotional responses above the objective tenets of equality before the law. That is to say, they are thinking and behaving like tyrants.

And these are Harvard Law students, the future movers and shakers of America’s legal system, its future star attorneys, its future constitutional interpreters, its future professors of law, its future supreme court justices. 

Both are based on the passive-aggressive means of cultural warfare that the modern Left has perfected. "I'll melt if I have to be exposed to anything unsettling!"

"Conservatives" who shout the latest GDP and employment numbers from the rooftops are throwing up a smokescreen regarding the pervasive rot of our culture, because reversal of said rot would require a level of astuteness, courage and effort that goes way beyond that required for providing people with job opportunities.  For fifty-five years, Western civilization has ceded ground to those bent on its destruction, because it has lost sight of the transcendent and the immutable. Everything is now ephemeral. If it's all relative and fleeting, what's there to defend?

 

It's this kind of stuff - today's edition

Look, I'm no Pete Buttigieg fan. He'd be up for removing Thomas Jefferson's name from public institutions. He's cool with late-term abortions. He's one of those mayors who doll up their downtowns while chronically blighted neighborhoods remain so and calls it economic revitalization. And he wears his unusual sex life like a badge.

But by appearing on Fox News, he brought out the Very Stable Genius's petty streak in a most cringe-worthy way:

President Trump on Sunday criticized Fox News, accusing the network of "wasting airtime" over its coverage of South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and other Democratic 2020 contenders.

"Hard to believe that @FoxNews is wasting airtime on Mayor Pete, as Chris Wallace likes to call him," he wrote, referring to Buttigieg and the Fox News host.

Fox News is scheduled to host a town hall with Buttigieg on Sunday night. 

"They forgot the people who got them there. Chris Wallace said, 'I actually think, whether you like his opinions or not, that Mayor Pete has a lot of substance...fascinating biography.' Gee, he never speaks well of me - I like Mike Wallace better...and Alfred E. Newman will never be President!" Trump added, doubling down on his comparison of the mayor to the character Alfred E. Neuman who appears on the cover of Mad Magazine.  

If he's going to  that level this early, it's going to be one long election cycle.

It was heartening to see someone of Brit Hume's stature and depth provide the requisite response:

Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume had a few choice words for Donald Trump after the president called out the network on Sunday for hosting a town hall with Democratic presidential hopeful and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

“Say this for Buttigieg. He’s willing to be questioned by Chris Wallace, something you’ve barely done since you’ve been president,” Hume tweeted. “Oh, and covering candidates of both parties is part of the job of a news channel.”

My question remains what it has been since the summer 2015 descent of the golden elevator at Trump Tower: What would it take to embarrass the VSG's followers. Not just the ridiculous ones, like Wayne Allen Root, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Charlie Kirk and Chris Buskirk, but the ones who ostensible have an erudite bearing, some credentials as people of substance and depth, like Victor Davis Hanson and Conrad Black.

"Hey, he'll hit back if you come at him!"

Is this really the way to depict this kind of behavior?

I think not. It's showing his thin skin and snottiness to the entire world.

It lends credence to all the stories we've heard from former ghostwriters, former administration officials and anonymous sources in his circle. He''s winging it. He has no core set of values, principles or ideas. He can't stand anything less than being fawned over. The only reading material he's ever interested in is media coverage of him.

This is why the movement within conservatism that continues to find him objectionable has not gone away. We will not make excuses for this kind of thing.

If we have to live with him for the time being in order to stave off the leftist murder of Western civilization, so be it. But give him full-throated support? Not gonna happen.

Saturday roundup

Incredibly powerful column at Townhall today by Ryan Bomberg entitled, "I Am the 1 Percent t Used to Justify 100 Percent of Abortions."

I am that 1 percent. 

My biological mother was raped, yet she rejected the violence of abortion. I was adopted and loved instead. I’m not the “residue of the rapist”, as Senator Vivian Davis Figures described those like me who were conceived in rape. I’m a human being with equal worth to anyone planned. I couldn’t control the circumstances of my conception. Could you, senator? 

As an adoptee who grew up wanted and loved in a multiracial family of 15 and as an adoptive father with four children, I’m here to say there’s another side of this painful issue. There are others like me who were conceived in the violence of rape, like my friend Rebecca Kiessling, an attorney and passionate defender of life. There’s the former Miss Pennsylvania, Valerie Gatto, Trayvon Clifton, Monica Kelsey, Jim Sable, Pam Stenzel, and many more whose stories offer a different perspective than mainstream media’s myopic pro-abortion view. There are women who became mothers from rape who courageously chose life, like Jennifer Christie, Liz Carl, and Rebekah Berg. 

Incisive essay by Dan McCarthy at The American Mind entitled "The Poisonous Religion of the Ruling Class."  A taste:

Multiculturalism is a substitute for organic identities connected to neighborhoods, religion, and class: real friends, places, and economic conditions. The group identities with which multiculturalism is concerned are actually ideological identities in racial, cultural, or sexual disguise. Evidence of this is to be seen in the fact that white liberals are more devoted to multiculturalism than the non-elite members of any minority typically are.
Multiculturalism means more in the faculty lounge than it does on the streets, and its evangelists who proclaim the faith and condemn heretics hail overwhelmingly from the ranks of the educated. Multiculturalism unites and militarizes the members of an educated class whose education chiefly concerns their own fitness to rule—on account of their greater enlightenment and moral sensitivity, of course, but also their recognition of the fitness to rule in other rulers. They respect the right idols, the right kinds of authority for their class.
Multiculturalism is a class ideology, but not in a purely economic sense: it binds a group that is distinct in its position within the social hierarchy together and provides it a common spirit. It is the religion of the ruling class. Google provided a telling illustration of this when it tried to suppress the Claremont Institute’s criticism of multiculturalism. Google is not weak, oppressed, or lacking in power, wealth, and social standing—just the opposite.
The U.S. has a highly democratic society with an expansive view of social equality. A religion or group ideology that emphasizes hierarchy is therefore bound to provoke outrage. Multiculturalism avoids that by being a belief system which Google executives and university administrators, government officials and millionaire celebrities alike can enforce in the name of the weak, rather than a transparent assertion of their own social superiority. More specifically, multiculturalism uses racial and sexual identities as weapons in a war against class enemies: the historically guilt-ridden Protestant middle, which remains guilt-ridden whether or not it’s Protestant anymore; the uneducated (and therefore deplorably uncatechized); and the dwindling number of elite Americans who remember what self-governing liberty is supposed to be.
Beyond supplying a mythology of justification for power and camouflaging class warfare, multiculturalism, crucially, identifies an enemy. The enemy is white, Christian and Jewish, heterosexual, “cisgendered,” bourgeois, and consciously or habitually conservative. In short, the enemy is what were once the country’s mainstream and typically majority identities—and in fact, still are. This definition of the majoritarian enemy makes sense if multiculturalism is understood as a small and elite class’s effort to assert and maintain power over a larger populace that would otherwise resist its rule.

Well, well. Walmart announces price increases.

Vodkapundit observes that, for all the favorable numbers for Joe Biden, his fierce opponents in the Democrat party are awfully vocal about finding him unacceptable.

Steven Hayward at Power Line reports on an eye-opener from Down Under.

Australia held a national election yesterday which all of the polls predicted for weeks would be won handily by the Labour Party. The ruling Liberal Party (which is the conservative party in Australian politics because they still understand the historic meaning of liberalism) has been in office for over a decade, and had struggled as ruling parties often do when they grow stale in office. In fact leadership fights within the Liberal Party had left it in chaos heading into the election campaign. The pollsters and the media called it an “unlosable election” for Labour.

But in a stunning upset, the Liberal Party has won the election. It sounds a lot like our 2016 election, no? Apparently lots of voters told the pollsters one thing, but voted differently in the voting booth. (Update: Keep in mind that Australia has mandatory voting—you get fined something like $50 if you don’t cast a ballot—so this upset can’t be a polling error, since polling ought to be simpler in such circumstances. The upset can’t be because of a sampling or weighting error as sometimes happens in our elections. It means lots of people really did lie to pollsters. Good for them.)

The most interesting angle to this upset is that the Labour Party went all-in on climate change.  

Sounds like we should add Australia to the list - The Netherlands, Finland, and Alberta - enumerated in the post below about Western countries / provinces eschewing climate hooey.

 

Barney & Clyde - episode six

It's here.

Pour yourself something bracing and join us at the bar for another hour of our fortnightly and forthrightly delivered exchanges regarding cultural, economic and political matters currently on our nation’s plate.
Four segments to this installment: Maybe Some Day We’ll Try an Actual Free Market, They Really Said That, the Hyperbolic Chamber, and Old News.

The appeasement crowd's Bolton-is-a-warmonger canard

Matthew Continetti, writing at National Review, looks at how the Left is deftly disseminating this meme:

Whatever the opposite of a rush to war is — a crawl to peace, maybe — America is in the middle of one. Since May 5, when John Bolton announced the accelerated deployment of the Abraham Lincoln carrier group to the Persian Gulf in response to intelligence of a possible Iranian attack, the press has been aflame with calls for America to show restraint, pursue diplomacy, and rein in the madman with the mustache before he starts a war.

Never mind that President Trump, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Patrick Shanahan, and Bolton have not said a single word about a preemptive strike, much less a full-scale war, against Iran. Never mind that the president’s reluctance for overseas intervention is well known. The antiwar cries are not about context, and they are certainly not about deterring Iran. Their goal is saving President Obama’s nuclear deal by manipulating Trump into firing Bolton and extending a lifeline to the regime.

It’s a storyline that originated in Iran. Toward the end of April, Zarif showed up in New York and gave an interview to Reuters where he said, “I don’t think [Trump] wants war,” but “that doesn’t exclude him basically being lured into one” by Bolton. On May 14, an adviser to Rouhani tweeted at Trump, “You wanted a better deal with Iran. Looks like you are going to get a war instead. That’s what happens when you listen to the mustache. Good luck in 2020!”

And now this regime talking point is everywhere. “It’s John Bolton’s world. Trump is just living in it,” write two former Obama officials in the Los Angeles Times. “John Bolton is Donald Trump’s war whisperer,” writes Peter Bergen on CNN.com. “Trump’s potential war with Iran is all John Bolton’s doing. But it might also be his undoing,” says the pro-Iran Trita Parsi on NBCNews.com. “Is Trump Yet Another U.S. President Provoking a War?” asks Robin Wright of The New Yorker. Guess her answer.

“We cannot repeat the days before the Iraq war when even many of our most reliable news outlets repeated and amplified what was, in fact, a flimsy case for war,” Wendy Sherman writes in the New York Times. She would rather our most reliable news outlets repeat and amplify anti-Bolton talking points instead. Sure, America suspects Iran was involved when “four commercial tankers were reportedly sabotaged off the coast of the United Arab Emirates,” and “Saudi Arabia also reported that drones sent by Iranian-supported Houthis attacked Saudi oil facilities.” But, look, “Iran has denied this.” What more do you need to know?

In the first LITD post today - the one about Brett Kavanaugh - I make the point that there are two tiers of leftism at work in the savaging of right-of-center judicial nominees: the ones who see everything through a power-dynamics lens, and the true believers who really think their worldview will lead to a world of peace, love, tofu and spouts. The same thing is at play here. As Continetti, shows, a leading figure in the Most Equal Comrade's administration let the cat out of the bag. I'm speaking of Ben Rhodes, he of the fine-arts masters degree, who describes tactics used to drum up support for patty-cake with Iran that more than faintly recall the front-group tactics used by the Soviet Union during the Cold War:

This is the Iran echo chamber at work. Recall former Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes’s admission to the New York Times Magazine in 2016, when he said, “We created an echo chamber” to attack the Iran deal’s opponents through leaks and tips to the D.C. press. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.” And: “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project, and whomever else. So we know the tactics that worked.” They worked because “the average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Continetti bluntly states the bottom line of how Iran is reacting to the present juncture:

Context is all. On April 8, the president announced he was designating the IRGC a terrorist organization, threatening its financial base. On April 22, Pompeo announced that the United States would end waivers for sanctions on Iranian oil. That same day, Iran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz. On May 8, one year after the United States withdrew from the nuclear deal, Iran threatened to follow suit.

“Rouhani did not signal the end of the deal entirely,” reported CNBC.com, “but gave Europe an ultimatum: It will have 60 days to either follow the Trump administration or resume oil trade with Iran to save the agreement, violating U.S. sanctions. A failure to do the latter would prompt Tehran to return to high level uranium enrichment, the Iranian leader said.”

This isn’t diplomacy. It’s nuclear blackmail. And it’s a sign of desperation. The Iranians are in a box. U.S. sanctions are crushing the economy, but if they leave the agreement with Europe, they will be back to square one. To escape the box, you try to punch your way out. That’s why Iran has assumed a threatening posture: Provoking an American attack could bolster waning domestic support for the regime and divide the Western alliance. 

The fact is that John Bolton is indispensable. Given the Very Stable Genius's sketchy understanding of a fundamental principle of foreign policy - that you don't appease rogue states - the close proximity of an advisor whose understanding of it is deep and strong is essential to maximizing the possibility of a secure US and a stable world.