Finally, some initiatives to counter that insidious 1619 Project

A reassuring development:

The Bob Woodson Center and Washington Examiner is offering an alternative to The New York Times and Pulitzer Center’s “1619 Project.” Theirs is aptly named “The 1776 Initiative.”

Responses to the 1619 Project are popping up everywhere. Countless conservative scholars have weighed in, both Civil War and founding-era historians have teamed up to cry foul, Hillsdale College is offering an online course to counter the narrative, the Heritage Foundation has compiled a trove of essays titled “1776: A Celebration of America,” and the National Association of Scholars has started a “1620 Project.”

Woodson's project has some heavy hitters among its participants:

The 1776 Initiative is headed by Bob Woodson, a former civil rights activist, head of the National Urban League Department of Criminal Justice, and resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. The 1776 Initiative also has a plethora of well-known and respected contributors, such as syndicated columnist Clarence Page, Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institution, Glenn Loury, professor of economics and social science at Brown University, and many more.

The Woodson Center press release describes the contributors as a “consortium of top black academics, columnists, social service providers, business leaders and clergy from across America who are committed to telling the complete history of America and black Americans from 1776 to present.” 

I like the way the Washington Examiner went about announcing it:

The Washington Examiner announced the 1776 Initiative in honor of famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ birthday, saying the contributors share an aversion to the “infantilization of black America or the denial of blacks’ agency throughout their history” and a distaste for “pseudo scholarship” that reduces American history to a history of racism and that consigns black Americans to the permanent status of victim.

I know the Human Rights Commission in the city where I live has the insinuating of the 1619 Project into out local school curriculum on its front burner. If the school board has any integrity, it will insist that 1776 Initiative materials be included wherever 1619 Project content is considered.

A snapshot of a day that will be talked about for some time to come

Some readers know that some of the bonus content I've offered to the LITD Patreon community consists of compilations of archived posts in various categories, going back to this site's earliest days (2012). It's provided illuminating glimpses into fairly recent history, allowing me (and you in the community) the opportunity to revisit key moments from which chains of development were launched. (It's also given me the chance to observe how my blogging style has evolved. I've backed away from certain rhetorical devices as the entire dynamic between sociopolitical forces has shifted - and a major new force (Trumpism) has emerged.)

My perspective on some of those early posts may have changed, but I haven't come across any that I regret writing. I was giving my most honest assessment of particular points in time, and those points in time have proven to have lasting significance. Those posts have a kind of time-capsule significance.

It's in that spirit that it seems to me a lasting documentation of the lay of the land in the second week of March 2020 is in order. So much is happening today that it can make one's head swim.

I haven't had much to say about the coronavirus, mainly because people with far more expertise in the public health realm are still speaking as if the jury is out. Statistics show that other viruses, including the common flu -which is a broad-brush way to speak about a range of microbes - kill far more people proportionally than this virus has so far. Those recommending a balance between prudential precaution and continuance of normal daily life seem to be the adults in the room at the moment.

As I say, I'm no public health authority, but it seems plain that Donald Trump's attempts to convey the message that everything is under control are looking increasingly flimsy:

Fissures between the White House and national health agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have begun to expand as the coronavirus pandemic spreads to more American states, creating dissonance between President Donald Trump and the professionals tasked with containing the virus further.

The two sides have grown increasingly distrustful of one another, people inside both the CDC and the White House say, as officials on each side question decisions that either appear designed to downplay the growing crisis or to generate further concern.

The cracks are falling along predictable lines. While health officials have sought to present a realistic and cautious picture of the national situation, Trump and his political allies are hoping to relay an altogether different message: that the virus is contained, Americans face little risk, and life should proceed as normal.

And it's true that while concerns about global supply-chain disruption due to this virus are a significant factor in the stock market free fall we're seeing, it's also being driven by a fissure between OPEC and another oil producer that is normally its ally, namely, Russia. Saudi Arabia is dealing with the problem of over-production by initiating a price war. 

Elevating domestic politics to the level of these possible calamities may seem inappropriate generally speaking, but we are well into an election year, and the stakes involved in the circumstances that are appearing demand our consideration.

Trump's cocktail of bombast and denial is, of course, unhelpful. The nature of what the alternative to his antics is going to be has changed in the last couple of weeks, though.

There are two left standing on the Democrat side. Aside from the matter of that party asking itself, given the primacy of identity politics to its raison d'être,   how it came to the juncture at which the choice would be between two straight white men in their late 70s, there are problems of how either would be perceived by the overall voting public once we've arrived at the general-election phase of the current cycle.

Bernie Sanders's marked decline in electability stems from the Democrats' realization that his explicit proclamation of what all the original lineup of candidates, to one degree or another, had stood for, was beyond palatable to most Americans. There are, of course, those of the opinion, that his overt radicalism is exactly what Democrats will need to defeat Trump, but Super Tuesday's outcome would seem to indicate that this is a niche outlook.

And there seems to be a hint of desperation in the recent spate of endorsements for Biden. Does anyone really think that Kamala Harris's little video oozed sincerity, particularly given their raw moments of interaction on the debate stage? Not only does Biden make a tepid standard-bearer for 2020 progressivism, the question of whether his bodily frame - particularly the command center within his skull - is up to the rigors of the last eight months of a presidential campaign now looms large.

Again, as in the case of the coronavirus, I'm far from able to conclusively assess someone's mental fitness, but evidence that Biden's is not at its peak is piling up.

If he really is cognitively fading, what does it say about Democrats, and that strange sliver of conservative Trump skepticism that finds Biden a viable alternative, that they might be willing to put a man through the coming ordeal when he should be resting comfortably at home? Is that really any way to rescue a nation from the present incoherence, and the cult following that sustains it?

So that is the LITD snapshot of where things stand in post-America mid-afternoon March 9, 2020.

We'll muddle through in some fashion. There's a sense, though, that developments are occurring that will have ramifications for our range of options on a number of levels of daily life for at least the intermediate term.

Barney & Clyde - Season 2, Episode 5

Clyde and I looked at each other as we put a wrap on this one and knew we'd just recorded a B&C for the ages. 

So welcome back to the Libation Station. Pull up a stool, pour yourself something bracing and join us as we discuss:

1. Clyde's Report on Libertarian Presidential Candidates who attended the Libertarian Party of Indiana's 2020 convention.

2. The New Right via Oren Cass presents the American Compass Project 

3. The Dark Horse and the Dropouts: Biden blows into first pace when Mayor Pete, Amy Klobuchar, and a wishy washy Liz Warren drop out before the voters can decide. What did Biden promise the dropouts?

4. He Really Said That!? The newest rantings from the Very Stable Genius himself... Donald J Trump.

Plus Patreon only bonus content!

Going off the rails

Some choice utterings from the Very Stable Genius over the past few days:


This:

Daniel Dale

@ddale8

Trump on why he wants to leave people on the ship: “I like the numbers being where they are. I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.” And: “They would like to quarantine people. Now when they do that our numbers are going to go up.”

 And his appearance on the site of the Tennessee tornado damage.

And then this:

On Thursday, Pence visited Washington state's Emergency Operations Center. Washington is seen as the epicenter of the coronavirus within the United States, with at least 14 deaths and almost 80 cases.

"I do want to commend, Gov. Inslee, your team's effort and the seamless partnership that was forged from the very beginning between our administration and your administration here at the state level," Pence said.

When asked Friday afternoon about Inslee, Trump had a different response.

“Oh, I told Mike not to be complimentary. … That governor is a snake. I said, 'If you’re nice to him he will take advantage,'" Trump added. "Mike may be happy with him, but I'm not."

When asked these comments during his evening press conference, Pence declined to comment. 

Now, this is an interesting factoid. The VSG has an uncle, John G. Trump, who taught electrical engineering at MIT. Now, check out what the VSG makes of that little factoid:

His nephew, the president, spoke of his purported grasp of science on Friday, saying: ‘I like this stuff. I really get it.

‘People are surprised that I understand it.

'Every one of these doctors said: "How do you know so much about this?"

Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.'

And this:

Meridith McGraw

@meridithmcgraw

Trump at the CDC: "As of the time I left the plane with you, we had 240 cases, that's at least what was on a very fine network known as Fox News. I know you love it. But that's what I happened to be watching, and how was the show last night? Did it get good ratings by the way?" 

I find it unsettling that it has come to this.

Donald Trump is a spiritually grotesque, loathesome, disgusting pig (which doesn't translate into some kind of obligation to support Biden) - today's edition

Who the hell else would use a pandemic for self-glorification and trashing of previous addressing of pandemics?

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Gallup just gave us the highest rating ever for the way we are handling the CoronaVirus situation. The April 2009-10 Swine Flu, where nearly 13,000 people died in the U.S., was poorly handled. Ask MSDNC & lightweight Washington failure 

@RonaldKlain

I realize that Klain has been outspoken in his criticism of the current administration's handling of this situation, and his motives may include the political.

But, again, we see that the Very Stable Genius does not understand that there is power inherent in being the bigger person and not responding to every criticism.

There's no defending this. It's repugnant.

Now, to Democrats or those who have, however tenuous, some kind of claim to being on the right but are getting really weird of late, who say in response to what I'm posting here, "Then are you ready to support  Biden?", I say, "No f------ way." He's a vicious liar.  One of his lies ruined an innocent man:

Biden’s wife and daughter did, in fact, die in a car wreck. That is true. It is not true that the driver of the other car was drunk, that he had been drinking, or that there was any reason to believe he was drunk or had been drinking — or even that he was at fault. The late Mrs. Biden “drove into the path of [the] tractor-trailer,” the police report says. But Biden, like every other third-rate ward-heeler of his ilk, thinks and speaks only in terms of good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats — and if something bad happens to good people, then it must be because somebody in a black hat did something nefarious. The driver of that truck went to his grave haunted by Biden’s lies, to the point where his children were forced to beg the vice president to stop defaming their late father. The casual cruelty with which Biden is willing to subordinate the lives of ordinary people to his political ambitions — for the sake of a petty tear-jerker line in one of his occasionally plagiarized stump speeches — is remarkable.

He also teamed up with Ted Kennedy to savage the reputation of one of America's greatest legal scholars and deeply human public figures, Robert Bork. He also told a predominantly African-American crowd that Mitt Romney aimed to "put y'all back in chains."

I have no horse in the race that appears to be shaping up.

It is very late in the day for post-America.

Monday roundup

Ryan P. Williams and Matthew J. Peterson of the Claremont Institute, writing in the New York Post, on what poisonous garbage, from its premise to its misrepresentations, the 1619 Project is.

A recent word salad from the VSG. It's a dandy:

Washington Examiner

@dcexaminer

Trump: "You know President Putin is KGB... Putin is fine. He's fine. We are all fine, we're all people 

At the rally where he let loose with this, he also said that North Korea hasn't fire any missiles in eight months. That bit of information hasn't aged well:

North Korea fired two presumed short-range ballistic missiles into its eastern sea on Monday, South Korean officials said, resuming weapons demonstrations after a months-long hiatus that may have been forced by the coronavirus crisis in Asia. 

And immediately on the heels of that really bad deal between our State Department and the Taliban comes this:

A deadly blast shattered a period of relative calm in Afghanistan on Monday and the Taliban ordered fighters to resume operations against Afghan forces just two days after signing a deal with Washington aimed at ushering in peace.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack at a football ground in Khost in eastern Afghanistan, where three brothers were killed, officials told AFP.

The blast occurred around the same time the Taliban ordered fighters to recommence attacks against Afghan army and police forces, apparently ending an official "reduction in violence" that had seen a dramatic drop in bloodshed and given Afghans a welcome taste of peace.

The partial truce between the US, the insurgents and Afghan forces lasted for the week running up to the signing of the US-Taliban accord in Doha on Saturday, and was extended over the weekend.

"The reduction in violence... has ended now and our operations will continue as normal," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told AFP.

"As per the (US-Taliban) agreement, our mujahideen will not attack foreign forces but our operations will continue against the Kabul administration forces."

The Taliban's military commission circulated instructions for fighters to resume operations, according to a document that an insurgent provided to AFP.

Kyle Sammin at National Review reviews Ross Douthat's new book, and it's prompted me to make yet another addition to my wanna-read-this-year list.  I've long held that his premise was the case. This blog is called Late in the Day, after all:

Pollsters often ask the American public their opinion on which way the country is going. In his latest book, Ross Douthat takes a step back from that inquiry and ponders whether America — and the West as a whole — is going anywhere at all. Have we instead entered an age of decadence and stagnation, resting on the successes of the past, and lulling ourselves to sleep as civilization slides lazily into decline? In The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, Douthat makes a fairly convincing argument that this may be the case.

He examines several areas, including technology (he points to the 1972 end of the Apollo space program as the inflection point on this score), politics and the arts. He cites Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, which I have read.  Douthat says we could go go on in our present state for quite some time.

An example of the cultural exhaustion he discusses is this Billie Eilish phenomenon:

Strange and often terrible things happen when the music industry anoints new royalty. Backlash is quick and intense. Stars sweat under the spotlight and start to say and do the wrong things. (Remember when *Justin Bieber peed in a restaurant mop bucket and cursed out Bill Clinton?) Everyone is desperate to figure Gen Z out, and rallying behind Billie Eilish seems to be a lot of people’s idea of getting it done, which is an understandable thought process, considering the size and median age of her following. But when you shoot a young performer to the top of the prestige circuit on the first album, where do they go next? For Eilish’s sake, let’s hope she can mitigate the backlash and show people what she’s really about and what she’s capable of.

The ever-ballooning amount of money that federal, state and local levels of government spend on education is a rich subject for exploration. We devoted a segment of the last episode of the Barney & Clyde podcast to the matter, launching into it via something happening in the city where we live. The school system, with the backing of the school board, is pushing a referendum that will be on the May 5 primary ballot. People will vote on a local property tax increase to fund teacher salary increases - a response to last fall's Red for Ed push. But it seems some of the newfound funds will go for stuff like "social and emotional learning" initiatives, mental health professionals in each school, as well as school resource officers. How did we come to have these needs? If I may venture an answer, it's that we have become a markedly more nutty society in the last 50 years.

I'm seriously tempted to send to the system superintendent and all the board members this Real Clear Politics piece by high school teacher and Young Voices Education fellow Tyler Bonin entitled "Throwing Money At Education Won't Improve Outcomes":

in the U.S. a great deal more was spent on support staff (administration, operations, etc.) than teaching staff. Support services spending has increased by 50% between the 1999-2000 and 2014-2015 school years in North Carolina. Such has been the broader trend in the United States overall, where school staffing growth, reduced only briefly during the recession, climbedconsistently since 1950 at a rate greater than student growth. So, while teaching staff in U.S. public schools grew by 243% between 1950 and 2015, administrative and support personnel increased a whopping 709% during the same period. 

Spending money on perpetual bureaucratic bloat and top-down pedagogical approaches that assume one-size-fits-all doesn’t mean educational equity will follow. Indeed, this growth of support services at greater rates than teaching faculty demonstrates just how large the educational-industrial complex has become. And the more distance put between bureaucrats making these funding decisions and the schools they work for, the less likely it is they’ll spend wisely (and the more likely they’ll never be satisfied with the amount received). 

The rising number and popularity of charter schools in states like North Carolina and Texas, then, illustrate the effectiveness of local educational governance and decision-making, especially concerning finances and student achievement. In 2011, the North Carolina General Assembly lifted the charter school cap from its maximum of 100. As a result, charters have grown while traditional public school districts have contracted. The Opportunity Scholarship, NC’s voucher program, has nine times the number of students it did in its inception year of 2013.

More constituents have voted with their feet, choosing alternatives to traditional public schools, like charters or private schools using the Opportunity Scholarship. Their record of student success and prudent spending speaks for itself. Hopefully, legislators will learn from the charter example that money well spent is far more valuable to students than a poorly managed influx of cash.

SCOTUS will consider a challenge to the "Affordable" Care Act's individual mandate. 

Convers

Three not-exactly-reassuring foreign policy moves by the VSG

Maybe this could all work out well, but I'm not betting the mortgage payment on it.

The administration has inked an agreement with the Taliban that is supposed to result in  fundamental exchange in its behavior for a withdrawal of US troops:

Per the report, the hinges on the Taliban meeting several major commitments. These include breaking with al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other terrorist groups, and maintaining the reduction in violence seen over the last week as well as negotiating a separate power-sharing agreement and cease-fire with the Afghan government. If the conditions are met, the US will make an initial troop reduction from about 13,000 to 8,600 soldiers.

On March 10, the Taliban, called the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” in the agreement, will begin negotiations with the Afghan government. On that date, the US will also review its sanctions on the Taliban with the aim of eliminating them by August 27. If the Taliban meets its commitments, the US would withdraw all of its troops within 14 months.

While most Americans are understandably tired of the 19-year war, in its rush to declare victory and leave, the Trump Administration seems to be making the same mistakes that the Obama Administration made in leaving Iraq. Back in 2011, just ahead of presidential elections, Barack Obama unilaterally withdrew American forces from Iraq. The Obama Administration failed to negotiate a status of forces agreement that would have allowed an American contigency force to stay in the country. Three years later, American combat soldiers were back in Iraq to fight a growing ISIS insurgency.

And the clumsy handling of another situation may have ramifications beyond the immediate region:

Tensions had been building for weeks in Syria by late January when forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad launched an offensive on the towns surrounding the last rebel-held stronghold in the country, the city of Idlib.

The Russian-backed Syrian government offensive represented, according to Turkey, a violation of the “ceasefire” agreement Washington helped broker between the nations and non-state forces competing over Northwestern Syria. The attacks had unleashed a new wave of refugees streaming toward the Turkish border, numbering now almost 1 million strong and once again threatening to destabilize Europe. More importantly, Turkey warned, its positions were at risk of being targeted by Syrian forces, and they would retaliate if necessary. And on February 3, six Turkish soldiers were killed by Syrian artillery. Turkey responded, striking 54 military targets inside Syria, reportedly killing at least 76 Syrian soldiers.

But the fighting did not stop. The cycle of attacks and retaliatory strikes between Syria and Turkey accelerated. Five Turkish soldiers were killed on February 10, to which Turkey responded by shelling Syrian targets. Two more soldiers loyal to Ankara lost their lives on February 20, yielding another proportionate response. On February 22, Turkey destroyed 21 “regime targets” after it lost its 16th soldier this month to Assad’s forces. All the while, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned both Assad and his logistical partners in Moscow that his country would not tolerate these attacks forever, and Turkey would be “everywhere in Syria” if it needed to be.

This violence may have climaxed on Thursday in a staggeringly brazen escalation when at least 33 Turkish troops died and 30 more were wounded in an airstrike. Once again, Erdogan’s retaliation was proportionate, attacking Russian and Assad regime strongholds near Latakia with missiles. But the time for proportionality may be coming to an end. Since the collapse of the 2019 ceasefire in January, Ankara has warned the Syrian government that it has until the end of February—this weekend—to halt its advance on Idlib. “We plan to free our besieged observation towers, one way or another, by the end of this month,” Erodgan said this week. The slaughter of scores of Turkish forces has surely only hardened his resolve.

Turkey claims that the strike was attributable to the Assad government, but Russian warplanes supporting the advance of Syrian forces are more likely to blame. You can see why Erdogan would run reluctant cover for Moscow. There are no guarantees that a low-intensity conflict between a member of the NATO alliance and Russian forces won’t spiral into a more dangerous series of increasingly violent confrontations.

This is now the most dangerous period of the conflict since Turkey shot down a Russian warplane in 2015 in the earliest days of Moscow’s military intervention on behalf of its besieged client in Damascus. As it did in 2015, Turkey immediately invoked Article IV of the NATO alliance treaty—a provision that compels member states to enter into emergency consultations, a prerequisite for triggering NATO’s mutual defense provisions in Article V. The Atlantic alliance was able to talk Turkey off the ledge in 2015, but the West can produce few inducements that might convince Ankara to endure these deadly assaults on its soldiers and sovereign dignity indefinitely.

None of this should come as a surprise. This is what American disengagement looks like. The United States beat a hasty retreat from Northern Syria last year—a political, not strategic, decision that seemed justified only by the president’s frustration with America’s modest footprint in that lawless part of the world. In its wake, America left behind a fiction of a “ceasefire” arrangement, the fragility of which was apparent to most observers even as the administration was celebrating its achievement. Even if the deal was doomed to fail, said its more candid supporters, so what? This was not America’s fight; it’s time to let the rest of the world fight its wars and get America out. Well, mission accomplished. 

And let's review the recent history of how the DNI / acting DNI position has been filled. Joseph Maguire was deemed insufficiently personally loyal to the VSG because he wouldn't finger the whistleblower during the impeachment proceedings last September.  He was recently replaced by Richard Grennell, who most recently has been the US ambassador to Germany, and prior to that was a political operative. No intelligence credentials on his resume. But he's about as yay-rah-VSG as you could ask for. Alas, he only has a few weeks left in the position, due to the provisos written into the "acting" status. So who has Trump put forth for the permanent position? Another unfailing loyalist: 

The concern about Ratcliffe is that he’s not just a yes man but is being chosen *because* he’s a yes man. He was nominated for this job once before, you may recall, seemingly for no better reason than that he’s an aggressive advocate for Trump during Intelligence Committee hearings. He doesn’t have any field intel experience, just what he’s gleaned in five years as a member of the Homeland Security and (later) Intelligence Committees, plus some limited work on terrorism cases when he was a U.S. Attorney. (He was accused last year of padding his resume on that point.) That’s why he ultimately withdrew last summer: Even Senate Republicans were concerned that he had been nominated not because there’s good reason to think he’d be effective in the job but because he’d be a yes man, the sort of person who’d eagerly carry out political vendettas for Trump against “disloyal” intelligence deputies and clean up, or even suppress, intel that the president found “unhelpful.” Richard Burr, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, reportedly dialed up Trump last summer and urged him to rethink the Ratcliffe nomination.

In naming Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe to be Director of National Intelligence, Trump ignored a warning from Republican Sen. Richard Burr, the chairman of the intelligence committee, according to Congressional aides familiar with the matter. Burr told the White House last week that the move would inject more partisan politics into the work of the intelligence agencies, said the sources, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

Last year it looked like Ratcliffe would be DOA in a confirmation hearing, so he withdrew. The Senate’s composition hasn’t changed meaningfully since then so presumably he’s still DOA. So why renominate him?

Here’s where the cunning comes in. Trump knows that this is an election year. He knows that his approval rating, both within his own party and across the population, is about as high right now as it’s ever been. (Coronavirus may change that soon, but never mind.) He knows that Republican voters just circled the wagons around him on impeachment and are ready to circle those same wagons tighter as we proceed towards the general election. All of that being so, Senate Republicans may be materially less likely to cross him on Ratcliffe’s nomination now than they were eight months ago. Does Romney want to cast another “traitorous” vote against Trump so soon after the Senate trial? Does Susan Collins want to piss him off with his voters in Maine watching her closely? Does Burr want to cause a rift with the president in North Carolina, one of the most important swing states this fall?

The odds of the Senate meekly confirming Ratcliffe have improved and Trump knows it. So he’s calling their bluff. I dare you to reject him.

But here’s where it gets even more cunning. Trump may be viewing this, correctly, as a “heads I win, tails I win” situation thanks to a loophole in federal law on executive branch vacancies. The law was written in the belief that presidents would always prefer permanent appointees as a matter of basic stability and sound constitutional practice. You want someone at DNI or DHS or HHS or wherever? Just send the nomination over to the Senate and they’ll vote up or down. And until Trump, presidents did approach the matter that way. Trump doesn’t care about stability, though; if anything, he appears to enjoy volatility in government. He seems to prefer acting directors since they can be shuffled around according to his whims. They may even be more prone to behaving like yes men than permanent appointees are because there’s a chance that the president will formally nominate them to the permanent position if they’re especially obsequious.

These are classic examples of the fact that Trump's only core principle when it comes to the conduct of policy of any type is unwavering personal loyalty. He doesn't think about alliances, geographic regions, tapping the nation's best expertise, or what the national interest is beyond a fourth-grade notion of "winning."

Hey, as he is fond of saying, we'll see what happens.

 

A bonus-content video for the LITD Patreon community

It's here.

It's about how that post from last Tuesday about not tolerating Trumpist mischaracterization of who we are clearly struck a nerve.

Yesterday's Senate vote: self-worship exposed

Have you heard any attempt by Democrats to explain this?

Senate Democrats today blocked a request by Republicans to vote on a bill that would stop infanticide and provide medical care and treatment for babies who are born alive after botched abortions. The vote to stop the Democrat filibuster needed 60 votes but Democrats stopped the chamber from getting enough.

The Senate voted 56-41 to end the filibuster and allow a debate and vote on the bill itself with Republicans supporting a vote on the anti-infanticide bill and Democrats opposing it. This is the third time Senate Democrats have blocked the bill to stop infanticide as 60 votes are needed to end the filibuster. (See vote tally at the end of the article)

During the debate, Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska noted how pro-abortion Democrats refused to stand up and explain why they would block a vote to save babies from infanticide.

He said, “I urge my colleagues to picture a baby that’s already been born, that’s outside the womb gasping for air. That’s the only thing that today’s vote is actually about. We’re talking about babies that have already been born. Nothing in this bill touches abortion access.”

If Democrats in general, and Democrats in the Senate in particular, are aware of the polling numbers showing that most Americans, even most pro-"choice" Americans, are definitely not cool with late-term abortions or denying care to someone born anyway in a botched abortion, why would they do this?

My hunch is that the entire party is so beholden to identity politics that any gesture that could be remotely construed as detrimental to the feminist piece of that puzzle is radioactive.

It took me years to be able to take a square look at feminism. I came of age just as the Gloria Steinem-Robin Morgan-Germaine Greer-Betty Friedan wave of it was breaking over our society. It made a great deal of sense to me at the time. How come it took so long for women to get the vote? How come women automatically take their husbands' last names? And so forth.

But in the midst of that wave of feminism, along came Stephen Goldberg's Inevitability of Patriarchy, and I began to reconsider. Years later, as I commenced my serious faith walk, I came to see that there is an architecture to this universe that includes distinctly male and female traits and patterns of relations between males and females that are detectable in pretty much all species of animals.

Women house the next generation of the species. The uterus is designed to provide a safe, warm, nourishing environment for people at the most vulnerable stage of their lives.

Also, women are designed to have the desire to nurture stirred up within them when they so house such a person.

At the core of feminism is a resentment against the identity nature has imposed on females.

You see this played out in modern arguments that pro-"choice" public policy in a given state is good for that state's business climate. "Get in on the action" is the message. You're a woman with ambitions. Don't be hampered by some inconvenient gestation going on inside of you.

It's a mutation of God's design, a design by which he has imbued a woman with a special kind of love that comes alive when a new life forms inside of her.

And, of course, if she has already chosen to refuse to express that kind of love, if her child survives what she intended to do to it, it's still a bother to her; it's just now outside of her, breathing the same air as all other human beings already born. That's a small matter once she - we - have concluded that the life is expendable.

Ultimately, it's about love of self over love of the one kind of being in the world that one ought to have the most intense and intimate kind of love for. It's self-worship.

We continue to give the middle finger to God. His patience will not last forever.

Trumpism's disingenuous mischaracterization of who we are and what we're about

We can't let this kind of thing slide. Guys like this know exactly what they're up to.

I'm speaking of Larry O'Connor's Townhall column today. Its title is about as inartful and blatantly on-the-attack as is conceivably possible: "Failed Never Trump Pundits Don't Speak For You, But MSM Can't Get Enough of Them." Note especially the term "failed." O'Connor has clearly made the Very Stable Genius's construct of the world as being divided into winners and losers his own.

The accompanying photo, of Bill Kristol, is an utterly predictable touch. It's true that Kristol has pretty much joined the ranks of that sector of the spectrum inhabited by those who object to Trump and who have also abandoned conservatism.

Wait; isn't he a featured speaker at the upcoming Principles First summit?

He is. Summit organizer Heath Mayo has already been taken to task over this, and his response is that those gathering all have at least a history of embracing conservatism, and therefore deserve a place at the table for a discussion on what conservatism is, if it is distinct from Trumpism. Mayo says that the variety of figures invited will make for disagreement by design. If Principles First were to establish an exclusionary policy at the outset, it becomes yet another brand or tribe, which puts a lie to its very name.

Recall also that when Kristol posted his infamous tweet about however provisional the status is, we are all Democrats now, his Bulwark cofounder Charlie Sykes responded, "Not me."

Then there's this unsubstantiated lumping-together of Kristol with two figures who are readily distinguishable from him:

The arrogant, hubris required to lecture life-long Democrats as to how wrong they are for not following the advice of Bill Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, and Stephen Hayes was amusing to witness for those of us on the pro-Trump right (that would be pro-conservative, Republican right to most normal observers). We've been living with this pomposity for years.

I've been fairly closely following Goldberg's and Hayes's launching of The Dispatch, and advising Democrats on who to nominate as a presidential candidate has not been anything close to a major theme of the discourse there.  I realize that a Townhall column imposes word-count restraints, but some portion of O'Connor's verbiage really needed to be devoted to backing this claim up.

He then addresses a point that those of us who find Trump objectionable but take pains to be responsible about it (It's a good thing I'm not bound by a word count here. I might have had to consider the Never Trump broad brush.) have been raising of late - namely, that Trumpists seem awfully preoccupied with us, for a group so ostensibly minuscule.

His response begins with playing the victim card and deteriorates into outright slander.

First, the victim card:

You were awful to us. You continue to be awful to us. Many of you actively worked to marginalize us and silence our voices in the media during and after the election.

And when you were proven to be monumentally wrong about everything in the 2016 Election, you never apologized to us or your audience and you never even acknowledged we got it right.

Just what is it you "got right?" What had been the focus of our objection - Trump's bombast, narcissism, pettiness, lack of depth or humanity, his recklessness, inconsistency,  and worldview based on deals and winners and losers - has been demonstrated with pretty much daily regularity since we raised it.

Now, the slander:

You supported the removal of the president twice over the past three years.

First, for being "Putin's stooge." And when your hand-picked Inspector Clouseau Robert Mueller found no evidence supporting your fever dreams, you never acknowledged you were wrong about the entire Russian-collusion hoax. Then, for the Ukraine impeachment fiasco, that was always doomed from the start after President Trump released the actual transcript of his phone call with President Zelensky.

Along the way, Never Trumpers, you revealed who you really are. When you could have supported Republican Devin Nunes, you chose to support Democratic hack Adam Schiff, and you've never acknowledged you were wrong when Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report confirmed Nunes' veracity and Schiff's duplicitousness.

Let's take the above-mentioned Goldberg and Hayes - although we could easily use any number of other figures, such as David French, Kevin Williamson, Mona Charen, Susan Wright, Peter Heck, or Noah Rothman, to name a few. Where is evidence that any of these people obsessed over supposed Russia-China collusion or "supported" Adam Schiff?

Then O'Connor sends an unmistakably thuggish signal:

Even worse, through it all... you've never paid a price.

In Trumpworld, there's a price to be paid for expressing a viewpoint that is non-Trumpism but lays claim to the conservative mantle.

The rest of the piece is an expression of resentment that anyone with this viewpoint gets television exposure.

I have been disinclined lately to take on particular figures in polemical pieces. It's not as if my combativeness flame has gone out; I've just been reexamining the state of my heart in light of an increased focus on prayer. I'ver also been thinking a great deal about how our society has pretty much forgotten how to extend grace.

But something this - well, rotten - can't go unaddressed.

Did you notice something about O'Connor's piece? He makes no attempt to consider that principles might be driving those he characterizes as Never Trump. Has he not thought it through that far, or is he reluctant to provide his readers the opportunity to set aside cynicism and contemplate what might have really prevented these folks from climbing aboard the Trump train?

Do not permit yourself to be falsely portrayed.

I guess I chose this particular piece because it distills the chicanery found in myriad similar pieces. While I'm not going to embark on a crusade of responding to each one, occasionally it's crucial to set the record straight.

Yet another figure who has seen the VSG's machinations up close

The admiral takes great umbrage at what was done to his friend, and is gravely concerned for what it portends:

Retired four-star Admiral William McRaven, who orchestrated the SEAL raid that killed 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, staunchly defended acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire while warning that Donald Trump could be jeopardizing national security to satisfy his own “presidential ego.”

In an Washington Post op-ed, McRaven explained how his personal relationship with Maguire, a former SEAL, goes back for more than four decades and he praised his friend’s honor and integrity. Maguire was reportedly “berated” by Trumprecently, when he briefed the president as well as House Democrats that Russia, as it did in 2016, was already conducting clandestine interference in the 2020 election.

Maguire’s tenure as acting DNI has been complicated ever since he took over the agency last summer in the wake of the resignation of Dan Coats, who was effectively forced out by Trump for frequently contradicting the president’s narrative. Maguire, as acting intel chief, also testified during the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry last fall, where he refused to say if he had discussed the Ukraine whistleblower with Trump.

“Like most of these good men and women, he came in with the intent to do his very best, to follow the rules, to follow the law and to follow what was morally right,” McRaven wrote about Maguire. “Within a few weeks of taking the assignment, he found himself embroiled in the Ukraine whistleblower case. Joe told the White House that, if asked, he would testify, and he would tell the truth. He did. In short order, he earned the respect of the entire intelligence community.”

McRaven then turned to call out Trump.

“But, of course, in this administration, good men and women don’t last long,” he added in a not so subtle shot at the president. “Joe was dismissed for doing his job: overseeing the dissemination of intelligence to elected officials who needed that information to do their jobs.”

The retired admiral then unleashed the big guns.

“As Americans, we should be frightened — deeply afraid for the future of the nation,” McRaven warned. “When good men and women can’t speak the truth, when facts are inconvenient, when integrity and character no longer matter, when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security — then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.”

What do you want to bet the VSG has already tweeted about this? I cringe with hesitation about checking my Twitter feed?

 

Is Bernie going to be allowed to get away with this drive-by smear of the Israeli government?

First, a point of clarification that the linked article doesn't address. Bernie's employment of the term "racist" is a misuse. Racism means a belief that particular races are superior or inferior genetically speaking relative to others.

It may seem like nitpicking, but I don't think so. On general grounds, as a writer, I do not like to see the sloppy misuse of terminology take hold in public discourse. It's the first step toward widespread imprecise communication, which eventually makes it impossible to get one's point across.

This is particularly so in the case of the racism charge, given the causal way it's lobbed these days.

Bernie here is actually accusing the Israeli government of bigotry. Israelis and Palestinians are of differing ethnicities. but they belong to the same race.

That said, it's still a spurious charge.

Consider:

Over the decade of the Netanyahu governments—as Israel’s left-wing daily Haaretzreported a year ago—

The number of Arab Ph.D. candidates in Israel has more than doubled….

 The number of candidates rose from 355 in 2008 to 759 in 2018….

 In the same period, the number of Israeli-Arab students in master’s degree programs rose by 90%.

Currently, 6.7% of Ph.D. candidates in Israel are Arab citizens of Israel, up from 3.5% in 2008. Though this rate is still significantly lower than their part in the general population—which stands at 20%—the Council of Higher Education’s Planning and Budgeting Committee defined these statistics as a “revolution.”

There has also been a significant rise in the number of Arab students studying for a bachelor’s degree. Between 2010 and 2017, [it] rose from 26 thousand to 47 thousand.

Just the other day the Washington Post—not exactly a shill for the Netanyahu government—reported on “a recent effort by Israel to improve living conditions in East Jerusalem and better integrate the Arab population.”
The Israeli government, says the Post, has 

...designat[ed] nearly $50 million to upgrade waste and sewage systems as well as enhancing transportation and adding classrooms. There has also been a push for more Arab schools to adopt the Israeli curriculum, including Hebrew instruction…. [T]here has also been an easing of the process for approving building permits….

Meanwhile, there has been an increase in East Jerusalem residents obtaining Israeli citizenship…. Last year, about 1,200 Palestinians were granted citizenship, the most ever…. Most Palestinians living in Jerusalem hold residency cards allowing them to work in Israel and receive state benefits.

If this is racism, it’s a strange form of it. 

Now, Gaza? Not much that can be done there, except for Israel to gird itself against the daily rocket barrages and close off tunnels wherever if finds them. Hamas is in such complete control there that there's not a lot of opportunity to lift the ordinary residents out of the poverty into which their leaders have delivered them.

But it's a different story in the West Bank:

As for the West Bank, it’s been relatively quiet over the past decade—not least because tens of thousands of West Bank Palestinians work jobs within Israel and in Israeli West Bank communities that pay three to five times better than Palestinian Authority jobs, and also offer benefits that PA jobs lack entirely.

Will this go unaddressed by the media and Bernie's fellow Dem candidates?

The Very Stable Genius is an economic illiterate - today's edition

There's this tweet:

Has it occurred to him that the farmers wouldn't be in their current pickle if the free market hadn't been tampered with?

And "massive tariff money" is a ripe bit of hyperbole.

Is it massive enough to be fully funding this level of expenditure?

The Trump administration gave more taxpayer dollars to farmers harmed by the administration’s trade policies than the federal government spends each year building ships for the Navy or maintaining America’s nuclear arsenal, according to a new report. A National Foundation for American Policy analysis concluded the spending on farmers was also higher than the annual budgets of several government agencies. “The amount of money raises questions about the strategy of imposing tariffs and permitting the use of taxpayer money to shield policymakers from the consequences of their actions,” according to the analysis.

Larry Kudlow, can you not exert any persuasion over this guy? Or, God forbid, have you swallowed the Kool-Aid, too?

What's the most important qualification for any job in Trumpworld? Loyalty to the VSG

This appointment of Richard Grennell as acting director of national intelligence is not going over well:

President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he has named Richard Grenell, a staunch loyalist, as acting spy chief.

"I am pleased to announce that our highly respected Ambassador to Germany, @RichardGrenell, will become the Acting Director of National Intelligence. Rick has represented our Country exceedingly well and I look forward to working with him," Trump tweeted. 

Trump also thanked outgoing acting director Joseph Maguire "for the wonderful job he has done, and we look forward to working with him closely, perhaps in another capacity within the Administration!"

News of the pick, which was first reported by the New York Times, comes as Trump faces a March 11 deadline to nominate a new director of national intelligence or name a new acting spy chief as federal law prevents Maguire from serving beyond that date.

Even in an acting role, Grenell's lack of intelligence-related experience is likely to unsettle the US intelligence community, which has endured repeated attacks from the President since his 2016 election win over the Russia investigation and later the whistleblower complaint that gave way to the Ukraine impeachment inquiry, which made Trump just the third president in American history to be impeached.

But it does not appear that Trump is looking for someone with deep intelligence experience in the role -- a former senior White House official described Trump's decision as "filling the gaps" following the impeachment acquittal, sensing disloyalty in Maguire, and filling that position with somebody he sees as sufficiently loyal. Trump is "looking for a 'political' who will have his back," the former official said.

However, the move is raising concerns even among Trump allies who have been quick to point out that Grenell's primary qualification appears to be his loyalty to the President. 

One source close to Trump told CNN they were surprised by the pick, noting Grenell has zero intelligence-related experience.

And another Trump adviser described Grenell as "out of his league" for the acting DNI job, adding that some in the administration are "embarrassed by his behavior." Previous holders of the DNI job have served in the intelligence community, the US Senate and senior levels of the military. Grenell, on the other hand, does not boast a resume with similar credentials despite his stint as the US ambassador to Germany. 

"Everybody came into (the DNI job) with a relevant understanding, of which this guy has none," said Bob Litt, former ODNI general counsel, who called the move "extremely dangerous."

"This is a President who has loathed and feared the (intelligence community) since before he was inaugurated and he views them as a deep state hostile to him seeking to undercut him and he'll seek to undercut them," he said. "Clearly the important thing here is the President feels Grenell will do his bidding."

He seems like a sharp enough fellow, and before the Trump phenomenon occurred, he seemed to have a skill for articulating conservative positions on whatever the topic of discussion was. But it's true he has nothing of an intelligence nature on his resume. He's been a political consultant. That's it.

 The above-excerpted CNN story alludes to "[h]is track record in Germany [having] raised some concerns." I wanted to find out a little more about that, and his Wikipedia bio gets into some of the details:

In May 2018, within hours of taking office in Berlin as US Ambassador, Grenell offended diplomats and business leaders when he tweeted that “German companies doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.”^[29] The tweet was widely perceived as a threat, with the Foreign Minister of Luxembourg, Jean Asselborn, commenting that "This man was accredited as ambassador only yesterday. To give German businesses such orders … that’s just not how you can treat your allies.”^[30] The leader of Germany's Social Democratic Partystated that Grenell "does appear to need some tutoring" in the "fine art of diplomacy", while the Die Linke party urged the Merkel government to summon Grenell to explain his comments.^[30]

In June 2018, Grenell stirred controversy by telling Breitbart News, "I absolutely want to empower other conservatives throughout Europe, other leaders."^[31] It was viewed as anti-establishment.^[32][33] This was described as a breach of diplomatic protocol and a breach of Article 14 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which requires ambassadors to be politically neutral in the domestic politics of the countries where they serve.^[34][31] Prominent German politicians called for Grenell's dismissal.^{[35][36][37][38]} Martin Schulz, former leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, said, "What this man is doing is unheard of in international diplomacy. If a German ambassador were to say in Washington that he is there to boost the Democrats, he would have been kicked out immediately."^[35]

Grenell was a regular contributor on Fox News's Tucker Carlson Tonight during the first few months of his Ambassadorship in Germany. In November 2018 he made an appearance where he repeated his criticism of Angela Merkel's immigration policies and compared her unfavorably to the recently-elected Chancellor of Austria Sebastian Kurz, whom he claimed "won in a very big way" because of his strict stance on immigration. The magazine Der Spiegel called it a "thinly veiled call for a change of government in Berlin".^[34]

In December 2018, during the affair surrounding Der Spiegel journalist Claas Relotius, Grenell wrote to the magazine complaining about an anti-Americaninstitutional bias ("Anti-Amerikanismus") and asked for an independent investigation.^[39][40] Grenell wrote that "These fake news stories largely focus on U.S. policies and certain segments of the American people."^[41]

In January 2019, Grenell told Handelsblatt that European companies participating in the construction of Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline are "always in danger, because sanctions are always possible". The Trump administration has long opposed the Russian-backed Nord Stream 2 — a pipeline for delivering natural gas from Russia to Germany.^[42] Within that context he also sent letters to German companies involved in the construction of said Nord Stream 2, threatening sanctions.^[43] In response, Angela Merkel's successor as leader of the Christian Democrat Union, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, stated that "The American Ambassador operates in a, shall I say, somewhat unusual diplomatic manner."^[44]

Der Spiegel published a profile of Grenell on January 11, 2019, using interviews with 30 “American and German diplomats, cabinet members, lawmakers, high-ranking officials, lobbyists and think tank experts". The magazine claimed that "Almost all of these sources paint an unflattering portrait of the ambassador, one remarkably similar to Donald Trump, the man who sent him to Berlin. A majority of them describe Grenell as a vain, narcissistic person who dishes out aggressively, but can barely handle criticism." The profile claimed that Grenell is politically isolated in Berlin because of his association with the far-right Alternative for Germany Party, causing the leaders of the mainstream German parties, including the Chancellor herself, to avoid contact with him.^[34] The sources claimed that Grenell "knows little about Germany and Europe, that he ignores most of the dossiers his colleagues at the embassy write for him, and that his knowledge of the subject matter is superficial."^[34]

A disrupter in the Trumpian mold.

And I doubt that the search for someone to officially fill that position is going to turn up a lot of first-tier possibilities.