Barney & Clyde - Season 2, Episode 16

 It's here!

Pour yourself something bracing, pull up a stool and join us at the virtual libation station for an hour of examination of 

NOT QUITE A BUSINESS, NOT QUITE A GOVERNMENT AGENCY - The US Postal Service: the upcoming hearings on its current predicament, Trump’s bluster about its role in the upcoming elections, a bit about the service’s history (with a particular focus on Nixon making it quasi-autonomous in 1970), the role of the union, and its unfunded liabilities. 

I’LL DECIDE THAT FOR MYSELF, THANK YOU - Uber’s announcement that it will suspend operations if it’s forced to regard its drivers as employees.

TURNING DOWN THE TEMPERATURE IN A PERENNIAL HOTBED - Could the Israel-UAE deal be a harbinger of a new era in the Middle East?

I DON’T NEED THIS KIND OF GRIEF - Law-enforcement morale in mid-2020 America.

Compare and contrast

 Joe Biden has sent a pretty strong signal as to how he's going to deal with intra-party schisms by condemning the views of Linda Sarsour. 

Sarsour's a weird mix, and that mix points up inherent contradictions in modern-day progressivism. She's forthrightly Muslim, wearing a head covering in public at all times. On the other hand, she's a feminist. She was a principal organizer of the women's march in Washington in 2017, but later stepped down from the ongoing role that grew out of her involvement with that because of her record of antisemitic comments. 

But the Biden campaign has been quick to take the initiative in establishing its distance from her, stressing that its candidate strongly supports Israel and opposes the boycott-divest-and-sanction movement. 

Now, that could get interesting as reverberations from last week's Israel-UAE deal come along. That deal, of course, is a move in the opposite direction from the JCPOA that the Obama administration signed with Iran. Biden is associated with that era's decidedly cool relations with Israel. But for now, he's serving notice that the likes of Sarsour aren't welcome in his ranks. 

Compare that to the Very Stable Genius's endorsements of Georgia primary winner Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom he called a "rising Republican star" who is "strong on everything" and an equally wacky primary winner in neighboring Florida, Laura Loomer, who characterizes herself as a "proud Islamophobe." 

Most post-American media being oriented the way it is, hay is already being made of the GOP's infiltration by kooks, and now we have the president bestowing his blessing upon them. 

Much can shift and no doubt will. As I say, Biden will be called to task for Obama-era mideast policy. It will be a daunting needle to thread to burnish his pro-Israel bona fides, but he nipped a potential danger point in the bud by washing his hands of Sarsour. 

Trump, because he is utterly tone-deaf, has no such separation between him and the wack-job element in the 2020 GOP.

Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib will not let the opportunity go to waste. 

Trump was unable to distance himself from this kookiness because he is so addicted to being worshipped that the success of these two sycophants, Loomer and Greene, released a flood of endorphins in his tiny brain. 

Saturday roundup

 In his piece entitled "How Young Conservatives Can Topple Woke Ideology" at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Avi Wolf demonstrates that he has a fine grasp on what conservatism is really all about. He frames the predicament - the wholesale takeover of our culture by those obsessed with identity politics and redistribution, while a largely non-ideological public feels vaguely disturbed, but unsure how to deal with it and then points out the arrow righties have in their quiver that would be just the ticket:

And let’s get real here: most Americans are not going to solve the deeper questions of existence or governance that conservative thinkers tend to fret about. For that, a small, highly talented elite―perhaps in communication with a broader educated, lay public―is more than sufficient. Nor will many be all that ideologically minded. If the last few years have been any indication, sentiment and disposition (feelings) drive most people more than direct argumentation from first principles.

What we need is a conservative message not for the high intellectual but the ordinary citizen. What is it?

In one word: tradition.

Wow. You don't hear that term brought up too much anymore, do you? It is, in fact, the essence of what distinguishes conservatives, though.

Tradition binds a person to a long chain of generations in both directions―it was there before him, and it is his to hand down to those who succeed him.

To be part of a tradition and to engage in it is to be bound to something greater than yourself. The question is no longer just “How shall I live?” as an individual, but “What shall I preserve and hand down?”

This in itself changes perspectives. It forms emotional and personal attachments and commitments in a way raw analysis of economic data can’t.

A tradition, broadly and properly understood, should be binding on your behavior―traditions that contain real ethical precepts are preferable here. There are things you do and do not do, simply because of your traditional commitments. Anyone can be an ideologue and demand the government force everyone to their will. To be a traditional person—not a “trad,” that ugly historical cosplay often seen on social media—is to realize you are not an outsider but an active partner in whatever endeavor you have chosen.

Most important, traditions are an anchor, the sort of thing my professor assumed we had but many didn’t. They provide you with a starting point, a place from which to set out to explore the world and a solid home to return to. Study the great wisdom of the world in the abstract and you may have great insights that are as important to you as the fact that the earth revolves around the sun is to Sherlock Holmes. Study them as one belonging to a tradition, and it becomes a personal but fruitful struggle—do these challenge my traditions? Do they force me to adopt another or adapt my own?

The Seattle city council voting 7 to 1 to start defunding the police department is at odds with the views of a particular demographic of the citizenry:

The Seattle City Council’s move to slash the police budget flies in the face of a recent Gallup poll that found that 81 percent of black citizens want the police presence in their neighborhoods to remain the same or be increased.

Your tax dollars at work:

A federal lab reportedly hosted a three-day mandatory training for its white male executives where they were instructed to apologize for their privilege, along with other tasks such as acknowledging the connection between “white male culture” and mass killings, per leaked documents reported by Christopher Rufo.

Sandia National Laboratories, which assesses the United States’ nuclear weapons and is a government contractor, hosted the training in 2019 at the La Posada luxury resort. It was here that the laboratory required its white male executives to participate in the “White Men’s Caucus on Eliminating Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia in Organizations” training, Rufo reported on his website after receiving the documents. 

The “caucus” was instructed by the organization White Men as Full Diversity Partners (WMFDP), according to the leaked documents. WMFDP claims it “transforms mindsets and behaviors to help organizations sustain truly inclusive cultures” in its Twitter bio.

From the your-children's-minds-belong-to-us file:

A Philadelphia public school teacher is curious about how educators will cope with “conservative parents" listening in on virtual classes, according to a thread captured on Twitter.

“So, this fall, virtual class discussion will have many potential spectators — parents, siblings, etc. — in the same room. We’ll never be quite sure who is overhearing the discourse. What does this do for our equity/inclusion work?” Kay tweeted. “How much have students depended on the (somewhat) secure barriers of our physical classrooms to encourage vulnerability? How many of us have installed some version of ‘what happens here stays here’ to help this?”

While Kay acknowledged that "damage can come from the left too," he noted that "conservative parents" are his chief concern when teachers are engaging “in the messy work of destabilizing a kid’s racism or homophobia or transphobia.”

“While conversations about race are in my wheelhouse, and remain a concern in this no-walls environment — I am most intrigued by the damage that ‘helicopter/snowplow’ parents can do in the host conversations about gender/sexuality," he tweeted. "And while ‘conservative’ parents are my chief concern — I know that the damage can come from the left too. If we are engaged in the messy work of destabilizing a kid’s racism or homophobia or transphobia — how much do we want their classmates’ parents piling on?”

The Very Stable Genius has a track record of making contributions to the political campaigns of - Kamala Harris. As recently as 2013.

 

 

 

 

The Israel-UAE peace accord: making official the mutual interests they've had for years

 Kenneth Pollack of the American Enterprise Institute has an interesting perspective on the agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates to establish diplomatic relations. Pollack sees it as the codification of a bond that had been growing for some time.

He says that Israel's agreement not to annex any more West Bank territory at this time is really not such a huge sacrifice:

The proximate cause for Abu Dhabi’s decision may very well have been a (smart) deal with Jerusalem: recognition instead of annexation. Israel would refrain from annexing any West Bank territory in return for normalization of relations with the UAE. 

This wasn’t as big a lift for either side as it might have been at previous times. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces serious domestic challenges at home, in particular over his government’s handling of the pandemic, and is beholden to coalition partners who believe that annexation would be a mistake. Thus, it would have been hard for Bibi to push forward on annexation regardless. Agreeing not to do what he probably couldn’t in return for recognition by another Arab state was therefore a win-win for him.

And everybody in the region knew that the two countries were growing more aligned:

Meanwhile, the UAE has been forging better relations with Israel for years. This was mostly kept private, even covert, but it was one of the worst kept secrets in a region of badly kept secrets. Moreover, it was pretty clear that the Emiratis were not unhappy with people knowing what they were up to, just as long as they retained some plausible deniability.

Pollack says that, for all the seeming difference between Obama-era US policy toward the Mideast and that of the Trump administration, it's really not all that much. Yes, the US has pulled out of the JCPOA and moved its embassy in Israel, but then it seems like the Very Stable Genius got bored with focusing on the region:

The deeper cause for this shift lies in America’s disengagement from the Middle East. This began under President Obama, and our Middle East allies hated it but hoped that it was an aberration. They looked forward to Obama’s departure from the White House in expectation that the next president would return to America’s traditional approach to the region. 

They were deeply disappointed by the Trump administration, which deepened that trend, often in erratic, unpredictable, and even dangerous fashion. In particular, the UAE and America’s other allies in the Gulf were horrified when Washington refused to respond to brazen, repeated Iranian military attacks on Emirati and Saudi oil tankers in the summer of 2019, or even to the Iranian drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s irreplaceable Abqaiq oil processing plant. This was a categorical reversal of 40 years of American policy, the foundation of the US-Gulf partnership and of their security, which Trump abandoned without a second thought.

Meanwhile, the Netanyahu government applauded Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal but has been frustrated by his lack of interest in pushing back on Iran’s aggression around the region. Israel has been locked in a war of attrition with Iran across Syria and increasingly Iraq as Tehran builds up its military infrastructure in both countries and works to tie them — and Hizballah-dominated Lebanon — into a united, Iranian-led front. The Israelis have repeatedly begged Washington to do more to help them deal with Iran all to no avail.

And Iran isn't the only threat. Both Israel and the UAE know that Sunni jihadist groups are licking their chops as well.

In and of itself, this agreement is a laudable move, but the other pieces on the chessboard aren't going to sit idle.

 

 

 

Post Office funny business

 Maybe it's because there's a growing reluctance in our society to have one's take on something be revealed as an unfounded conspiracy theory that the current set of developments involving the US Postal Service are still being treated as if it were enshrouded in mystery.

But consider the deactivation of several mail-sorting machines at centers around the country. Or the reduction in the number of national service areas from seven to four. Or the change to the core postal service principle of getting every piece of mail delivered every day. 

And consider the person now at the helm, the one implementing these changes:

Before joining the administration, DeJoy, a Trump ally and fundraiser, was on the board of directors at XPO Logistics, a large transportation and logistics company that does business with the USPS and has contracts with other US government agencies, such as the Department of Defense. In 2014, XPO acquired DeJoy's company, New Breed Logistics, for $615 million. 

These questions about DeJoy come at a time of incredible strain at USPS. The agency is already strapped for cash and facing funding shortages. And two members of the board of governors quit earlier this year, at least in part to protest efforts by Trump aides to control USPS finances and operations. DeJoy's supporters say he's the right person for the job because he can streamline the struggling agency with his business expertise.

When announcing DeJoy's appointment, the USPS board of governors noted that New Breed "was a contractor to the U.S. Postal Service for more than 25 years," and received awards for high quality in the 1990s. The announcement didn't mention XPO's ongoing ties to the USPS. 

According to federal records, when he became postmaster general, DeJoy still owned a large equity stake in XPO, totaling between $30 million and $75 million. Federal ethics officials recently approved his decision to keep these assets, but outside experts with decades of experience in government are raising red flags. 

"The idea that you can be a postmaster general and hold tens of millions in stocks in a postal service contractor is pretty shocking," said Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics, who resigned in 2017. "It could be that he's planning on selling it, but I don't understand the delay. He has managed to divest a lot of other things. And if he wasn't prepared to sell that off, he shouldn't have taken the job."

Schaub, who is now a senior adviser at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, suggested that if DeJoy doesn't divest his holdings soon, it could be construed as an illegal conflict of interest. Schaub also questioned why the ethics officials approved this arrangement. 

It's illegal under federal law for federal government employees or their spouses to have a "financial interest" in companies that intersect with their official duties. The ethics experts who spoke to CNN said DeJoy could have mitigated these conflicts by divesting, agreeing upfront to recuse himself from some matters, receiving legal waivers, or even establishing a blind trust. 

"If you have a $30 million interest in a company, of course it's going to impact you," said Stuart Gilman, who spent 12 years at the Office of Government Ethics, where he was the assistant director. "I would assume that there is a problem here. It certainly doesn't pass the smell test."

Or consider the Very Stable Genius's response, particularly ineptly delivered, to Maria Bartiromo, on Fox Business this morning. It's one of his classic word salads, but it doesn't really take too much parsing to get to what he really means: that he has the USPS by the short hairs and is not going to get them the funds they'll need to process mail-in ballots this fall:

During an interview on Fox Business, host Maria Bartiromo asked Trump what Democrats are pushing in the coronavirus stimulus package that was causing the negotiations to be held up. He replied, “It’s their fault. They want 3-and-a-half billion dollars for something that will turn out to be fraudulent. That’s election money, basically.”

“They want 3-and-a-half billion dollars for the mail-in votes. Universal mail-in ballots, 3-and-a-half… They want $25 billion — billion — for the post office. Now, they need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” he explained, adding, “Now, in the meantime, they aren’t getting there.”

“By the way, those are just two items, but if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it,” Trump went on, before remarking, “And you’ve seen how bad it’s been with this Caroline Malone scam. She scammed her way into an election. She probably lost but they said mail-in ballots, it’s all mixed up. Paterson, New Jersey, same thing.”

“Yesterday, Virginia, 500,000 applications for ballots got sent to everybody, nobody even knows. Got sent to dogs, got sent to dead people. Nobody has no idea what happened. They say, ‘Oh, we made a mistake, I’m sorry.’ 500,000 ballots sent in Virginia,” he said. “How do you feel about Virginia going in there and you have 500,000 phony ballot applications, and this is all over.”

Bartiromo responded, “Wow, so this is what’s holding it up?… This is what’s holding up money for the American people? They want mail-in voting and they want money for the post office? This is one of the sticking points that’s holding back stimulus for Americans during this coronavirus?”

“That’s one of them,” Trump answered. “How would you like to have 3-and-a-half billion dollars — billion — for mail-in voting? Billion… You know how much money that is? Nobody has any idea… They want $25 billion for the post office because the post office is going to have to go to town to get these ridiculous ballots in.”

“You know, there’s nothing wrong with getting out and voting. You get out and vote. They voted during World War I and World War II and they should have voter ID because the Democrats scammed the system. But two of the items are the post office and the 3-and-a-half billion dollars for mail-in voting,” he concluded. “Now, if we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. They just can’t have it.”

He was no doubt trying to sound as minimally autocratic as possible, but he's not an adept enough communicator to pull it off.

Yes, the Postal Service has some chronic problems that predate this confluence of a pandemic and an election cycle, but an orderly and secure mail-in voting option could be implemented if all parties involved were on the same page. 

Some folks think "but we're crowding into bars and reopening sports stadiums" is a gotcha rejoinder. Here's the difference: People have other options for things they'd do with a chunk of time not spent in a bar or a stadium. Some people - probably a lot of people - will indeed line up at their local polling place the first Tuesday of November. But they ought to have the option of an alternative means of voting in this extraordinary time. 

It can be done. 

If there's a truly strong argument why it shouldn't be, someone who can communicate like a composed adult will have to make it. The VSG's gobbledygook wasn't convincing.  

 

 

With the Kamala Harris pick, we now have a good sense of the lay of the land

 I'm not surprised. Aside from checking off both the requirements with which Joe Biden had cornered himself, she sends a different set of signals than, say, a Susan Rice, or a Keisha Lance Bottoms.

Harris does the best anyone from the circumscribed pool Biden had established can in terms of assuring the hard left base that that is the direction of the party. From co-sponsoring the Green New Deal to advocating for Medicare for All to asserting that the extermination of fetal Americans is a right to raising the capital gains tax and the corporate income tax to her views on guns to the hyper-combative stance she brings to Capitol Hill hearings for judicial appointees, she can allay any concern that there's ever been anything to this notion of a moderate prevalence in the 2020 Democrat party.

One big question is whether the Very Stable Genius can deal with her in some sort of dignified way, presenting his argument against her to the American people with some sort of class, or whether he'll do so with maximum boneheadedness. I think the latter is the more likely scenario, and if that's the way it unfolds, some great chances to make a really convincing case against Harris will be missed.

But an even bigger question is whether America is such a different country from what it has been until recent years that something like a Biden-Harris ticket has great appeal. People are accepting of such things as socialism and unconventional modes of sexuality and collective racial guilt to a degree that would have been inconceivable 20 years ago. 

How accepting? That's what will become more apparent as autumn closes in. 

The Bonehead-in-Chief goes protectionist against our neighbor to the north

 With the economy at a particularly precarious moment, the VSG thought it would be a fine time to start a trade war with Canada:

Canada said Friday it will slap retaliatory tariffs on $2.7 billion worth of U.S. goods, the latest development in a new trade feud sparked by President Donald Trump’s decision to reimpose aluminum duties on the U.S. ally.

“Canada will respond swiftly and strongly,” Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said at a news conference.

“We will impose dollar-for-dollar countermeasures in a balanced and perfectly reciprocal retaliation,” she said. “We will not escalate and we will not back down.”

Freeland said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will spend the next 30 days consulting with Canadian citizens and businesses on a broad list of aluminum-containing products. Canada’s new duties on U.S. imports, she said, will total 3.6 billion Canadian dollars ($2.7 billion).

Trump, during a speech Thursday at a Whirlpool manufacturing plant in Ohio, announced that he had signed a proclamation reimposing 10% tariffs on aluminum imports from Canada that had been lifted more than a year earlier. The president complained that Canada was putting American workers in the aluminum industry at a disadvantage.

“The aluminum business was being decimated by Canada,” he said.

Trudeau vowed to enact countermeasures against the U.S. just hours after Trump’s announcement.

Freeland is clearly not amused:

Freeland on Friday . . . argu[ed] that the tariffs will hurt American consumers already suffering from the economic devastation inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic.

“In imposing these tariffs, the United States has taken the absurd decision to harm its own people at a time when its economy is suffering the deepest crisis since the Great Depression,” Freeland said.

“These tariffs are unnecessary, unwarranted and entirely unacceptable,” she added. “They should not be imposed. Let me be clear: Canadian aluminum is in no way a threat to U.S. national security, which remains the ostensible reason for these tariffs, and that is a ludicrous notion.”

Freeland also noted that the new tariffs come just over a month after the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement – the Trump-backed trade pact that replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA – went into effect.

“Now is the time to advance North American economic competitiveness, not to hinder it,” she said. 

"Team player" is an utterly foreign concept to the VSG. 

 

Notre Dame drifts further away from its raison d'être

Look who is joining the faculty:

The University of Notre Dame has announced that Pete Buttigieg, failed presidential candidate and former mayor of South Bend, Ind., will be taking a post at the university for the coming academic year.

Buttigieg will be a 2020-21 faculty fellow at Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study (NDIAS), taking part in a cohort that is set to focus on the “nature of trust.” In October, the former mayor will release a book on just that subject, called Trust: America’s Best Chance, “interweaving history, political philosophy, and affecting passages of memoir [to explore] the strong relationship between measures of prosperity and levels of social trust.”

I concur with Alexandra DeSanctis's take:

Notre Dame’s choice to employ Buttigieg is yet another example of university leadership seeking worldly prestige at the expense of the school’s Catholic mission. While there is some merit to opposing views on this subject, my own opinion is that the individuals any school chooses to hire — whether for administrative or faculty positions — are necessarily a core component of advancing the school’s identity and mission.

There’s much to be said for diversity of thought and ecumenism, but those values should never be taken so far as to excuse the employment of public figures such as Buttigieg who, aside from having little to offer in the way of intellectual rigor or genuine expertise, have repeatedly and in the most public way possible contradicted and flouted Catholic doctrine on key, non-negotiable issues such as abortion and the nature of marriage.

Buttigieg clearly was offered this position not because of any academic work he’s conducted but because of his political career, a career during which he’s routinely espoused positions that undermine the most fundamental parts of the Catholic Church’s view of human nature, sin, and social justice. On the subject of trust, the matter on which the university claims he’s expert, the former mayor hasn’t much to offer aside from a new book and more meaningless pablum about bipartisanship, an overrated virtue that he did little to practice during both his mayorship and his presidential campaign.

Then again, what institution is staying true to its core identity and mission these days? 

 

How advanced is the rot of our civilization? - today's edition

This guy is saying out loud what heretofore has been confined to faculty lounges, curriculum design meetings and academic conferences:

Leaders in education, politics and other areas gathered in suburban Evanston Sunday to ask that the Illinois State Board of Education change the history curriculum at schools statewide, and temporarily halt instruction until an alternative is decided upon.

At a news conference, State Rep. LaShawn K. Ford said current history teachings lead to a racist society and overlook the contributions of women and minorities. 

Before the event Sunday, Rep. Ford's office distributed a news release "Rep. Ford Today in Evanston to Call for the Abolishment of History Classes in Illinois Schools," in which Ford asked the ISBOE and school districts to immediately remove history curriculum and books that "unfairly communicate" history "until a suitable alternative is developed."

The representative instead suggested that schools devote greater attention toward civics and ensuring students understand democratic processes.

"It costs us as a society in the long run forever when we don’t understand our brothers and sisters that we live, work and play with,” Ford said. 

The state representative is sponsoring a bill that would require elementary schools to teach students about the civil rights movement.

This is one of the key battlefronts in our culture war. Is anybody at the ISBOE or the state's various districts going to mount the kind of opposition that will make clear what's going on here?

 

 

Another cringe-inducing interview with the VSG

It was just a little over two weeks ago that Trump sat down with Mike Wallace of FNC. The exchange produced lines like these:

27. "When people -- when people proudly have their Confederate flags, they're not talking about racism. They love their flag, it represents the South, they like the South."

What Trump seems not to grasp is that for a lot of other people, the Confederate flag represents slavery and oppression.

28. "People right now like the South. I'd say it's freedom of, of, of many things, but it's freedom of speech."

"I'd say it's freedom of, of, of many things." -- The President of the United States

29. "Excuse me, excuse me. I don't care what the military says. I do -- I'm supposed to make the decision."

Wallace noted that the military said they were just fine with renaming bases that are named after Confederate generals. To which Trump, the self-professed biggest supporter of the military ever, said he doesn't care what the military says. So, OK.

30. "We won two World Wars, nobody even knows General Bragg. We won two World Wars."

[slowly looks around the room]

and these:

16. "I'll be right eventually. I will be right eventually. You know I said, 'It's going to disappear.' I'll say it again."

This is how Trump responded to Wallace playing a clip of the President back in January saying this of the coronavirus: "It's one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It's going to be just fine." Also, saying "I'll be right eventually" on an infectious disease eventually running its course is like me predicting there will be a 2020 election. Like, I will be right about that. But also, so what?

17. "Because I've been right probably more than anybody else."

No words.

18. "No I want people to have a certain freedom, and I don't believe in that. No, and I don't agree with the statement that if everybody wear(s) a mask everything disappears. Hey, Dr. Fauci said don't wear a mask. Our Surgeon General -- terrific guy -- said don't wear a mask."

There's so much wrong here. I'll just pick out one: Trump said that Surgeon General Jerome Adams said don't wear a mask. Which was true months ago, back when we knew way less about the virus and how it transmits. Here's Adams on Fox News Monday morning: "I'm pleading with your viewers, I'm begging you, please understand that we are not trying to take away your freedoms when we say wear a face covering."

And I repeat, that interview took place a little over two weeks ago. In it, he said this:

47. "We're signing a health care plan within two weeks, a full and complete health care plan that the Supreme Court decision on DACA gave me the right to do."

This will be news to, well, everyone.

But, the VSG being the VSG, he has outdone himself. His sit-down with Axios editor Jonathan Swan produced such gems as this:

The president defended the rally, talked up how many people were there, and made a point of bringing up something “nobody talks about”: it set a Saturday ratings record for Fox News, something the president repeatedly emphasized to defend holding the rally despite public health concerns.

Trump also said he thinks thing are under control. Swan asked how when 1000 Americans are dying a day, and Trump said, “They are dying, that’s true, it is what it is. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it. This is a horrible plague that beset us.”

and this:

This was the exchange that Axios previewed last week that shocked a lot of people. The president said “many people” called the Russian bounty reports fake news and said he never brought this up in his recent call with Vladimir Putin.

He claimed it didn’t reach his desk. Swan pointed out how the former commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan has publicly said Russia’s supplying weapons to the Taliban. “Isn’t that enough to challenge Putin over the killings of U.S. soldiers?”

Trump started by saying, “We supplied weapons when they were fighting Russia too.”

“That’s a different era,” Swan responded.

and this:

At one point, he repeated something he’s said before, that “I’ve done more for the black community than anybody, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.”

“You believe you did more than Lyndon Johnson, who passed the Civil Rights Act?” Swan asked.

“I think I did, yeah,” Trump said.

“How?” Swan asked. “How possibly did you…”

“I got criminal justice reform done. I got prison reform,” Trump said.

“Lyndon Johnson,” Swan repeated. “He passed the Civil Rights Act.”

“How has it worked out? If you take a look at what Lyndon Johnson did,” the president responded.

“You think the Civil Rights Act was a mistake?” Swan asked.

“Frankly, it took a long time,” Trump said, before continuing to tout his administration’s accomplishments.

His handlers might want to think about keeping out of this sort of format.  

 

 

 

Is the Biden campaign really considering Karen Bass for the VP slot?

Since her name has surfaced in that regard, the MSM focus has been on things like receiving a Profile in Courage award in 2009 for bipartisanship while in the California state assembly, co-founding a group that worked to block liquor stores from setting up shop in crack-infested neighborhoods, and speaking out against "Defund the Police."

But, as should be the case with all politicians, we should want to know as much as possible about the set of core principles that drives her. 

We can get a good look at that, as it turns out:

“In the mid-1970s, California Congresswoman Karen Bass, who is now under consideration to be Joe Biden’s running mate, was an organizer for the Venceremos Brigade… An event blurb in an October 1975 issue of the communist Daily World newspaper describes Bass, then 22, as “leader of the Venceremos Brigade in southern California….As a ‘brigadista’ and then organizer for the Venceremos Brigades, Karen visited Cuba every 6 months.” (Tablet magazine, 7/28.)

The Venceremos Brigades were formed in 1969 by one of the factions of Students for a Democratic Society and the Cuban government. The immediate motivation for its founding was Fidel Castro's exhortation, in his New Year's address that year, for all Cubans to help with the sugar harvest. The members of this particular SDS faction, such as Bernadine Dohrn (in whose living room years later Barack Obama would launch his career),  thought, what a great way to express solidarity with the revolution.   

Shortly after the Brigades' founding, the Soviet Union got, shall we say, very involved:

“The ultimate objective of the DGI (Cuban Intelligence’s) in setting up the Venceremos Brigades “is the recruitment of individuals who are politically oriented and who someday may obtain a position, elective or appointive, somewhere in the U.S. Government, which would provide the Cuban Government with access to political, economic and military intelligence.”

Interestingly, right at about this time, Cuba’s DGI, which had always been mentored by the KGB, come under direct and total control of the KGB. Let’s see the sworn testimony of a high-ranking DGI defector during Congressional hearing titled:  The Role of Cuba in International Terrorism and Subversion, Intelligence Activities of the DGI, Feb. 26, 1982, US Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, Feb. 26, 1982?:   

“Mr. Gerardo Peraza (a high-ranking Cuban intelligence defector)” Between the years 1959 to 1970 there was close cooperation between Cuba and the KGB. But by beginning of 1970, the intelligence service of Cuba was placed under the DIRECT ORDERS of KGB Colonel Simonov.” 

Peraza's testimony in that hearing provided us some juicy dots to connect:

“Sen. Denton:  “(Julian Torres) Rizo was at the DGI (Cuba’s KGB-controlled intelligence service) Station chief in New York for 3 years, as I understand it. 

“Mr. PERAZA. “Yes.  He was also an active DGI agent in the Venceremos Brigade camps. 

“Mr. PERAZA. Yes. This was his first intelligence job. His first intelligence job was to recruit members of the Venceremos Brigade. He had also connections with many North Americans, preparing himself to come to the United States. And he continued directing the work of these agents in the United States.”

And wouldn’t you know it?  In another apparent publicity pic from one of her red-carpet trips to Stalinist, Terror-Sponsoring Cuba we find an (apparently) enchanted Karen Bass accompanied by an old Venceremos Brigadista comrade named Gail Reed who is married to Julian Torres Rizo!

None of the possible picks the Biden team is looking at would be good for human freedom, just as Biden himself would be bad for human freedom, but Bass would be egregiously bad. 

 

Two more conservative voices aghast at the VSG's delay-the-election tweet

Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabresi. Calabresi says "this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for impeachment again." Olsen says "It is the single most anti-democratic statement any sitting president has ever made.

The Federalist Society has provided the pool of possible federal judges that Trump has considered. Olsen has been irritatingly favorable in his overall assessment of Trump's performance to date.

These are not men that the die-hard throne-sniffers can dismiss as "Never Trump." 

They have been, to quote Irving Kristol, mugged by reality. 

Just remember: the cringeworthiness level doesn't peak with this one

Remember yesterday, how, with one tweet, the Very Stable Genius put stink all over a very good policy move? How it opened up new avenues of opportunity for leftists who not only cannot stand the VSG as an individual but know what a great job he does of presenting the worst possible image of conservatism?

He's outdone himself:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

·

7h

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???

Hello, my name is Donald Trump and I want to sound as insecure about my political prospects and as clueless about what federal law requires as possible. 

Now, the VSG is on record as being cool with absentee ballots, but they are the same thing as mail-in ballots. 

Republicans, who, as I have said over and over and over again since mid-2015, should have never taken him seriously, are distancing themselves from this nonsense:

“He can suggest whatever he wants. The law is what it is. We’re going to have an election that’s legitimate, it’s going to be credible, it’s going to be the same as we’ve always done it,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters.

and

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who is in the line of succession for the presidency as the president pro tempore of the Senate, dismissed Trump’s tweet as just the opinion of one person, noting that it would take an act of Congress to change the date of a federal election.

“It doesn’t matter what one individual in this country says,” Grassley said. “We still are a country based on the rule of law. And we must follow the law until either the Constitution is changed or until the law is changed.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) similarly said he opposes pushing back the date of the election. “No way should we ever not hold an election on the day that we have it,” McCarthy told reporters.

Let us not kid ourselves. If he can ratchet up the ridiculousness levels we've seen this week, it's not going to plateau there.  

 

 

The Bonehead-in-Chief even manages to ruin his good policy moves

Rescinding the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule is an excellent move. It was rank social engineering, federal overreach and distortion of the housing market.

As Stanley Kurtz at National Review said in 2015:

AFFH is easily one of President Obama’s most radical initiatives, on a par with Obamacare in its transformative potential. In effect, AFFH gives the federal government a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood — imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike, and weakening or casting aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities, from zoning to transportation to education. Not only the policy but the political implications are immense — at the presidential, congressional, state, and local levels.

But count on the Very Stable Genius to frame his move in the most cringe-inducing, boneheaded way possible:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood...

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

·

2h

I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood...

The democrat attacks write themselves.  "We don't want that smelly, lazy criminal element in our nice neighborhood of upright people." It's a walk in the park to construe a racist overtone. 

This has been the problem all along. The public conflates this boneheadedness with well-articulated and principled conservatism.

Thanks for nothing, VSG.

Mike Pence was once a public figure (with whom I was personally acquainted) I admired greatly; now I regard him with disgust bordering on contempt

Okay, so I'm about to head out to the back courtyard to begin watering our surfeit of flora. Martha McCallum's "The Story" program is on FNC on the living room television. Mike Pence is her guest. She lays out the facts of a Congressional proposal to dole out federal funds to farmers on the basis of color. She then asks him if he's okay with that.

A direct question that, if honestly answered, begins - even if elaboration follows - with a yes or a no.

Pence begins his answer with "Martha, I couldn't be more proud of this president for . . . " 

I bailed. I headed outside to water plants. 

It was a direct question, Mike. 

There was a time, when he was an Indianapolis-based talk show host, or, perhaps even more certainly, when he was the head of a statewide think tank, when he would have said, "Of course not. That runs counter to everything our notions of fairness and of the role of the federal government tell us."

I'm from his hometown. I've had several one-on-one conversations with him. I have connections to various members of his family.

My point in bringing that up is to convey that I have seen him demonstrate conservative bona fides.

And now he's so gutless that he shirks direct questions about matters of basic conservative principle and instead offers up talking points that make clear how overtaken his very soul is by the power of the cult he agreed to join. 

This is by no means the first time he has demonstrated this degree of fecklessness. 

But this one was a clear case of being given the opportunity to go on record as standing on principle. 

He blew it. 

It's guys like him that have taken the entire Republican party's poll numbers down to the level of the Very Stable Genius vis-a-vis Joe Biden.

It gives me no pleasure to be saying this. This country needs a repository for actual conservative principles. But the entire organization is wholly given over to a megalomaniac who has 99 percent of its politicians by the short hairs. 

You follow the Very Stable Genius off the cliff in the service of his glorification, or your career is done, which it's going to be anyway.

I can't imagine you're going to sleep well tonight, Mr. Vice President.

Tuesday roundup

Richard Reinsch II has a great piece at Law & Liberty entitled "Irving Kristol's Rules for Nihilists." A taste:

Many of us now feel old, detached even, before our time. The beliefs, attitudes, mores that our parents, clergy, coaches, teachers, and other authority figures, almost unconsciously imparted to us, seem increasingly like museum pieces. Should we consign individualism, competitive striving, personal accountability, to say nothing of a belief that we live and act under God and the moral law, to an antiquated, bigoted past? In is the new victim slick and its reduction of the person to gender and race—its symbology sits on your Nike apparel, emblazoned on sporting venues, touted by leading corporations. Out is the fabric of liberty and order, honesty and sobriety, diligence and thrift. The symbology of these virtues may become synonymous with white supremacy, the ontological core of American identity, we are increasingly told. The Smithsonian Museum for African American History and Culture has pedagogical plans on this front.

We confront the following question: “what if the “self” that is “realized” under the conditions of liberal capitalism is a self that despises liberal capitalism, and uses its liberty to subvert and abolish a free society?” This question was asked forty eight years ago by Irving Kristol in his magnificent 1972 lecture “Capitalism, Socialism, and Nihilism,” delivered to the twenty fifth anniversary meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. Kristol understood well the problems of liberal democratic society when it is detached from metaphysical and spiritual goods. He underscores what he thinks are the tendencies for such an order: a vacuous liberty increasingly perceived as unworthy of defending and the turn to a pathological, if not socialist tinged, notion of the good. The outcome, Kristol feared, would be a sickness leading to death. His insights in this essay clear a path forward during our own sickness in 2020.

One of the speakers at yesterday's America's Frontline Doctors event on the steps of the Supreme Court is a real humdinger:

Immanuel, a pediatrician and a religious minister, has a history of making bizarre claims about medical topics and other issues. She has often claimed that gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are in fact caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches. 

She alleges alien DNA is currently used in medical treatments, and that scientists are cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious. And, despite appearing in Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress on Monday, she has said that the government is run in part not by humans but by “reptilians” and other aliens.

Immanuel gave her viral speech on the steps of the Supreme Court at the “White Coat Summit,” a gathering of a handful of doctors who call themselves America’s Frontline Doctors and dispute the medical consensus on the novel coronavirus. The event was organized by the right-wing group Tea Party Patriots, which is backed by wealthy Republican donors.

In her speech, Immanuel alleges that she has successfully treated hundreds of patients with hydroxychloroquine, a controversial treatment Trump has promoted and says he has taken himself. Studies have failed to find proofthat the drug has any benefit in treating COVID-19, and the Food and Drug Administration in June revoked its emergency authorization to use it to treat the deadly virus, saying it hadn’t demonstrated any effect on patients’ mortality prospects.

“Nobody needs to get sick,” Immanuel said. “This virus has a cure.”

The account goes on to say that "[t]oward the end of Immanuel's speech,  the event's organizer and other participants can be seen trying to get the microphone away from her."

Rod Dreher's essays at The American Conservative are always worth one's while. Today's is particularly good. It's about what a poisonous undertaking the 1619 Project is:

In our time, the New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has been celebrated as the genius behind the Times‘s 1619 Project, which is an attempt to — in the Times‘s word — “reframe” American history around slavery. No longer should 1776 be considered the year of America’s birth, but rather 1619, the year the first African slaves were brought to the New World. Jones won the Pulitzer Prize this year for her work on the project. It is based on a fundamental historical falsehood — a malicious and destructive one too: that the purpose of America was to preserve slavery.

A number of historians — none of them conservatives — called Jones and her team at the Timesout on this lie (see here for a list of some of the names, and their criticism). This is a lie that could have tremendous consequences. As Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, himself a man of the left, has said:

“To teach children that the American Revolution was fought in part to secure slavery would be giving a fundamental misunderstanding not only of what the American Revolution was all about but what America stood for and has stood for since the Founding.”

But Jones’s lie is politically useful in advancing the identity-politics goals of progressives. Oprah Winfrey and Lionsgate are going to make a series of films and feature television shows based on the 1619 Project. They are changing the cultural memory of Americans, in a way that deceives people about what America was, and is. Nobody can possibly deny that slavery was a terrible stain on this nation, but it is an evil whose existence stood as a rebuke to the Founders’ ideals. It took a Civil War to finally end the malignant institution — but it did end, at the cost of between 600,000 and 750,000 American lives. 

He takes on the ginned-up outrage over Tom Cotton's "necessary evil" remark:

The reason we’re talking about it now is that Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, is sponsoring legislation that would prohibit the use of federal tax dollars to teach the 1619 Project in American classrooms. Whether or not such legislation is wise is certainly debatable. What’s caused the ruckus is this section from a story in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette:

In the interview, Cotton said the role of slavery can’t be overlooked.

“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction,” he said.

Instead of portraying America as “an irredeemably corrupt, rotten and racist country,” the nation should be viewed “as an imperfect and flawed land, but the greatest and noblest country in the history of mankind,” Cotton said.

This is being wildly misconstrued as some sort of justification for slavery. What Cotton is saying simply is that the United States could not have existed if the non-slave states had not agreed to accept the slave states. It was a doomed compromise, a one we eventually had to go to war over, but it launched the country. Cotton is pointing out the tragic nature of the compromise that made America possible as a nation united under the Constitution. He is not defending slavery, which would be as insane morally as it would be politically. He is repeating a similar point that Abraham Lincoln made in an 1855 letter to Joshua Speed, a friend of his who owned slaves:

You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union.

Do you see?

Attorney General William Barr's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee is ongoing even as I write, so it will be some time before takes on the overall arc of his appearance begin coming out, but his opening statement doesn't sugarcoat anything.  

One thing I am getting from real-time observations on Twitter is along these lines:

Michael Ongstad

@MikeOngstad

Jim Jordan, who has built an entire brand around yelling at witnesses and giving them no time to respond, is complaining that Democrats are doing that to Barr.

What's in each party's new COVID-19 relief bill? Some commonalities (direct payments), some differences (liability protection for businesses, schools and health care providers).