At about the 5 minute mark, there is an exchange that I found deeply disconcerting but also very illuminating.
Q:You are a gay, black Washington Post Columnist and much celebrated. Are you, is this, your America? Are you worried it will become another America?
A: That is a very powerful question John, and it moves me almost into silence, because, um, the election of President Obama was a great moment for this country… and now we stand two months away from…from all of that disappearing [here he begins to weep]… And as an African American, as an openly gay man, and as an American, that frightens me.
Watching Jonathan Capehart break down out of fear because his candidate lost an election… at first I thought it was almost juvenile, hysterical even (in the old sense of caused by uncontrolled extreme emotion, not the humorous sense). Capehart is more then just a well established, well respected and frequently awarded journalist, at least one site lists his net worth “considered to be $3 million“.
But it occurs to me that in this man, a well respected multimillionaire journalist, we see the same pathology that is running rampant in the the Social Justice Warriors and Inter-sectional Feminists (etc, etc) on college campuses all across the Anglosphere. He has allowed himself to be terrified, to become a victim in his own mind. A victim of his own accusations against someone else.
He’a convinced himself that Trump, a man who was a rich New York liberal until only a few years ago, a man who has a Jewish daughter, a Jewish son in-law, and two Jewish daughters in-law, is but a toothbrush-mustache away from being Neo-Hitler.
The same Donald Trump that, at the end of the interview, Capehart describes as being warm and charming when Capehart interviewed him personally!
I can’t help but think about the protesters that accosted Professor Peterson only a few weeks ago. Protesters that accused him of not only attracting Nazis to his rally with his rhetoric, but that his words were the proximate cause of teen suicides.
It really is both amazing and dismaying. Whether on campus or in the campaigns, it seems that the only thing the pursuit of Social Justice has produced is an ever greater number of victims.
Today, the first in what is likely to be a series on the quixotic oddities of the #NeverTrump movement.
Ace at the Ace of Spades blog has an excellent (and appropriately acerbic) post on the distressing turn some prominent members of #NeverTrump have taken and their increasingly bizarre reasoning. On Tuesday the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Page’s Bret Stephens assailed Sean Hannity (among others) and includes the following;
This is the reason I’ve consistently argued that the only hope for a conservative restoration is a blowout Hillary Clinton victory, held in check by a Republican majority in Congress. If Mr. Trump loses the election narrowly, the stab-in-the-back thesis will have a patina of credibility that he might have won had it not been for the opposition of people like me. But a McGovern-style defeat makes that argument impossible to sustain except among the most cretinous. We can count on Mr. Hannity for that.
So, let’s get this straight: the path to restoring ‘conservative’ principles lies first in… a crushing Democratic victory? One that leaves the White House (and thus certainly the Supreme Court) in the hands of progressive Democrats for four to eight more years (vastly longer for the Court)? So elegant a plan, yet also so familiar…
For those insufficiently well versed in South Park episodes (or internet memes) the ‘business plan’ of the Underpants gnomes (world domination through underoos monopoly!) which has become shorthand for any plan where the initial steps seem completely disconnected from the final goal. A shorthand Stephens is well familiar with. Unfortunately, familiarity with the concept does not seem to have aided Stephens, for he seems to embrace a plan that not only seems unlikely to succeed, but a scenario where the first step makes the final step all but impossible.
Stephens’ thoughts on the subject are a deep well to plumb, but let’s focus on just a few problems that stand between Steps 1 (Hillary in the White House) and 3 (Conservative Triumph).
One is immediately struck by how #NeverTrump is presented in two, mutually incompatible, forms. On the one hand it is a movement so small and so lacking in influence that their opposition cannot reasonably be blamed for a loss by Trump. On the other hand the NeverTrumpers seem to harbor no doubt that their influence and leadership is sufficiently potent that they will be able to seize hold of the levers of power in the GOP in a post Trump environment.
To be fair one may object to my characterization: perhaps it is not that the NeverTrumpers believe they have such power now, no no. Rather they imagine that, after their prophesied ruin of Trump, they will be hoisted on the shoulders of the GOP, a GOP repentant and chastened by shattering losses. In other words, they may be powerless now, but just you wait, when this worm turns they will be on top of the world!
Putting aside that little wrinkle, there is a vastly greater problem. Buried in the vituperation against Mr. Hannity is a small and very revealing remark, almost offhand, but which gives perfect voice to the insuperable problems in the 3-step #NeverTrump plan (emphasis mine);
Mr. Hannity’s other goal is to preserve the fiction—first cultivated by Ted Cruz and later adopted by the Trumpians—that a wan GOP “establishment” and its “Acela corridor” voters sat on their hands while Mr. Obama traduced the Constitution and sold us out to the enemy.
For a moment, let’s take Mr. Stephens at his word: he truly believes that a Hillary presidency is the key to a “conservative restoration”. If that’s the case, what exactly is the conservative movement that Stephens and his colleagues at the WSJ editorial page interested in restoring?
It’s not exactly ancient history when the WSJ had precious little regard for conservatives such as Ted Cruz and Mike Lee. In an article at Truth Revolt from December of last year, pithily titled The Wall Street Journal Hates Ted Cruz. Here’s Why., Aaron Bandler runs through the many, many objections the WSJ has raised to Senator Cruz’ attempts to enforce conservative principles;
Time and again, the Journal‘s editorial board attacks conservatives for trying to fight against the leftist agenda. When Cruz and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Ut.) attempted to defund Obamacare, the Journal accused them of simply wanting “fund-raising lists or getting face time on cable TV.” The Journal also came out against conservative efforts to defund the baby-dismembering Planned Parenthood and Obama’s illegal executive amnesty. What good are the Republicans if they can’t even fight against those two issues?
Also, Bret Stephens, who is on the Journal‘s editorial board, wrote a snarky column called “Let’s Elect Hillary Now” in which he accuses conservatives like Levin and radio host Laura Ingraham of having purity tests for Republican candidates that will guarantee a win for likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. The column was light on substance, but heavy on elitism.
That same day Ben Shapiro dissected Stephens’ ‘Elect Hillary Now’ article in depth on Truth Revolt;
In fact, Stephens calls Cruz as unpalatable as Trump with this nasty slur:
Mr. Cruz is happy to be on any side of an issue so long as he can paint himself as a “real Republican”—the implicit goal here being the automatic excommunication of anyone who disagrees with him. Naturally, he’s rising.
What absolute, self-serving hogwash. Cruz has been incredibly consistent, far more so than Rubio. In fact, Cruz and Trump were both leaders on one of Stephens’ chief priorities, stopping the Iran deal that Stephens’ beloved GOP establishment allowed to breeze through Congress.
But that doesn’t matter. In order to demonstrate that they aren’t the whiny pick-up-the-political-football-and-go-home types, however, the GOP establishment must insist that Mitt Romney didn’t lose because they picked him – no, it was somehow the base’s fault. And it will be the base’s fault again if Cruz or Trump gets the nomination.
Shapiro remarks that Stephens “mocks”, “snarls” and insists “the only reason to disagree with him is a collective political death wish”. Ben Shapiro has been one of the most prominent (and during the Michelle Fields affair, most strident) public conservatives associated with #NeverTrump, yet there seems little room for either Ted Cruz or Mr. Shapiro in this new, ‘restored’ conservative movement Stephens imagines.
So, if Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Ben Shapiro et al are insufficiently representative of the ‘conservative’ movement the WSJ wishes to restore, what does actually inform the WSJ’s conceptualization of ‘conservatism’? Again, from Bandler’s article at Truth Revolt;
To really get an idea of the mindset of the Journal, one simply needs to look back to their editorial on July 3, 1984 called “In Praise of Huddled Masses” in which they called for open borders.
“If Washington still wants to ‘do something’ about immigration, we propose a five-word constitutional amendment: There shall be open borders,” the editorial read.
In his articles Mr. Stephens explicitly denies the very idea of an ‘Establishment’ GOP. He has openly denigrated conservatives in the mold of Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee. Two years ago it was the libertarian conservative Senator Rand Paul that Stephens was denigrating. In that article Stephens seems to reserve his warmest regards for such conservative stalwarts as… Governors Jeb Bush and Chris Christie. Winners, respectively, of 0.92% and 0.18% of the GOP primary vote. They really are representing the 1% (well, 1.1%)!
Stephens inadvertently illustrates that whether Trump or Hillary occupies the Oval Office next year, the conservative movement and the GOP face dark times ahead. As Myron Magnate observes, the voters are angry, animated by “the sense that the U.S. government no longer belongs to the people and no longer represents them“, a sense that “reflects the real state of affairs”. By this December we will be well into the question of what the conservative movement actually is and what it seeks to conserve.
Unfortunately for us all, it seems there is no shortage of people that someone wants out of the movement. What remains to be seen is if anyone at all will be left.
The Democratic nominating process has finally begun, which being the Democrats means that the first allegations of impropriety have been lodged.
What happened Monday night at the Democratic caucuses was a debacle, period. Democracy, particularly at the local party level, can be slow, messy and obscure. But the refusal to undergo scrutiny or allow for an appeal reeks of autocracy.
But what’s a potentially stolen primary when measured against the vast tally of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s malfeasance? It’s a credit to her immense and transparent corruption that she’s managed to make a septuagenarian socialist Jew from Brooklyn (by way of Vermont’s Senate delegation) seem like a reasonable alternative for the nomination of the Democratic party (another glass ceiling shattered by Hillary!).
For all that, I find myself almost fond of the diabolical crone, not so much for herself, but for the case she makes against the Democratic party and (especially) the mainstream media. This is, after all, the same media that considered sexual harassment in the workplace a pressing concern… right up until it was time to slip on their presidential kneepads.
With that in mind, let’s look at some issues where Hillary forces her supporters and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself) to swallow positions that they have previously condemned (and in some cases, continue to condemn).
Secret Emails are Shredding the Cons… err, never-mind…
The year is 2007; the battle rages between Hillary Clinton, heir apparent to the Democratic nomination and the upstart Barack Obama. One issue they agree on is the perfidy and secrecy of the bush administration. Obama promises “We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration.” While today Obama’s promises of transparency have increasingly gone from a punch-line on the right to a shared consensus, some forget the clarion call of alarm issued by Hillary.
Clinton said, “We know our Constitution is being shredded. We know about the secret wiretaps, the secret military tribunals, the secret White House email accounts.”
Apparently the Constitution is safe so long as the emails are under the steely eye of Eric Hoteham…
Those who have observed the evolving Clinton strategy of defense on the email matter will note that Hillary has moved subtly from “There is no Classified Material” to “nothing marked classified”. This is, however, a distinction without much legal difference; among the statutes she is suspected of potentially violating is 18 USC 793. Without going too much into things, gross negligence, as well as willful and malicious action, is enough to secure a conviction for “Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information”.
Put another, simpler way: if the material on Hillary’s server falls under the aforementioned code, then the excuse “it wasn’t marked classified” is about as legally useful as “I swear officer, I didn’t know she was 13…”
Lawyer for Evil, Incorporated;
Critical writers, such as those of Mother Jones magazine, have made a bit of a cottage industry of criticizing GOP candidates for actions they took during their private legal representation of clients. The criticism is especially sharp when directed at Ted Cruz, ranging from who he represented,
…But much of the time, Cruz represented corporate clients.
Cruz’s years as a highly paid private lawyer who often defended powerful corporations. And there are several significant cases he handled—politically inconvenient cases—that he has photoshopped out of his personal narrative.
As a politician, Ted Cruz, the junior Republican senator from Texas, has championed tort reform—the nationwide effort pushed by conservatives and business interests to restrict malpractice and other wrongful injury and death lawsuits, limiting how much a jury can award a harmed individual for pain and suffering and in punitive damages. …
Yet, as a lawyer in private practice, Cruz—at least twice, in 2010 and 2011—worked on cases in New Mexico to secure $50 million-plus jury awards in tort cases prompted by corporate malfeasance. These are precisely the kind of jury awards that the tort reform Cruz has promoted would abolish.
In 1975, the same year she married Bill, Hillary Clinton agreed to serve as the court-appointed attorney for Thomas Alfred Taylor, a 41-year-old accused of raping the [12 year old] child after luring her into a car.
The specifics of Hillary’s defense of Mr. Taylor are not the subject of this post (they deserve a specific and in-depth treatment). What is relevant is the simple question: if a corporate attorney’s actions should reflect poorly on his character, how about the defense of the accused rapist of a 12 year old girl? How about securing for that accused rapist a sentence of one year?
Taylor, who pleaded to unlawful fondling of a chid, was sentenced to one year in prison, with two months reduced for time served.
How about securing a one year sentence for an accused rapist of a 12 year old girl when their attorney thinks they are guilty?
“I had him take a polygraph, which he passed – which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs,” {Clinton] added with a laugh.
No doubt we can look forward to the media expressing as intense an interest in the case of Thomas Alfred Taylor as, say, Mitt Romney’s high school experience. I wouldn’t hold my breath though.
The Darker the Money, the Sweeter the Juice…
This is not to say that all of Hillary Clinton’s trespass are all of old vintage, far from it. In the ongoing Democratic party attack of paranoid lunacy regarding the Koch brothers, the new book that is making the rounds is Jane Mayer’s Dark Money. In it, Mayer… well, let’s let the NY Times describe it;
“Dark Money” relates the personal story of the Koch family in considerable detail — an engineer father who made a fortune building oil refineries, then spent the last years of his life as an angry member of the John Birch Society; an early conversion by Charles and David Koch to the radical libertarian economics of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises; a web of sibling rivalry among all four of the family’s brothers, ending in painful legal confrontations that dragged on for years.
Ah yes, Hayek and von Mises, those dastardly fellows! You can practically smell the mustache wax… Thank goodness Hillary Clinton is, of course, above such shabby and obvious graft, such tawdry peddling of influence for cash.
A consortium of American defense contractors led by Boeing would deliver $29 billion worth of advanced fighter jets to the United States’ oil-rich ally in the Middle East. …
The Saudi deal was one of dozens of arms sales approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department that placed weapons in the hands of governments that had also donated money to the Clinton family philanthropic empire, an International Business Times investigation has found.
As Egyptian democracy protesters massed in the streets of Cairo in 2011, provoking a bloody crackdown from the authoritarian regime of Hosni Mubarak, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented herself as a champion of human rights. …
But behind the scenes, Clinton pursued contrasting aims. … Her State Department cleared Egypt to continue purchasing arms the U.S. government classified as “toxicological agents,” a broad designation that included chemical and biological weapons, …
The Clinton-run State Department’s approval of chemical and biological exports to the Egyptian government increased in volume just as dollars flowed from Mubarak-linked entities into the coffers of Clinton family concerns.
The Clinton Foundation accepted millions of dollars from seven foreign governments during Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, including one donation that violated its ethics agreement with the Obama administration, foundation officials disclosed Wednesday.
This list is, of course, far from comprehensive. Nor is it my point to claim that there is no possibility that any given one of these episodes or elements is evidence of irredeemable corruption. My point is that the Left and the Media (once again, I repeat myself) have established a code of conduct, a framework of right and wrong and applied it strenuously to Republicans whenever they get the chance. It is the unfortunate reality of the moment that these traits, found individually in various people on the right, seem to be present all at once in the person of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
This is the singularity that is Hillary, and the best explanation for the Berne being felt: Hillary embodies all of the traits that the Democratic base has grown to despise, yet the Clinton’s possess such a death-grip on the Democratic Party machine they seem determined to either drag the party to a Hillary coronation, or strangle it in the process.
It seems that the Donald Trump phenomenon is something that pundits and commentators can’t seem to stop talking about, but also something they can’t seem to actually understand. One particular remark on Special Report Online struck me: Dr. Charles Krauthammer wondered how it was that a man born in wealth and with a tremendous fortune, how can he connect with middle and lower economic class voters?
The problem, it seems to me, may be that Dr. Krauthammer is a great intellect (and avid fan of baseball), but it seems he doesn’t watch enough movies. Because, as Ace of Spades explains, politics has become a a movie, analyzed in terms of a heroes journey and the sensibilities of plot, pacing and motivation. But how does that help us figure out the Trump phenomenon?
There are a lot of theories among pundits: some think he panders, some thing he simply shoots from the hip, some point out his crudity, borderline vulgarity and so on. All of that has some merit, but none of them capture the whole picture: Donald Trump is Thornton Melon.
Back to School is a great comedy, and a big part of the success is the ensemble cast. That’s because, just like Donald Trump, Rodney Dangerfield’s Thornton Melon is a man we root for in part in spite of himself. The thing is that if take away the loathsome, hidebound, patrician economics professor, the cartoon jock villains and the unctuous dean, and we’re left with Melon… who’s kinda an insufferable schmuck.
Insufferable perhaps, but a snappy dresser.
At the risk of fantastically over-analyzing a light 80’s comedy, Thornton Melon would be nearly intolerable in real life: he is constantly breaking the rules and suffering no consequences because he throws large amounts of cash at problems, he’s unashamed about being crooked and simply bribing public servants, he’s a womanizer, a coward and, most significant to the plot, he’s a cheater.
In Back to School we don’t root for Melon because he’s a hero, we root for him because he’s not actively a villain. Once we realize that, and that Paxton Whitehead‘s acerbic and patronizing performance is as important to the movie as Dangerfield’s own, we understand Trump and his role in this film.
Because if Trump is Melon, who has been cast in the role of the uptight, head-up-his-ass professors that everyone wants to see get their comeuppance?
Heirs to the legacy of Lincoln, or two putzes in need of a pie to the face?
Since putting in the Republican Congress Republican Voters have been subject to one episode after another of what Ace aptly terms failure theater. No principle seems too big to sacrifice on the alter of expediency, no favor to donors too imbecile to come through on. The Republican base is appalled and feels betrayed. They’ve delivered both houses of Congress to their party only to be told ‘oops, turns out nothing worthwhile can be done without the White House too‘. The Republican leadership is running a con job on its voters, and they have noticed. In other words, the base has collectively decided that it’s time to do something futile and stupid.
At City Journal, a normally very reliable source for clear thinking articles and commentary, Guy Sorman presents a shocking article: The Unspeakable Comparison. In this article the author sets out a simple formulation; that the tide of refugees entering Europe at the moment is nothing less then the modern incarnation of the Jews fleeing from the Nazis in the 1939s. This is no idle speculation or sly innuendo but explicit in the article, which enters into the comparison within two sentences;
Several million refugees escaped from Germany, Poland, and the Baltic countries between 1933 and 1940, fleeing Nazism and throwing themselves against closed borders.
What makes the article so shocking is not so much its subject matter, but its quality, or rather the lack thereof. This article dramatically fails to live up to the (admittedly high) bar set for City Journal articles.
First, the article is filled with a number of dubiously truthful and bizarre non-sequiturs. Consider the author’s claim that “Outside the Jewish community, Nathan’s relatives and the 6 million other victims of the events that would later be named the Holocaust failed to inspire any kind of emotion, until Adolf Eichmann was tried in Jerusalem in 1961. The extermination of the Jews had previously been swallowed up by the collective unconsciousness, filed away as a collateral accident of the Second World War.”
This idea, that the Holocaust was unknown outside of the Jewish community until 1961 is simply untenable. As a simple point, the documentary film ‘Death Mills‘ (directed by Billy Wilder) was released in 1945. ‘The Stranger‘, directed by and starring Orson Wells (with Edward G. Robinson) and incorporating documentary footage of the camps, in a story about hunting a Nazi war criminal was released in 1946, becoming “the only film made by Welles to have been a bona fide box office success upon its release.” The film was nominated for an Oscar and made back triple the production costs.
In 1959 the film version of “The Diary of Anne Frank” would win 3 Oscars, and be nominated for a further 5. This is an adaptation of the Broadway play, which in turn was an adaptation of the book of the same name.
Simply put, to say that (at least in the United States), “the Holocaust failed to inspire any kind of emotion” seems irreconcilable with these (and many other) facts. This is but one of the offhand remarks the author makes that inspire puzzlement, rather then confidence.
Second, the author has a habit of simply asserting things, including the point that underlies the moral of his entire article: “This is not the Holocaust—not yet.” “YET”, the author says, with not a shred of justification. But lets go back, for the author seems to understand the weakness of his own argument, and the shameful inadequacy therein.
“Is this situation incomparable because Latifa, Ali, and Ahmed have not been exterminated with the same industrial efficiency as Samuel, Nathan, and Rachel? Why are they incomparable?”
The obvious answer, so obvious it’s painful, to “Why are they incomparable?” is because the author has not mustered a shred of evidence that these refugees are similar to Jews fleeing the Holocaust in the two ways that actually matter: Genocide, and the industrialized killing used to enact that genocidal intent.
The horror of the Holocaust doe not lie simply in the scale of the bloodshed, many more people in total numbers would die in defense of Soviet Russia, but in the deliberate and determined efforts of a nation to eradicate an ethnic group. This defining element of evil is simply not to be found in this conflict, or better put, not a defining characteristic of these refugees. More on this in a moment.
It is true that the conflict in Syria and Iraq is sectarian and barbaric, but it is sectarian and barbaric (for the most part) in a manner that is entirely consistent with the ancient religious wars of the area. “Convert or Die” is the bloody credo of ISIS, it is the way they seek to recapture the 7th century origins of their faith. What they are not is motivated by the pseudo-scientific race hygiene of the Nazis.
As an aside, it’s rather telling that the author pays no special attention to the clearly genocidal elements of the conflict that everyone has seen: the attempted eradication of the Yazidis and the indigenous Christian population. There is very little evidence presented that the refugee masses entering Europe are these critically endangered groups, and certainly none is mustered by Mr. Sorman. In a piece entirely directed to making the moral analogy with the Holocaust, it’s a curious omission.
Above and beyond anything else, while the author’s argument is ripe for being picked apart (so many other tendentious elements remain), it fails for not even mentioning the simplest and first point: that the very first quality of a nation is the ability of that nation, and that nation’s people, to decide who they wish to admit as citizens and residents. Without that, a nation is simply an area on a map.
What the author doesn’t say is again telling: he mentions 3 Muslim nations that “have somehow managed to welcome 3 million” refugees (Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, who may be themselves surprised to see the word ‘welcome’ used there…). Conspicuously absent from the list of “welcome” countries? Any of the sparsely populated, and very wealthy, nations of the Arabian peninsula.
Why exactly is it incumbent on the nations of Christian (or rather, post-Christian) Europe to put up this army of refugees, when their fellow Arab coreligionists close their own borders? Perhaps the author avoids this because he knows that the answer invalidates so much of his own assertion. He (amazingly naively) states “Do we really think Latifa, Ali, and Ahmed are risking drowning in the Mediterranean Sea, suffocating to death in a truck in Austria, or dying of thirst on some Greek road because they love to travel? Because they are looking for a part-time job in England? Of course not.”
Really? Putting aside that the USA regularly has seen economic migrants suffocating in container trucks, dying in the southern deserts and drowning on their way to the USA, if simple shelter from the conflict drives these refugees, why are they undertaking this arduous trip across a hostile Europe, instead of the much, much shorter trip to the Arabian peninsula?
Because these people are not fleeing a modern holocaust and have no interest in sitting in refugee camps in the Arabian desert. Sitting in the cafes of Europe? That, it would appear, is worth a bit of travel.
By the by, there is some debate about where this footage is from: the Youtube page claims German refugee busses. Other claim a bus in France in 2012. Such wonderful options…
Finally, the slipshod nature of the author’s argument spills into the comments section: a commentator identified as the author writes “Regarding the so called flight of French Jews to Israel , the numbers are stable”.
Which is directly contradicted by numbers supplied to the Washington Post by the Jewish Agency, which “says the number of French Jews leaving for Israel each year had been steady at about 2,000 until 2013, when it hit 3,400. Last year, it jumped to more than 7,000 — making France the leading contributor of immigrants to Israel and marking the first time that more than 1 percent of a Western nation’s Jewish population has left for Israel in a single year, according to Avi Mayer, a spokesman for the Jewish Agency.”
Overall, the greatest flaw in The Unspeakable Comparison is the near total lack of grounding in dispassionate principles. Rather, the entire article is framed as if accepting immigrants from this conflict is the penance that the West must pay for refusing shelter to Jewish immigrants generations ago. Mr. Sorman (in the comments) makes this moral framework explicit: “Angela Merkel is saving the honor of the western civilization” he declares. Quite the endorsement!
Reading The Unspeakable Comparison I could not help but think of an adage for Jewish thought, which I am told is one favored by the Lubavitcher Rebbe: The Head must be master of the Heart. Without calm and reasoned thinking, solutions become impossible, reason breaks down and morality gives way to the flush of excitement, that visceral reaction to doing something that ‘feels right’. Ironically, what the Jewish Mr. Sorman’s article lacks in dispassion, Thomas Sowell admirably supplies in his far superior The Past and Future of the Refugee Crisis. Without going into Dr. Sowell’s recommendations, he points out something that that entirely escapes Mr. Sorman’s jeremiad: that the best solution is not the importation of an indefinite stream of refugees, but acting to ameliorate conditions on the ground in the Middle East. Failing that, Dr. Sowell points out that far closer nations, such as Jordan and Egypt, could be offered compensation to alleviate their share of the refugee crisis and (potentially) provide a more attractive (and certainly closer) point of refuge.
In the end, the most curious part of The Unspeakable Comparison is the author’s… well, his failure to actually pursue the comparison. If, one accepts his argument, that the current refugees are the moral equivalent of the Jews fleeing the Nazis, then is not Assad’s regime and ISIS the moral equivalent of Nazis themselves? If this is to be the case, is not the clearest moral case not that Europe should suffer the tide of refugees, but rather take arms, that by opposition they may end the source of this conflict?
The admonition “Never Again” is, after all, not an admonition for the nations of the world to sit idly by, swelling their intake centers with those poor wretches lucky enough to flee their persecutors. No, it is an argument against allowing evils like the Nazis to hold sway. It is an argument against the indifference shown by the administration to ISIS, to Syria, to Iran, it is, in short, an argument for armed conflict as a method of destroying the greatest of evils.
But I suppose I have answered by own question: Mr. Sorman does not, and perhaps cannot connect that final dot and declare ISIS the moral equivalent of the Nazis, because that would cast his argument down. He desires exculpation from sin through ‘progressive’, ‘peaceful’ means. That these means ultimately do nothing to shorten the crisis… well, what’s a man seeking absolution to do?
So Donald Trump is promising to wall off the southern border. Whether you think this is a worthwhile endeavor or not depends on a great many things, but one strain of argument that has popped up is not so much that this is a bad idea, per se, but rather that it’s an idea beneath consideration, patently foolish and something no rational person would consider.
The response I have seen to this is very interesting and it often takes the form of “Israel has a border wall, why can’t the United States?”
What makes this question “Israel has X, why can’t we” so interesting is what it reveals, both about Israel and about the gulf between her and the other Western nations. It seems that Israel, alone among the Western nations, must engage in this kind of exercise in exclusion. Although England, at least, may soon be regretting the loss of their great moat against mainland Europe… The rest of Europe looks at such nationalism, such exclusion and shudders. Though, to be fair, European nations have more reason then most to rue forceful expressions of national pride.
This in turn fuels a feeling for some on the Right that Israel is the last truly Western nation, in the sense of being a nation that is distinctly modern and patriotic yet retaining its own cultural identity. In other words, that Israel is the last Western nation that is Western in the American sense. This would seem to be supported by the reviling of Israel in the most anti-American quarters of the Left, who despise Israel for precisely the characteristics that are admired by the right. The patriotism, seeing self-defense as a virtue and religiosity that the Right value are all characteristics far out of favor on the left.
Others will contend that a fence is useless, offering more picayune objections: citing tunnel infiltration and the abduction of Gilad Shalit. ‘Surely the wealthy Mexican cartels can surely replicate Hamas’ tunnel network?’, they declare. But this rebuttal would seem to miss the point; no one would seriously entertain the idea that condoms are useless because they have a (very small) failure rate. Yet to a certain kind of critic, the idea that the Israeli border walls are not 100% efficacious is the equivalent of them being useless.
In this way the Left is at least consistent: for years we were told that missile defense could never be practical. Which is true.. so long as you keep ratcheting up what constitutes “practical”. It’s also reminiscent of the attempt to ‘debunk the success’ of the Iron Dome system in the recent Gaza conflict.
This, I think, ties into the other reason the left find the question “Israel has a wall, why can’t we” so vexing: Israel has a wall because it retains a sense of self and a sense of sovereignty. European nations retain (with varying degree of success) distinct identities, but there is a terrible shame seen among the ‘elites’ in taking any pride in this. Israeli pride in Israeli identity is an uncomfortable reminder to many on the left, especially in Europe, of a time they want to forget.
There is also a rather amusing and circular argument and it goes like this;
“You can’t build a fence that won’t be scaled, or a wall that can’t be tunneled under.” Claims the opponent of a border barrier.
“Well,” goes the reply, “then we’ll put up X.” Where X is an ever increasing level of security, going from barbed wire topped fences to noveu-Berlin Wall affairs. As each new level is proposed, it is dismissed, until a point of security that everyone understands would be effective is proposed.
“Okay, may that would work,” admits the opponent, “but it would be sick. But I guess you want to see migrant children blown up by landmines/impaled on punji sticks/eaten by moat alligators?”
It’s a bit like the old example of a man that kills his parents then asks the court for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan. The opponents of a border wall insist that innocuous measures will be ineffective, and effective measures would be too terrible for civilized people to actually deploy… oh, and you’re a dope if you propose innocuous measures, and a bloodthirsty savage for proposing the measures opponents understand would work.
Catch-22: it’s a way of saying ‘yes’ to the question “does a sovereign nation have the right to refuse access to non-citizens?” while at the same time ruling out any way to restrict access.
It seems in the end what is really being discussed is: if a nation will not put its own citizens before non-citizens, if it will not show loyalty first to its citizens, what loyalty then does that nation deserve from its citizens?
In the contrast of Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, many Americans (especially on the right) see one leader that they feel, outside of any evaluation of competency, truly loves his country and is doing all he can for it. The other leader would be President Obama.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that Hillary Clinton’ speech at the United Nations in March about her use of a private email server, was… well, perhaps Clintonian is what she was going for;
QUESTION: Were you ever — were you ever specifically briefed on the security implications of using — using your own email server and using your personal address to email with the president?
CLINTON: I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.
So I’m certainly well-aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.
We now know that at least half of that statement is untrue: there is classified material in her emails, and not merely classified material, but the most delicate and closely guarded of secrets;
The inspector general for the Intelligence Community notified senior members of Congress that two of four classified emails discovered on the server Clinton maintained at her New York home contained material deemed to be in one of the highest security classifications – more sensitive than previously known.
Remember that the four emails that are classified (two highly classified) were detected in a sample of forty (40) emails, this is not the total number of such records;
The four emails in question “were classified when they were sent and are classified now,” said Andrea Williams, a spokeswoman for the inspector general. The inspector general reviewed just a small sample totaling about 40 emails in Mrs. Clinton’s inbox—meaning that many more in the trove of more than 30,000 may contain potentially confidential, secret or top-secret information.
The inspector general’s office concluded that Mrs. Clinton should have used a secure network to transmit the emails in question—rather than her personal email account run off a home server.
“None of the emails we reviewed had classification or dissemination markings, but some included IC-derived classified information and should have been handled as classified, appropriately marked, and transmitted via a secure network,” wrote Inspector General I. Charles McCullough in the letter to Congress.
We cannot now know, but if the sample examined is representative Secretary Clinton’s emails might be 10% classified and 5% highly classified… in other words, 3,000+ and 1,500+, respectively. So why do I mention this in the context of Joe Biden? Let’s consider what former CIA operative and CNN national security analyst Bob Baer had to say about this matter;
“Seriously, if I had sent a document like this over the open Internet I’d get fired the same day, escorted to the door and gone for good — and probably charged with mishandling classified information,” Baer said.
What does this have to do with Vice President Joe Biden and President Barack Obama? As other have observed, Hillary Clinton is in trouble, but she should be in very big trouble, of the criminal kind. But she’s not, not yet. And she certainly should be;
Even for those of us who hold a very low opinion of Mrs. Clinton’s character, integrity, and judgment, this is a graver offense than many had contemplated. Merely the storage of “Top Secret” e-mails – never mind their dissemination over open channels to some individuals likely not cleared to read them — is a federal felony. On top of that, it is unthinkable that Hillary could have sent such sensitive information and not known at the time that it was sensitive.
At the moment it’s very difficult to see Hillary Clinton’s (relative) lack of legal trouble as anything but the application of double standards so shamefully common in Washington. Obama’s Justice Department could be more aggressive, and indeed, was more aggressive when it came to similar allegations against former General David Petraeus, and far, far more aggressive in pursuing penalties against lower level individuals for mishandling classified information.
Hillary would seem to have an almost insurmountable lead in the polls, as well as a frightening amount of campaign cash. Joe Biden hasn’t even begun to run, how can he possible overcome Clinton’s advantages?
The simplest way is for his friend and colleague Barack Obama to… do his job. Or rather, let his attorney general do the job she is sworn to do. It’s actually a win-win for Obama. President Obama has earned a great deal of criticism for his uneven treatment of leakers and draconian treatment of whistleblowers. Dislike of Hillary Clinton is not confined to the precincts of the right wing: plenty of progressives seem eager for anyone but Hillary.
In such an atmosphere, all President Obama needs to do to hand the nomination to his friend Joe is to treat Clinton as the law would dictate she ought to be treated and stop playing along with the Clinton charade. Hillary knows that her only chance at election is to reassemble the Obama constituency, leaving her with little to no ability to strike back at Obama should the White House, State Department and Justice Department spokespeople decide to stop dancing around questions and start answering plainly.
For the second time it seems that Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions are controlled by Barack Obama.
The 70th anniversary of the use of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, has prompted a round of discussion about the morality of the bomb, with discussions of varying quality. While with every year there seem to be more nd louder voices of condemnation, I personally find the arguments against the use of the bomb rather… lacking.
Thank God for the Atomic Bomb, an essay by Paul Fussel I consider essential to understanding not just the facts and figures, but the emotional impact the atomic bomb had. Read the whole thing, but a fine pull quote;
When the atom bombs were dropped and news began to circulate that “Operation Olympic” would not, after all, be necessary, when we learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow to adulthood after all.
In all the cant that will pour forth this week to mark the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the bombs—that the U.S. owes the victims of the bombings an apology; that nuclear weapons ought to be abolished; that Hiroshima is a monument to man’s inhumanity to man; that Japan could have been defeated in a slightly nicer way—I doubt much will be made of Fussell’s fundamental point: Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t just terrible war-ending events. They were also lifesaving. The bomb turned the empire of the sun into a nation of peace activists.
When people question, “how can you be thankful for such a terrible thing?” Point out the following;
During the closing phase of the Pacific War, average monthly deaths, military and civilian, in Japanese held-territories in China, southeast Asia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, from disease, starvation, atrocities, or combat, was about 400,000 men, women, and children.
400,000 men, women and children dead per month at the hands of the Japanese: in other words, more then 10,000 dead per day.
Put aside all the American GIs that would not be killed in the invasion. Put aside all the Allied POWs that were not killed by the Japanese, who held their lives hostage against an invasion of the home islands. Put aside all those hundreds of thousands and you still have the Atomic bomb saving more than 10,000 lives for every day it shortened the war.
It’s a funny thing, in the discussions about how the US owes the Japanese an apology, I rarely hear about the hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, Filipinos and others that were being killed by the Japanese even as they were “about to surrender”. Not a lot of talk about the tens of thousands of women, abducted for service in rape camps. Not allot of talk about attempted coupe that occurred when the Emperor finally gave the surrender order.
To put all those numbers in perspective, 400,000 dead per month is roughly equivalent to 13,000 dead per day, 556 dead per hour, just under 10 dead per minute.
Let that sink in for a moment: even as the bombs were being dropped on Japan, the Japanese were killing one Chinese soldier, one Filipino woman, one Korean child every 6 or so seconds.
It is an incontestable fact that bringing the war to an even just slightly earlier by dropping the bombs saved lives. Not just American lives that would have been lost in the invasion. Not just Japanese lives that would have been spent resisting the invasion. But civilians by the hundreds of thousands in Japanese occupied territories.
Funny how rarely that gets mentioned…
As for myself, I find my thoughts best reflected by the statement of Britain’s Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, regarding the fire bombing of Dresden, Germany;
I … assume that the view under consideration is something like this: no doubt in the past we were justified in attacking German cities. But to do so was always repugnant and now that the Germans are beaten anyway we can properly abstain from proceeding with these attacks. This is a doctrine to which I could never subscribe. Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.
There is one problem with those headlines and the course of action they describe: there is no reason for a review. From Secretary Clinton’s UN press conference yesterday;
QUESTION: Were you ever — were you ever specifically briefed on the security implications of using — using your own email server and using your personal address to email with the president?
CLINTON: I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.
So I’m certainly well-aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.
In other words, given that she was not using a server and system secured to government security standards, Sec. Clinton voluntarily restricted herself to using her email only for non-classified topics and materials*. Information that could be viewed by the general public. So why is there any review at all?
By Sec. Clinton’s own statements, there is no reason for a review by the State Department, because she never transmitted or received any information that needed security. Which also means that the State Department never needed to redact any of her emails, as Gabriel Malor notes;
Remember: Clinton says she never emailed classified info. So, if you see (b)(1) redactions in the emails posted by State, someone's lying.
The only reason for the State Department to review Sec. Clinton’s emails would be… that her statement at the press conference cannot be relied upon, and there is loads of sensitive and/or classified information in her emails. The test for all this is simple:
-If the State Department reviews the emails, then they think Sec. Clinton’s emails contain material she claims they do not.
-If the State Department simply makes the emails available, without review or redaction, then they actually believe she was telling the truth.
Which do you think they will do?
*Yes, there are many divisions of classified and sensitive information, but this entire defense for Secretary Clinton using a private email (of dubious security) is that she rigorously avoided having problematic material in her email.
As new scandals emerge to bedevil Hillary Clinton’s march to power, a question occurs: what exactly is this quality of Hillary’s that actually makes people want to vote for her? Right now it seems that Secretary Clinton is doing her own rendition of Taxi Driver, with her in the role of Matthew and the Democratic Party in the role of Iris (WARNING! Strong Language);
As I pointed out in an earlier post, conservatives have gradually come to terms with the “transparent selfishness and corruption” of Republican politicians, a recognition that the best that government can aspire to is an evil, albeit a necessary evil.
But the Left believes the opposite: that government can be a force for good, that rule by experts can usher in a new age of Aquarius, blah blah blah, etc. As Jonah Goldberg put it, “Liberalism, as an ideology, insists that government can do good and great things for the people and the world, if the people running the government are smart liberals.”
The left must claim that good government comes from good governors. The election of Barack Obama may be excused by his particular brand of practiced obscurity: he was a blank slate coming into office, onto which a majority of voters could project their allotments of “I hope”. Secretary Clinton allows for no such illusions as her history making it explicitly clear that she has a mafioso’s contempt for the strictures of government.
Apparently she was playing Tetris. Damn that L-block!
It is one thing for the Republicans to hold their nose and vote for the lesser of two evils: at the heart of the skeptical outlook of conservatives and libertarians is the idea that government may be necessary, but it remains a necessary evil. This is both a problem and a strength for conservatives: the expectation that the best and brightest are doing something, indeed anything but going into politics puts them at a certain disadvantage, but at the same time… well, it makes possible the “vote for me because my opponent will ruin this country” avenue of attack.
The left cannot so easily accommodate this reality. One of the greatest gifts the Obama presidency has presented to his opponents is, paradoxically, transparency. Not on his part (of course) but on the part of everyone else. Obama has so abused his office, so systematically embraced the machine of government, so taken to the things claimed to abhor that his defenders… well, they have been shown to be not so much principled as partisan.
You thought Obama’s election promised to advance the Anti-War movement he made so many appeals to? Well… that didn’t turn out so well.
You thought the left objected to a president killing people in far off lands with a stroke of the pen? Oops, turns out he’s rather fond of the practice.
With that in mind, let’s ask what offenses against good government Hillary has already committed?
-As MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell observes, the transparency requirements Hillary has evaded with her emails are policies liberals have desired for decades.
–James Taranto of the WSJ points out that Secretary Clinton’s decision to provide her emails entirely in paper print-outs has some selling points, although entirely from the view of thwarting public access. Providing her emails in the form of boxes and boxes of paper slows Freedom of Information Act requests to a crawl and makes FYI, if you hear someone reference Hillary turning over 55k emails, correct them: it’s 55k pages of emails. Not at all the same thing.
-Concerned with the plight of women in repressive Middle Eastern nations? Don’t worry, though Bill Clinton’s “friends” in the United Arab Emirates may have thrown some money into the Clinton Foundation coffers, Bill doesn’t “agree with everything they do“.
-Maybe that’s alright, so long as the Foundation abided by the rules set up by the State Department. Except they didn’t. Algeria managed to slip $500,000 into the Clinton Foundation coffers. No doubt it was a coincidence that they gave money to the Secretary of State’s family charity at the same time Algeria “was spending heavily to lobby the State Department on human rights issues.”
-Further the Clinton Foundation makes sure to keep company with a, uh, rarefied group of donors. As the New York Times reports (emphasis mine);
The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation has accepted tens of millions of dollars in donations from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Algeria and Brunei—all of which the State Department has faulted over their records on sex discrimination and other human-rights issues.
Now, don’t mistake any of this: I don’t like Hillary. I haven’t liked Hillary for decades, and for reasons entirely to do with the standards and philosophy she professes to believe. But in a strange way, all of this makes me a little less worried about Hillary. After all, as a conservative I have no illusions about the integrity of politicians, and there is something refreshing about a politician so blatantly mercenary. But for the left, if you think that the Republicans are the party of big business, why would you want to put in power a politician that has spent decades in Washington establishing that her loyalty is exclusive… to the highest bidder?
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